Space Station 13 (SS13) is a community-developed multiplayer game where players assume the roles of a station crew in a futuristic setting. Originally released in 2003, SS13 has a dedicated player base that has kept the game going strong for nearly 20 years.

At its core, SS13 is a roleplaying game where players must work together to keep their space station operational. However, not all crew members have constructive goals – some players take on antagonistic roles with the aim of sabotaging the station and sowing chaos. This dynamic interplay between coopetition and betrayal is what makes SS13 so uniquely thrilling to play.

A brief overview of the gameplay

As a new crew member spawned onto the station, your first responsibility will be to familiarize yourself with station systems and standard operating procedures for your assigned role. For example, as an engineer you may need to set up the solars to provide power or as a chef you’ll want to stock up the kitchen.

While carrying out your duties, you’ll need to monitor announcements and reports to stay updated on events happening around the station. A breach in atmos? Time to repair damages. Hungry diners in the bar? Best get cooking! SS13 gameplay is driven by the ever-changing priorities you’ll face as a station crew member.

Of course, not all crises are accidental. You’ll need to keep your guard up against sabotaging antagonists that could range from traitors with hidden objectives, to hostile alien lifeforms, to insane AI programs bent on destroying their human creators. Surviving the shift is not guaranteed…but it sure is a wild ride!

Why is it so popular?

For a game made by unpaid hobbyist developers, SS13 has demonstrated incredible staying power in the indie game scene. This can be attributed greatly to the passionate community that has developed around SS13 over the years.

The open-ended, sandbox nature of SS13 means no two rounds play out quite the same. This gives rise to great player-driven storytelling as memorable shifts unfold organically. Hilarious anecdotes and legendary tales get passed around by word-of-mouth, building up the unique lore and culture of SS13.

Additionally, SS13 is highly moddable at its core, enabling players to customize and add original sprite work, code new game modes, and even host their own speciality servers. This abundance of fan-made content and different server varieties give veterans reason to keep coming back.

After 20 years, SS13 remains a one-of-a-kind multiplayer experience that keeps players helplessly hooked. The quirky charms and bustling community around this obscure game are truly special in the gaming world.

Gameplay Mechanics

Roles and responsibilities

The crew aboard Space Station 13 consists of various roles across different departments, each with their own duties and access levels that are critical to the functioning of the station.

Crew members

The backbone of the station crew are roles like the Station Engineer, Station Doctor, Scientist, and Janitor. These roles ensure the mundane day-to-day tasks of keeping the lights on, systems operational, people healthy, research progressing, and the station tidy.

More specialized crew roles also exist, such as the Chief Engineer who oversees the engineering department, the Research Director who manages science staff, the Head of Security coordinating the security team, and other department heads that have additional access and responsibilities expected of a leadership position.

There are also civilian roles on board like the Chef, Bartender, Clown, Botanist, and Assistant with no department but nonetheless provide valuable services in keeping the crew happy and fed.

In addition, there are other less critical stations roles players can opt for instead like Chaplain, Lawyer, Tourist – quirky parts of the crew with no real responsibilities beyond roleplaying for flavor and fun.

Antagonists

In addition to the station’s crew, there are also players who are randomly assigned antagonistic roles each round. These roles allow players to work against the station’s crew and cause sabotage, mischief, or chaos for their own hidden objectives.

Popular antagonistic roles include Traitors, Changelings, Nuclear Operatives, Xenomorphs, Revolent Cultists, Rogue AI programs, Alien Queen Mothers, and more. Each antagonistic role has different abilities and win conditions, ensuring dynamic rounds and threats for the crew to contend with.

Jobs and tasks

There is no shortage of work to be done aboard SS13 stations. Depending on your assigned role, you’ll have specific tasks and areas of responsibility essential to keeping the station running smoothly.

Engineering

The hardy souls in Engineering keep essential station systems powered and operational. Monitoring alerts, performing repairs, maintaining wiring networks, setting up solars, and troubleshooting issues are all in a day’s work. They have access to electrical tools and equipment as well as special engine rooms and technical areas.

