This all leads to three possible endings, the most accessible of which is appealingly appalling. It’s not achingly spelled out by the end, and indeed due to certain events that occur along the way, a lot of the story is left to your own discernment. Here there’s decent acting from all involved, and the writing tells the tale with a fair amount of skill. Most of these games have badly written drivel and audio logs recorded by the developer’s mum and dad.

So far, so typical.īut what makes this one work is as simple as just delivering the formula well. But goodness me, it’s completely abandoned, and covered in notes, audio logs and scrawled writing on walls that pieces together a tale of a mysterious space maybe-virus. You arrive at the space station with the instructions to work out what’s happening, and return the whole thing to Earth. Xanadu follows the formula pretty closely. But it’s hard to tell which are going to suck before you play them, since they all look absolutely identical in their screenshots. If you happen to have the same curse as I that forces you to look through every single game ever released on Steam, you’ll notice they come out on a weekly basis, if not more often, and most of them are baaaaaaad. I am a sucker for these sorts of games, where you stumble around an abandoned spaceship/station trying to work out what went wrong, of which there are literally hundreds. One of those was a five-year-old space station explore-me-do, Spirits Of Xanadu, so I took a look. Having had a crappy day of playing a bunch of broken or rubbish games, none of which proved worth writing about, the excellent denizens of Buried Treasure’s Discord suggested some palate cleansers. (This appeared in the itch.io ultro-bundle, so be sure to check there first!)

Tinykeep spirit of xanadu