You wake up. Or rather, she wakes up. A girl. Alone. Floating in what looks like a retro-futuristic orbital pod. The UI is sparse: a few buttons, a blinking terminal, a window showing a planet too far away to touch. No mission log. No tutorial. Just presence.
The dialogue – what little exists – feels like fragments of a diary entry written by someone slowly forgetting why they’re writing.
"The stars don't blink here. They just watch."
There’s something haunting about version 0.01. It’s not a game yet. It’s a promise. A whisper. A single frame of a film you’re not sure will ever be finished. Space Girl -v0.01- -Koooon Soft-
Koooon Soft – known for niche, atmospheric, often melancholic interactive experiments – has released Space Girl at its most embryonic stage. And maybe that’s the point.
The controls are limited to arrow keys (movement is useless, as the cockpit is only 800x600 pixels) and the "E" key to interact. Upon launching the executable (a tiny 45MB file free of any DRM), you are greeted with a pixel-art rendering of the protagonist.
The "Goal" displayed in the top-left corner reads: "Survive. Wait for the transmission." You wake up
There is no transmission. The timer in the corner counts up to 30 minutes, loops, and ends the game with a screen that says, "Signal lost. End of v0.01. Thank you for playing."
Is this boring? On paper, yes. In practice, Space Girl -v0.01- leverages the absence of content as content. The long silences between the ship's ambient hum and the girl's idle breathing create a loneliness that AAA survival games spend millions trying to replicate.
In most games, v0.01 is simply a vertical slice. In Space Girl -v0.01-, Koooon Soft has taken a different approach: the atmospheric slice. "The stars don't blink here
Since this is a review of an alpha build, honesty is required. Space Girl -v0.01- is buggy. Not in a fun way, necessarily.
However, Koooon Soft has included a readme.txt file that is surprisingly detailed. It explains that v0.01 is a "proof of soul" rather than a "proof of concept." The developer writes:
"I wanted to see if loneliness has a shape. This is the shape. Version 0.02 will add a second room, maybe a friend. Or maybe just more static."