Lithovar

Your ship has come down on a moon. You wake beside the wreck, a geomancer with a staff, and the mast of the ship’s rescue beacon stands dead next to it. The run is to light that mast: it takes six parts, and four pips over it show what the first one costs.

The first minutes teach themselves, one thing at a time. Carve the debris for nickel plates, carry them to the wreck to light its smelter, and feed it by hand until it gives you the power to raise walls. When the energy runs dry the game points at sulphur; when digging by hand gets slow it offers a drill, whose hauler brings ore home and goes on working while the game is closed.

Scar the ground near a nest and the hive under the surface wakes: it scouts, then raids the outpost, and a wall you raise turns the swarm. Five materials unlock and upgrade seven powers. The moon changes under you: lava cools, crystal creeps, a tide bares ore on the lava’s bed once a day, night falls, and ruins under the ground hold blueprints. Once a day a merchant fleet comes into orbit to buy ore, sell what you are short of and offer contracts. Each part of the beacon you place angers the hive. Light it and the run is won; the end screen gives a link to your moon to send to a friend.

It plays with a keyboard or with one finger. Every moon comes from a seed, the game saves the ground as you left it, and the pause menu has settings for volume, screen shake, a colour-blind palette and reduced motion.