Space For Sale Makes You A Planetary Property Developer Who Gets Alien Creatures Drunk

Just like humans, aliens need places to live, and in management sim Space for Sale, you’ve got your chance to turn a backwater, bargain-priced solar system into a high-class homestead. There are a bunch of obstacles in your way, however, not the least of which are the creatures that call your solar system home, and the eccentric requests of your alien clientel.

THQ Nordic revealed developer Mirage Game Studio’s Space for Sale with a trailer during its 2022 game showcase, which gives a sense of how the top-down management game will work. You play an astronaut property developer to various aliens, a job that requires you to set up plots and meet their potentially weird demands. As the trailer demonstrates, your main goal is to try to sell plots to aliens and earn space money, but there’s more to the game than just that element.

THQ also gave GameSpot an early look at the game that illuminates a few of its other elements. Space for Sale also includes sandbox elements, so you won’t just be building houses in your solar system, you’ll be exploring, gathering resources, and scanning what you find as you make your way around your planets. Making money gives you the opportunity to improve your own base to get more options to improve your property-selling capabilities.

According to Mirage, planets are procedurally generated and encompass a variety of different environments–we saw a sandy desert-like world, as well as a lava-filled one. The planets you’ll explore also include a bunch of weird creatures, which will add wrinkles to and play a big role in the gameplay. Some might avoid you while others are aggressive, and some might be useful to your developments, if you can figure out how to outsmart them.

In one example, Mirage showed us a crab-like creature with a back covered in rocks–minerals that would be useful to you, if you could manage to harvest them. But the skittish crab always ran away from the player astronaut, making snagging those materials difficult. To solve the problem, the astronaut fed the crab an overly ripe, fermented fruit. The result: a drunken space crab, which stumbled around hilariously for a bit before finally passing out. With the crab incapacitated, the player was able to harvest the minerals from its back and use them to further their goals. Mirage says the creatures are the star of the show in Space for Sale, and they seem as potentially weird and interesting as your alien clients.

You’ll also find that your solar system has problems of its own. There’s a reason you were able to nab it at a discount: It’s infected by a weird green mold called space rot that you’ll have to find ways to counter.

Space for Sale is headed to PC, although it doesn’t yet have a release date. THQ Nordic also showed off some other new, unannounced games during its showcase, including a reboot of the 1992 survival horror classic Alone in the Dark, a racing game called Wreckreation that looks like a spiritual successor to Burnout Paradise, and Tempest Rising, an homage to the 1990s era of real-time strategy games.