Δv: rings of saturn first impressions
I was excited for this game, because it looks like a detailed hard sci-fi game. My excitement for the hard sci-fi aspect is the easiest to explain; I love the way stories like The Expanse and Project Hail Mary can be told within the constrained settings of plausible science, and there's not that much hard sci-fi out there compared to fantasy sci-fi. The other is a bit harder to explain.
When I say I love detailed games, I mean that it seems like the kind of game which has many logically consistent, detailed systems. I find that such games often have emergent properties. Details cascade into each other, creating more complex states than you could predict from the individual systems, in a way that is surprising but sensible. I love navigating spaces like this, because I feel really rewarded for noticing interesting details and also because it's fun to build a heuristic or a method of play without feeling like I should be "min-maxing" the game or learning of a prescribed meta that tells me what "valid" ways there are to succeed -- if success can even be defined. These kinds of games are one of my favorite things, and I think I'll call this genre Emergent Detail. Games along these lines include Dwarf Fortress and Project Zomboid.
ΔV: Rings of Saturn is a game that, on the surface, looks like exactly my kind of jam. It's a game about being an asteroid miner in the rings of Saturn, with detailed spaceflight physics and an open-ended sandbox to explore. The Steam description includes the sentence "Every action has a reaction, lasers are invisible without a medium, and your thrust is a potent weapon", which practically screams Emergent Detail to me. I had to check it out. However, while ΔV: Rings of Saturn is very detailed, it does not have the emergent feeling I am looking for. In fact, the game remains simple in spite of its complexity.
Every run -- or "dive" as it is called in the game -- is a rote, repetitive task. For the most part, you just fly your spaceship around and scoop up rocks until you decide to go back home to sell. To be fair, flying around the spaceship is complicated, especially in microgravity where using your RCS or main thruster in the wrong way can send you hurtling into a rock. And it's easy to accidentally do this at first -- you have so many buttons to use between manual thrust controls and autopilot controls. If that were not enough, every aspect of how your spaceship propels itself can also be tweaked. There's a lot of excessive detail here. Excessive, because whether or not I pay attention to these details doesn't really seem to impact gameplay in a fundamental way. I don't feel a desire or need to tweak my ship, no reason to pick manual thrust over autopilot, no reason for why I might want to actively turn systems on and off during flight. As long as I can hit the asteroid anywhere for long enough to break it apart and scoop up the resulting ore, none of the other spaceflight details matter.
This kind of excessive detail is present throughout the game. There's a smattering of different ores to collect, which all have their own prices and their own level of volatility on the market. There's many different ways to pass time when you need to repair your ship which all cost a different amount. However, these details appear to be meaningless. I don't really care which rock I collect as long as I maximize how much value I can carry back. I don't really care where I rest as long as I spend the least amount of money (paying for a more expensive place to stay doesn't seem to change anything). The detail is merely noise.
Each of these detailed systems are self-contained, with little impact on other systems in the game. In the end, the core game loop of "collect rock and sell it" is largely the same. It's easy to survive, it's easy to make money, and -- after you get the hang of it -- flying is easy too. There's no tension. Why is my ship not blowing up because I overloaded the power system? Why am I not getting crushed between two asteroids because I dilly-dallied for too long? Why am I not getting hit by shrapnel created by my own mining activities?
There aren't even any interesting goals to motivate you through the game. The game doesn't really have a story and, if you wanted to come up with your own goals, there is little to focus on except grinding for more money so you can buy a better ship... to scoop up more rocks. What's the point of all this?
The systems don't present you with interesting and unexpected challenges and there's nothing that draws you into playing more. Maybe if I played more I would find that I am wrong, but I'm impatient and unwilling to spend hours in a game waiting for it to become enjoyable. If you're looking to spend many hours in a realistic spaceflight mining simulator in 2D, I guess ΔV: Rings of Saturn has your back. There is, after all, a lot of spaceflight to do. But, there isn't much else. What remains is a slow game loop, one that lacks in challenge, variety, and surprise.