If you’ve ever wondered how you’d fare in the stressful circumstances of a failing spaceship, new space survival simulation game Tin Can helps you find out. Soaring through space in the titular Tin Can, a tiny escape pod full of failing systems, you must manage your power resources and shift components around in an attempt to keep yourself alive until you can reach safety.
Forced to evacuate from a colony transport ship, you are left drifting in your pod with no sign of rescue. Much like popular space game FTL: Faster Than Light, you must now decide which systems are crucial for your survival at any one time. Can you afford to switch off the emergency lights to make sure the oxygen generator stays up and running? Is it okay to disable temperature control to ensure that the radiation shielding is solid?
Your character, controlled from a first-person perspective, will suffer what developer Tin Can Studio describes as ‘real medical symptoms’ as a result of problems aboard the ship, rather than relying on heath bars to determine your current status. A lack of oxygen, for example, will make the player breathe faster and will also cause your vision to blur and your movements to slow until you eventually lose consciousness.
Components will break and disable in different ways – faulty electrical connectors delivering insufficient power, damaged buttons not triggering properly when pressed. You must trace failures to their source and resolve the issues, aided only by an onboard manual which provides detailed information about your pod and its components.
You will also have to deal with the consequences of cosmic events, from overheating as the pod passes in close proximity to a star, to ull damage from asteroid fields.
Tin Can is out now on Steam. A VR version of the game is also in the works, and will be provided for free to owners of the regular version. If you’re looking for more of the best survival games on PC, go ahead and click that link.