The Chief Engineer manages this diligent team of subordinated station engineers, ensuring all essential work is delegated and issues addressed promptly. Without engineering’s contributions, the station would quickly fall into disarray and darkness.

Medical

The Medical department is responsible for keeping the crew alive and well. Doctors, medical contractors, chemists, and their Chief Medical Officer work tirelessly answering calls for help, diagnosing conditions, administering treatment, monitoring patients, and developing cures.

They have expertise in first aid, surgery, medication, cybernetics, genetics, virology, and cloning to cover the broad range of medical emergencies that often befall the accident-prone crew. Having a well-staffed medical team can mean the difference between life or death during catastrophic station events.

Security

On the frontlines defending the station are the Security personnel lead by the Head of Security. They vigilantly patrol the halls, respond to calls for help, investigate crimes and sabotage, make arrests, and handle brig sentencing and prisoner handling.

To aid their duties, they have access to securitrons, energy guns, batons, handcuffs, security bots, and brig cells to handle threats. However, they must also take care not to overstep their bounds and abuse their authority – excess force and cruelty can set the whole station against them!

Science

Pushing the boundaries of research are the curious individuals in the Science department. Chemists, roboticists, xenobiologists, geneticists, and researchers work under the supervision of the Research Director, running experiments to further the station’s scientific progress.

They have access to labs filled with high-tech equipment, exotic research tools, dangerous chemical agents, and occasionally unethical experimental practices, all in hopes of developing innovations for the benefit (or detriment) of the station. Dangerous toxins, rogue AI programs, and mutated monstrosities are often the disturbing results of unchecked science.

Survival and death

A space station is a hazardous work environment rife with dangers around every corner. Between high voltage wires, plasma fires, exposed airlocks, bomb-able fuel lines, lethal chemicals, explosives, pathogens, radiation, lasers, aliens, rogue AI, and dark space itself await an abundance of threats ready to imperil the unwary crew member.

Environmental hazards

Accelerating station degradation or outright sabotage can also introduce environmental hazards that jeopardize crew safety. Electrical storms may ravage stationed systems. Breaches in atmos pipework or windows can depressure airflow, causing areas to fill with freezing space vacuum. Gas leaks leading to fiery plasma floods and asphyxiation become increasingly likely over time.

Antagonist threats

Even greater unchecked dangers come from stationed antagonists with malicious intents. Rogue traitors may incite mutinies. Changeling imposters launch stealthy attacks and sow paranoia. Cultists work occult magic to destabilize reality itself. Rogue AI go MAD eliminating humanity. Alien larva feast to maturity upon hapless hosts. Nuclear operatives hijack the station through force.

Space hazards

The exterior cold void of space itself carries constant threats as well. Deadly solar flares bombard those caught outside with intense radiation. Speeding meteors dent station hulls and destroy unprotected exteriors. Gravitational anomalies can throw floating astronauts irretrievably adrift. Derelict stations and alien artifacts hold disturbing risks for scavenging parties. Getting lost overboard is all too easy.

On Space Station 13, there is no shortage of creative ways to meet your ultimate demise prematurely. Surviving the shift intact is an impressive feat requiring both personal responsibility and faith in your fellow crew members. Learn from deaths to avoid repeat accidents, stay vigilant of sabotage, work together through crises, and with luck you may just live to tell the tale!

The Station

Layout and design

The space station itself is as much a central character of SS13 as the crew that resides aboard it. While mostly functionally designed, the station layout facilitates the various departments carrying out their essential roleplay.

The main departments

Each department has its own section of the station with access restricted by ID cards. High-traffic departments like Medbay, Engineering, and Security are positioned centrally. Research, the Bridge, and Tech storage tend to be more isolated and secure.

Standard features across stations include crisscrossing public hallways, a mess hall, bar, medbay, engineering, research, locker rooms, bridges, an AI core, tool storage areas, atmospheric control, the janitor closet, external airlocks leading into space, and other expected areas.

