For a while I felt like I needed to give this game more of a chance before rating it but looking back nothing changed from the first moment to the last.
If you don't like RNG to be the be all and end all of things you will most likely never like this game.
I simply could not get into the story, world or mystery of the game while the gameplay was so random.

While i am giving this game a Not Recommended i'd like to mention that the core gameplay loop genuinely is one of a kind and excellent except the game's a real lying ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and all of you should be aware of what you're getting into.

So:
The main gameplay loop is docking with derelict stations and ships, exploring them to gain scrap, which is what you use to repair and buy upgrades for your drones and your ship, and collecting Propulsion Fuel to travel inside a star system, and Jump Fuel to jump between star systems. This is actually really good.

The problem:
There's LITERALLY nothing else here. The ""story"" if you can call it that is just a bunch of logs of the most lame and boring scifi bs i have ever read, telling you to salvage more ships of the military kind, or salvage derelict stations. Literally just telling you to play the game more, you dont actually have to do anything for it, it just jumps up before a salvage mission and goes away after with one button press. No actual logs to be found on the ships, merely docking progresses the story meaning its not something you ever interact with, it just happens in the background. That being said thats probably for the better considering how lame and filler it is. There's the joke that a game only needs story like a porno does and this game just took that idea and ran with it. Its so bare bones there isnt even skin on the bone. Its the first draft of a story's outline, not even a story itself.

Moreover, as i said, this game has two hours of content and absolutely nothing else. No music(although to be fair it doesnt need one, but still), four enemy types, three of which play largely the same with very minor differences, and an absolutely brutal economy system that is so cruel that as soon as you start playing you're in an inescapable death spiral and you cant survive the death spiral, you can only extend it by a handful of more salvaging missions if you play well and get lucky.

Not being able to tell how big a derelict is going to be is a major problem too because it makes the death spiral economy so much worse, because a derelict with four rooms and one scrap in it is a massive loss in repair costs, while the bigger wrecks are smaller losses atleast, letting you play for longer. There IS a ship class system in the game, going from D to A in terms of small to big, *except it doesnt do ♥♥♥♥* and i have seen D class ships with like 12 rooms when they are supposed to have 4-5 and A class ships that are supposed to have more than 20 or even 25 have only five. There's literally a system so you can tell if its worth it to visit it or not and it doesnt work!

Also, the infestations number means how many TYPES of enemies there are, not how many enemies total.

The difficulty options are largely useless too. So many options that dont matter. They literally dont do anything of value to change the parts of this game that suck ass. Even with more scrap and slower wear you're still in an inescapable death spiral so what does it matter, turning off permadeath doesnt matter because you still lose fuel from traveling and scrap from just playing the game and you need both to keep playing, simply being able to duck out of a derelict doesnt do ♥♥♥♥ when you cant go anywhere or dont have functional drones to play with, for which you need to do derelicts anyway, its just dumb. None of these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ do anything to address the game's problems!

That last part is important because BOY this game is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RNG heavy its insane. From how much scrap a ship gives you, to if you're going to get enough fuel to keep going to new derelicts, to random events like a meteor destroying a third of the derelict you're on, to random pipe bursts, or the positions of enemies, or which rooms are unscannable by the motion scanner forcing you to face check the doors which almost always results in your drone getting disabled or destroyed, to if your upgrades that you desperately need to keep going will lose their chances of permanently breaking and turn into a useless broken lump worth one scrap, its just SO EXTREMELY RNG heavy, my god.

Economy woes part 2
The death spiral exists because everything from your drone upgrades, to your ship upgrades, to even the slots on the ship that can host the upgrades, to the camera feeds of both your main ship and the drones, wear down with every single derelict you visit. The ship upgrades wear down as soon as you visit anything, without even boarding it, hell, they wear down from you just equipping or swapping them ffs! All of this means that literally everything and more has a scrap cost to repair, and its almost always around three to four times as much as you get for salvaging a single ship, meaning most upgrades cost around 9-12 scrap to repair while one salvaging mission gives around 1-4 scrap. Now multiply this with the 20 odd different things that WILL wear with everything you do, luckily drone upgrades only wear if you actually use them but still, all of them will wear and 20 things wearing at the same time costing 9-12 scrap each to repair, or if you're lucky, three scrap to buy at a trader, means that you literally cannot escape the death spiral. Oh and the traders? Yeah, they stock 3-5 upgrades, never replenish, no fixed upgrades that you might need so if you had a motion scanner that lost a 9% chance roll and the nearest trader doesnt have one? Have fun face checking doors! Seriously. Some of these upgrades you literally cannot do anything without and the game doesnt care.

In short, buy it, play for two hours, get a feel for the main gameplay loop and refund this ♥♥♥♥ because i'm telling you, there's NOTHING more this game could offer you beyond the first two hours. It literally is that extremely shallow and its masking it with a permadeath gameplay system and an economy so brutally overtuned that its going to take you a good 12 hours of playtime to realise this is all there is and by then you will be way too far to refund this ♥♥♥♥.

In addition the developer openly stated he tried to come up with ideas for a spiritual successor and couldnt and i'm genuinely baffled by that because there's potential for an extremely good game here, and there's so many more things to improve and iterate on this that i find it unbelievable that he cannot come up with anything. HOW THE HELL CAN YOU NOT IMPROVE ON THIS?! Anyway, I could go on but i've already wrote a novel...

i love it so much. the only game that will just kill you and you say "i guess i messed up, ill do better next time!"