Seedship 4+

I think it was about a year or two ago I installed Seedship. I did not expect much and it was more of a random install than anything. Even when I was starting the game for the first time I thought “am I really going to enjoy this?” But then after about 10 minutes I began to saw how in-depth and interesting the gameplay was despite its simplicity.

This is honestly one of the best free-to-play games on the App Store. A single game definitely will probably not last you 10 minutes, but there are plenty of different endings, scenarios, and outcomes you can strive to get. There is no “correct” choice in this game, everything you do *will* have a risk and the riskier it is, the higher the reward can be. You need to decide which part of the ship you want to prevent from being damaged as you travel across the galaxy, trying to find a new home for humanity.

Will your faith in aliens be rewarded? Or will the Seedship and humanity suffer immensely? Do you let an asteroid hit the colonist sleep chambers? Or do you avoid it and allow it to hit somewhere else that may be more important? Do you settle for a planet that is not exactly perfect for mankind? Or do you risk humanity losing more of itself by trying to find a better planet?

Seedship is an absolutely wonderful game, but between its complex moral decisions, risks and rewards, and deceptively simple gameplay, my favorite thing has to be how the game connects you to the story.
In the context of the game, you are an AI created to find a second home for humanity, and to think like a human. At first this seemed like a cute way of putting the player into the game, but the more I played the more I realized it was true. To an AI, and to me as a player, the colonists were just numbers on a screen. I wanted them to survive and thrive, yes, but in the end my mission was to win the game. I made some decisions based on human biases, but they weren’t clouded by fear or panic or loneliness like they would if they were made by an actual member of the crew. I commanded a faceless army of sleeping colonists, and whether or not they succeeded was my priority, yes, but it didn’t make me cry myself to sleep because I’d killed hundreds of colonists.
The game truly does make you feel like the AI in charge, and that’s just one of the beautiful things about the story. I highly recommend this game, which can deliver a beautiful, heartfelt sci-fi narrative in just a few minutes with a few paragraphs of text.

It's such a simple concept, but complex in what you can do with it, and the stories you can make up to go along with it. I always play as a classic over-zealous AI, one whose primarily goal, to preserve the lives of its passengers at all costs, forces it to disregard the idea of landing at all costs, instead opting to keep searching indefinitely at the expense of every other system besides life support, because it thinks that's the only way to ensure their safety.

(It's also just pretty fun to get all the systems as damaged as possible without failing. My record is all scanners gone except gravity at 7%, only 3% on the landing system, 353 passengers remaining, both databases completely depleted, and no remaining surface probes.)

I'd really love some new random events, and I think the idea of some rare random event actually changing the AI's goal from finding a suitable host planet, to instead just letting the remaining humans live out their lives on board would be cool. I think it should be a diffucult ending to get however, with the need to somehow bring back some resources from planets you pass by, and then to completely deplete the landing system.