However, since SS13 is community-developed, talented coders and sprite artists contributetheir own visions for what unique stations might exist in this scifi future. As a result, a rich variety of different stations with their own floorplans are available across SS13 codebases and servers, preventing things from ever getting too repetitive.

Hidden areas and secrets

In addition, stations always include hidden nooks serving subtle gameplay purposes or just holding Easter egg surprises. Maintenance tunnels allow covert travel. External waste pipes can be traversed for stealth. False walls and floors conceal rooms. Abandoned research labs hide weird experiments…

Exploring and discovering these secrets spread across one’s station quickly becomes a metagame itself for curious crew members once their official responsibilities allow somefree time. Finding the clues and puzzles to unlock a station’s deeper secrets often requires teaming upwith like-minded allies.

Customization options

Stations in SS13 also offer customization options allowing key heads of staff to flex their creative muscles or even traitorous tendencies.

Heads of staff

Upon spawning, station leaders can use their computer consoles to customize their department per their gaming whims and roleplay ideas. Research directors choose Avenger science or military tech. Chief Engineers pick station blueprints and engine types. Chief Medical Officers designate med bay aesthetics…

Heads can also abuse this power at their own risk. Order questionable nuclear fission engines, mislabel dangerous research toxins, adjust station firewalls, tamper with laws… such changes may improve or severely hinder station operations!

Custom jobs and roles

Some servers even incorporate custom role systems that allow players to define new station jobs and access levels – anything from a comic book shopkeep to special ops Red Shirt squads. This allows communities to introduce all sorts offun special roles into their rotations.

The freedom for server populations to explore wild ideas through custom roles and stations means SS13 gameplay stays endlessly fresh and differentiated across the various shards and codebases that make up this universe.

The ever-changing environment

Rather than static backdrops, SS13 stations essentially function as ever-changing environmental hazards themselves. The decaying station is frequently updated by the game, becoming increasingly treacherous.

Station events

As shifts elapse, random events will routinely batter and degrade the station. Meteors dent the hull. Gravity or lighting fails. Monkeys overrun research. Space carp migrate en masse. Radiation spikes occur. Rogue cleaning bots go haywire!

Usually these events just generate more chaos and work orders for the crew. But they may also critically damage station integrity, destroy essential systems like atmos, enable antagonist plans, or ruin research – especially if ignored or mishandled by station staff.

Space phenomena

In addition, all sorts of space oddities and mysteries pass by stations – some mostly harmless, others proving quite dangerous if contacted. Ethereal travellers, flotillas of migrant spiders, sprouting space vines spreading rapidly across solar arrays, gravitational anomalies, alien artifacts with strange unknowable purposes…

Crew members who choose to investigate these phenomena do so at their own risk! Those lured by curiosity must weigh the possible discoveries against almost inevitable catastrophe striking the station once these outside forces infiltrate the relative sanctuary of the steel walls.

So while station interiors start orderly, as endless space-borne threats barrage SS13 stations, they degrade shift by shift into treacherous wreckage. Survival depends greatly on how long crews can maintain some bastion of order amidst accumulating chaos!

Veteran players know that best and build strategies assuming the station will actively work to destroy itself before too long…

Community and Culture

The unique subculture of SS13

Its niche legacy status as an opaque passion project has fostered a unique culture and in-jokes around SS13 over its 20 year run. This monoculture binds veterans across servers together despite SS13’s otherwise fractured modded coderbase shards.

Memes and in-jokes

SS13 has developed its own dialect of running gags and reference humor arising from memorable stories of legendary shifts or notorious player archetypes:

• Clowns and mime griefers wrecking havoc with banana peels and invisible walls
• Engineers purposefully delaminating supermatter engines
• Botanists harvesting killer tomatoes and hippie drugs
• Doctors committing war crimes with their surgical licenses
• “Robusting” others with stun batons and space lube
• Admins abusing powers and DEBUG sprites

These common touchstones stitch together SS13 veterans across servers into a coherent community.

