In 2012, renowned developers Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe launched a Kickstarter to spiritually revive their classic Space Quest series, a game to be called SpaceVenture. Some 13 years later, following numerous delays and botched half-launches, the game has finally arrived on Steam. And oh no, it’s so bad. But before we confront its awfulness, let’s take stock of how we got here.
Very old people will remember that in 1986, a game was released by Sierra Online called Space Quest. It was a low-fi parser-based graphic adventure, and it was really not very good. However, creators Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy (known, at their insistence, as The Two Guys from Andromeda) continued to make sequels, and eventually—I would argue especially with Space Quest IV—created something memorable and extremely funny. These games were spoofs of the science fiction boom of the time, in which you played space janitor and general loser Roger Wilco.
They were crude games in most senses of the word, but at this point the loveable loser hadn’t become the most overused trope in adventure gaming, and the series became known for its very funny ways to die, its incredibly convoluted spoofs, and the dulcet tones of narrator Gary Owens’ voice as he delivered withering one-liners for every thing you looked at, used, licked or combined. This eventually culminated in Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier, released in 1995, just before Sierra’s first (and only good) iteration came to an end. Space Quest VII: The Return to Roman Numerals was in development when Vivendi bought Sierra and cancelled everything.
The Kickstarter boom
A few attempts were made over the years to revive the franchise, but none came to anything, although the games remained cultishly popular through frequent re-releases on PC. It also didn’t help that Crowe and Murphy hadn’t spoken to each other in 20 years. And then, in 2012, the Kickstarter boom arrived. Tim Schafer’s fundraiser for what was then called “Double Fine Adventure” raised over $3.3 million, and every single person from the same era of classic point-and-clicks reappeared to try the same. The Guys from Andromeda managed to put their decades of hostility behind them for this gold rush, and riding the wave, secured over $500,000 from nearly 11,000 backers. It was close, the half-million target only being cleared at the eleventh hour, but they’d done it. This was June 2012, and the game was promised to be released in February 2013.
Keen chronologists will have noticed that 2013 was a very long time ago. Over the last 12 years, a huge number of delays, notes about family tragedies, and apologies have been issued, but nothing approaching a final game. I remember writing in 2015 about how long-delayed it had been, and how frustrating this was for backers. At that point it was set to come out in November 2016. Come that month, another update went up (the 112th by that point), explaining that it wasn’t ready, but “we are close, guys.” Narrator: they were not at all close.
The endless delays begin
Every four or so months, another update would appear, almost all saying they were working on the “last scenes of the game.” During all this time, very sadly Gary Owens had died, notably years after the originally intended release date for the game. Two more years on, in April 2018 and after a six-month silence, it was more of the same. “We’re almost there!” The situation was endlessly farcical, with near-identical updates year after year, while the fanbase became angrier and angrier—some reasonably, some deeply unreasonably. From June 2019 to March 2020, there was nothing, and then the declaration that the game would be out in June.
Yes, like you already guessed, in June it was announced beta testing would begin in July. In August 2020, beta testing started. In February 2021 that was complete, the bugs were worked out, and release was imminent—they just had to fix their save/load system. Hold on to your hats, folks!
Yeah, in November 2021 they hadn’t managed to fix that save/load issue. Literally nine months and this Unity save system couldn’t be figured out. That update finished, “The next update WILL contain info about releasing the game.” Any day now!
It’s July 25, 2022. “Thank you all again for your patience,” the next update began, seemingly without irony. They were “very close to finishing.” The last eight months had been taken up with fixing bugs, despite their all having been fixed over a year earlier, and that darned save system! But, in August that year, they finally gave a proper release date. September 16, 2022.
However, for real, no jokes, no surprises, SpaceVenture was released to backers on that day. Ten years since the Kickstarter was funded, the game was in the hands of its supporters. They did it.
They didn’t do it
I was lying about no surprises. What was released was a broken, unplayable mess, and obviously everyone was miserable. Astonishingly, it would be six months before the development trio would pipe up and acknowledge this on the Kickstarter. At this point, former Sierra boss Ken Williams got in touch and offered to help with the project, and none of the people working on the game were getting paid. A fairly typical eight more months went by, when it was revealed they had spent the year trying to move the game to a new version of Unity.
This process stretched out yet again, the same six-to-eight months between updates, the same declarations that it was so very nearly almost ready, and then at the end of March 2025, it was announced that version 2 of the game was ready to launch on Steam! 13 years later, it was coming out to the public. In fucking Early Access.
Yup, as of the appositely chosen April 1 this year, you can buy a copy of SpaceVenture for $15. An unfinished version, with a promise to have it properly finished by this summer. The Steam release notes, “There are some key gameplay sequences that are only partially implemented at this stage, and you may experience some technical bugs…”
A terrible mess
SpaceVenture is so very, very bad.
It’s bad from the opening seconds, from the moment you realize how incomplete it is, how poor it looks, how clunkily it’s been made.
