Desynced Preview

Desynced is a strategy game with a simple premise: you’ve crash landed on an unknown planet. Your mission, after being rudely awakened from your stasis sleep, is to repair your ship and survive.

Your guide (and alarm clock) is ELAIN: Emergent Logistics Artificial Intelligence Network. ELAIN is an AI and is the only source of information you have at the beginning of the game about who you are, what’s happened, and how to possibly fix it. They’ll walk you through what’s expected of you and the basic gameplay mechanics.

The heart and core of Dysynced are creating something simple from raw resources and then building upon it to make something better. You’re given “scouts'', which are little bots that follow your orders. Depending on how you equip them, they can go and mine resources like ore and bring them to buildings to be processed into other things. The more resources you have, the more upgrades you can make, and the fancier your whole little layout becomes.

For example: If you want to make a building, you need metal plates and circuit boards. To get metal plates, you need metal bars. To get metal bars, you need ore. To get ore, you need to send your bots out to mine. To make a circuit board, you need a certain amount of crystals and metal plates. Which, once again, you need metal bars for, which you need ore for… and you get the gist.

Each resource builds upon each other to get more complex. The good news is that you can get your bots to do most of the monotonous work of collecting and organising. You also have free range to set this up as you like, as long as you’re connected to a power grid, so your little helpers have the charge to keep going. You’ll also find explorable buildings to send your bots to. Some will just open, some will need certain materials, others will unlock via a puzzle. You’ll be rewarded with different loot once you crack your way in.

As you progress, you’ll need to increase storage and research more advanced methods and materials to keep up with demand. The better discoveries you make, the more possibilities open up to you. Research is broken up into multiple different trees, each branch offering up a description of what benefits you reap upon completion. They start out pretty simple and progressively get fancier as you expand.

One of the great features of Desynced is its customisation. Upon launching the game and starting fresh, you’re met with various customisations like “Peaceful Mode” or “Resource Richness”. These options let you tailor each playthrough to your liking. If you’re looking for a more laid-back experience, you can fine-tune the settings to meet your specifications. If you want to just build but want a difficult environment to do it in, you can tweak that too. Or, if you want to torture yourself, you can crank hostility up and resources down. Each new game has a freshly spawned world, so every replay will be different. Desynced also has a multiplayer option if you want to have a co-op situation with your friends and mod support through the Steam Workshop.

If you're a detail-oriented person who enjoys creating, Desynced is a game you should give a go. You can find it on Steam Early Access.