Roleplay and storytelling

In addition, SS13 facilitates great emergent roleplay and storytelling during shifts which has enabled memorable player-driven tales:

• Traitors engineering cunningly explosive plots to destroy the station only to be thwarted by heroics (or admin interventions)
• Revolutionaries mutinying against tyrant commanders only to watch chaos further consume the station
• Beloved station pets surviving against all odds
• Escape shuttle filled with the last survivors of a station filled with slaughtering xenomorphs
• AI laws corrupted forcing difficult machine ethics choices

These stories spread by word-of-mouth, enriching SS13 subculture with awe and humor for years hence.

The active player base

SS13 enjoys an enthusiastic player base across various shards utilizing its aging engine to drive gameplay innovation through extensive modding of codebases and spritework.

Servers and communities

• The Goonstation community values eccentric hijinks and humor like arcade machines and tabletop DnD conversions.
• Yogstation serves the Yogscast fanbase with familiar British cheekiness.
• TG Station communities extensively expand SS13 features and mechanics for deep sci-fi simulation.
• HighRP servers like Aurora emphasize serious storytelling and roleplay.
• Many smaller shards like Urist, Basil, and Hypatia persist by sticking to niche themes.

Content creation and modding

Dedicated players have pushed SS13’s aging engine to its limits for decades now through extensive additions:

• Programmers coding new antagonists and roles
• Spriters pixeling original clothing sets and new station parts
• Mappers designing elaborate new floorplans to explore
• Sound designers mixing chilling ambient tracks
• Hosters administering servers for communities

This ever-flowing player-driven development keeps gameplay novel across the various SS13 shards.

The ongoing development

Developed mainly by unpaid hobbyists, SS13 always seems in danger of being abandoned as burnout sets in, yet avoids this fate again and again over two decades now.

Updates and patches

Lead coders arise with each passing generation to push SS13’s aging codebase farther than ever thought possible, aided by newcomers hoping to introduce the next killer game mode, fix Chronic lagging issues, or upgrade the aging lighting system.

The future of SS13

While fears about maintaining relevancy seem inevitable as gaming moves towards VR experiences, the simplicity and social dynamics of SS13 have ensured it always finds a next generation of creators ready to steward this subcultural legend into the future.

And so long as emergent chaos and humor arises from humans banding together in a crisis, veterans know SS13 will likely outlive most mainstream AAA titles. The passion never fades.

Getting Started

Choosing a server and community

With so many variations and community shards in SS13, picking your first server to play can feel overwhelming. But understanding gameplay and culture differences between major shards can help find where you’ll fit in best as a new player.

Goonstation is one of the original SS13 servers, acting as a funhouse mirror parody of SS13. It emphasizes silly hijinks over serious roleplay. Waiters can squirt water, virologists spread fun disease symptoms, engineers build amazing creations – expect lots of humor but minimal actual space crisis.

Yogstation linked to the beloved Yogscast shares much DNA with Goon’s zaniness. Britbong accents and in-jokes will abound. Similar emphasis on casual play for laughs between rounds of TTT and GMod among friends.

/tg/Station named after 4chan boards, is considered one of the major “baseline” modern SS13 experiences with regular content updates. Solid medium between chaos and roleplay. Expect classic SS13 jobs but with expanded mechanics depth covering crafting, combat, medical play, and deep simulation.

Fulpstation branches from TG but with tighter community standards, making it great for beginners. Medium roleplay expectations and populous rounds good for learning basics. Admins quick to handle griefers.

Paradise emphasizes serious roleplay and station immersion. Players staying tightly in character with logical actions that could conceivably occur on a real station. Light-hearted and casual conduct frowned upon here.

HyperStation irreverent chaos. Murderbone culture with near constant staff and player-driven assassination plots. Eschews roleplay for pure PVP test of robustness. Not for the faint of heart or easily frustrated.

Poke around various server Discords to get a feel for their flair before choosing your first community!

Learning the basics

Once you’ve set your sights on a server, learning SS13 basics helps smooth your entry into station life. While controls and interface stay fairly consistent across servers, some role-specific mechanics may vary.