Despite being made in Unity, an engine where it’s actively hard not to offer players options, this is a PC game with no settings at all. The game boots in fullscreen, but 1920×1080, and beyond alt-enter to put it into a window, there are no other options whatsoever. Pressing Esc while playing brings up a quit option that doesn’t take you back to the main menu, but the desktop. Admittedly, that’s a timesaver for everyone, but it doesn’t bode well. (Incredibly, when someone asked about this in the Steam discussions, the developers replied, “…it is something we are considering.”)
Even less impressive is the opening cutscene. Janky, atrociously lit, and barely textured, the shots of a space van docking at a space station appear like the sorts of blocky placeholders you’d put in at the start. It looks like the PC port of a 2002 PS2 game. We then cut to inside the airlock, where our defiantly unlikeable character, the gruff, taciturn Ace Hardway, again looks like a dreadful placeholder model, the rigging obviously unfinished, the animations haphazard and amateurish. I looked at a toolbox on the floor, and the very first description text in the game had a typo. Ho boy.
Moments later, I’m trying to walk down a corridor when a burst pipe blasts steam. I’m not going to repeat how bad everything looks throughout this, but know that everything looks bad, like 20 years ago bad. I walk through the steam, deliberately, as the game’s instructions encourage you to try to die for the gags, promising you’ll return alive immediately. Ace lies dead on the floor and I’m now playing as his robot dog/toolbox, Rooter. But when I “use” certain items, Ace’s lines of dialogue reply. Sigh. Also, why am I now playing as a toolbox? And why, now, out of nowhere, does a (decent) impersonation of Space Quest’s wonderful narrator, the late Gary Owens, pipe up at this point but not before? Why wasn’t there any narration during the opening, any explanation of who I was, why I was there?
So, it turns out, the tool-dog-thing has a cellphone in its possession? And that has an app on it that offers a defibrillator? And you revive Ace with that? Sure, OK.
You then make your way into a supply closet in an earlier location. You have to move some crates to do this, in a “puzzle” that involves dragging them to create a path. Except someone entirely forgot to implement the puzzle aspect, such that you just have to pull each crate in each direction, until you stumble upon the arbitrary direction in which it’s allowed to move, and then repeat that a few times. Get into the closet, and the stuff you need is blocked by…identical crates. But now you can’t move them, because that would be “manual labor.” What? The solution is to put Rooter on a shelf, such that he can crawl past the crates and then operate a forklift to move them. So you “use” Rooter to pick him up, and then click the resulting icon on the shelf, and…get an endless stream of “nope” messages. Because, of course you idiot, what you’re supposed to know to do is to “talk to” Rooter—who, by the way, you cannot even “look at”—which causes Ace to whistle, which causes Rooter to turn back into a toolbox, and then put that on the shelf. I feel so stupid!
Rooter can then interact with the forklift, which causes it to move forward and run over Ace, killing him. But no worries! We can just revive him with that defib app! Except, um, nope, you can’t, and this time the scene resets to when you entered the room and you have to start the whole fucking ordeal over again.
Let me stress, I have so far described the first five minutes of this godawful mess.
Ordinarily, I try to pick screenshots that are visually appealing when illustrating an article, and that’s obviously been tough here, but it’s important I also include what the game looks like most of the time. Like this extraordinary framing, complete with untextured model on the desk.
Oh, and by the way, they never figured out that save bug! Saving to prevent unpredictable deaths doesn’t do anything, because when you reload, you start the scene over again anyway.
There’s no real point in continuing to list everything that’s wrong here. I’ve persisted on, and every single puzzle has been flawed, there’s no internal prompting about why you can’t just sodding well use an item in an obvious place, and most seriously of all, not one single line of dialogue has been faintly funny. I went into this ready to at least laugh. But it is worth noting what I believe is, aside from any of the technical issues, the game’s biggest, most damaging flaw: Ace Hardway.
Roger Wilco was a twit, often selfish but lovably goofy, and the Space Quest games hated him for it. He was treated with disdain, and his attempts to climb above the rank of janitor always failed. Ace Hardway isn’t a moron, but just a deeply unlikeable person. He’s rude, incurious, and most of all, deeply dull. But the game loves him. The narrator, despite sounding just like Space Quest IV’s disgusted commentator, constantly celebrates his benign actions, cheers him on. It’s just so weird.
This is a colossal disaster. And while those who backed the project 13 years ago, especially those who backed this at the $10,000 level (three people did!), have every right to be disappointed and frustrated, it’s hard not to also feel a sense of empathetic horror for the developers.
Clearly, the three main developers—Scott Murphy, Mark Crowe and Chris Pope—were out of their depth from the start. It’s obvious from the grim state of what’s been released that there was little understanding of Unity, nowhere near enough learned over the past decade-and-a-half, and no money to be able to address it. Both Murphy and Crowe have chronicled multiple personal struggles and family tragedies over the last decade, and this game must have been the most awful millstone around their necks throughout. I find I can’t shake off that sense of the burden as I play, a pact signed with the devil that they couldn’t escape, persisting for over a decade after they were meant to be freed. And god, they’re still not free. This is “Early Access,” and the prediction of completion by this summer is clearly as realistic as every other projected release date made since 2013. Honestly, I wish I could break this bond for them, give them permission to just say the game is finished, and garbage. They took an incredibly long time to make a shit game. Then they can move on. But I fear 10,000 backers might not all agree.
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