Animal Crossing… in space! That is what Young Suns, the latest game from Goodbye Volcano High, Depanneur Nocturne, and GNOG developer KO_OP Mode, appears to be when put reductively. But let’s not put it reductively, because while this is one of those cozy life-sims, it does sound like it has something going on for it, particularly for the more revolutionary of you out there.
Young Suns is set right after a revolution has taken place on Jupiter, obviously far off in the future because I don’t even know if you can actually stand on the orb famously known as the gas giant. Anyway, post-revolution, there is work to be done in order to make it a better place. So, you get given a ship, tasked with heading out to other planetoids, ruins, and stations, either by yourself or with up to three friends.
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The Animal Crossingness of it all manifests in the ability to customize how your character, spaceship, and living quarters looks, with a lot of the UI and UX reminding me of the most recent entry, New Horizons, in particular. There’s a very neat-looking character creator too, with options for things like prosthetic limbs and even being fat – as a bigger person myself, it’s one of those forgotten aspects that I greatly appreciate, so kudos for highlighting it with a dedicated tummy slider section in the trailer.
However, while Animal Crossing has its own cast of characters with stories happening in the background, narrative is brought to the foreground in Young Suns. There’s a whole bunch of characters to interact with, 30 of ’em apparently, each with “unique looks, behaviors and over 2 months of unique daily chats.”
The thing that I personally need Young Suns to deliver on is its understanding of the inherent flaws in the genre. Animal Crossing started out as a simple little game where you lived in a town where your neighbours kind of hate you (but in a funny way), and now it has morphed into a game where you must mine the resources of every single resource you come across in order to build and shape the land as you see fit.
It’s a bit yucky, and I did notice in the trailer that there is some resource mining to be found in Young Suns too. What is a revolution good for if we uphold the systems that oppressed us? Guess I’ll find out how KO_OP handle things whenever the game launches on Steam – you can wishlist it here in the meantime.