The Solus Project

Availability: Windows (Steam Deck YMMV), Xbox One, PS4

What if you’re in the mood for some space travel, but prefer a smaller-scale tale of exploration gone wrong? 2016’s The Solus Project is worth checking out as a survival pioneer sim that has a much smaller scale than what we expect from Starfield, but still sells the fantasy of being on a far-off world. The game sees you crash on a mysterious, alien world on which you must now survive against the elements.

You’ll spend a lot of time alone in The Solus Project, as it’s up to you to make the best of an alien world’s resources—as well as repurposed parts from your crashed spacecraft—to survive each day. As a survival game, it will tax you with more desperate scenarios than what we typically find in a Bethesda game, but as an appetizer to Starfield, it works to sell the gritty experience of needing to survive against all odds on an alien world.

The scale of the planet that orbits the world, and the intense storms that come and go, really sell the environment as a place situated somewhere in space. That experience is only heightened in VR, which The Solus Project supports on PC.