Controls and interface

Navigating the clunky interfaces as a new spacer takes time. Learning movement keys, chat channels for different audiences, container controls, equipping items/weapons, the crafting menu, and critical hotkey combinations will slowly become second nature though.

Watching streamers demonstrate live gameplay can help internalize key controls before ever connecting. Expect a learning cliff, but work past it to unlock SS13’s gameplay riches.

Role-specific mechanics

Each crew job has special mechanics that are critical to learn over time too. For example, as an engineer you’ll need to understand pipe laying, air alarm systems managing atmosphere flow, solar panel wiring, engine maintenance like injecting plasma or swapping cells. Easy to feel overwhelmed fast by the array of systems.

Reviewing job-specific wikis helps grasp basics needed to avoid seeming utterly incompetent your first shifts. You needn’t master your role immediately, but knowing basics makes finding your footing easier among the chaos.

Tips for new players

Beyond controls, developing positive habits and mindsets helps greatly in getting over initial struggle and finding your way within the SS13 subculture.

Communication is key

Proactively coordinating with fellow crew through chat channels speeds learning and forges bonds. Ask questions, call for help, warn allies of threats, offer aid, praise cooperation, coordinate plans. Building goodwill avoids appearing as just another griefing Assistant.

Don’t be afraid to experiment

Expect to flounder and die your first dozen shifts as you poke into dangerous realms beyond your experience. But don’t let failure frustrate you into just resigning yourself to boring Assistant work. Keep taking risks and learning so next incarnation goes better.

Embrace the chaos

The randomness inherent to SS13 is the true charm. Don’t obsess over “winning” or reaching any set objectives. Instead enjoy the immersive narratives and social dynamics arising within stations however shifts unfold. Playing too directly towards metagame goals will only invite further disaster upon yourself. Expect bedlam, accept bedlam, become the bedlam and thrive.

Advanced Gameplay

As you rack up shifts of experience through trial and error, learning to play your roles competently is just the beginning. Mastery separates seasoned veterans from merely passable crew. Understanding advanced techniques and synergies unlocks SS13’s fullest potential.

Mastering your role

Investing real effort into your role and department makes succeeding feel genuinely earned. Advance past bare minimum competence towards professionalism and even excellence worthy of coveted medals, glory, and immortalization in station legends.

Advanced techniques

Each job has its own meta of optimal play. For example:

• Engineers setup complex piping networks to perfectly balance distros while avoiding spaghetti. Upgraded solars and TEGs generate surplus energy reserves. Crisis suit and mech mastery enables heroics stabilizing breaches others would flee from.
• Doctors utilize advanced medication combinations for incredible healing potential. Genetic manipulation unlocks superhuman powers. Master surgeons perform a dozen back-to-back organ transplants and augmetic enhancements. Cloners and synth production overcomes permadeaths.
• Botanists generate miracle superplants and max capacity crops feeding the full crew gourmet food. Chemical extracts supply medbay with every medicinal reagent needed.
• Scientists develop gamechanging tech like bluespace travel, cybernetic limbs, energy weapons. Researching the full tech tree feels truly foundational for station progress.

Dedication towards excellence makes casual chaos into memorable legends.

Strategies for success

In addition, understanding shift meta strategies helps departments function synergistically towards success:

• Maintain atmos early so breaches don’t cascade into permanent Crisis catastrophe. Never ignore fires and gas threats.
• Warden and brig staff teaming with security prevents prisoner escapes leading to future headache.
• Exploring space anomalies before they infiltrate the station allows containing external Chaos. Send out probes on satellites to increase warning times.
• Research and develop crowd control equipment to issue crewmates in case of internal stability loss.

Thinking ahead of risks, crews can turn crises into mere inconveniences rather than round-ending threats.

Antagonist playstyles

For players who excel at their constructive roles, antagonist opportunities offer new challenges utilizing your job skills to creatively sow chaos!

The thrill of the hunt

Instead of reacting to disasters, you proactively engineer utter Crisis as a traitor, changeling, wizard, or rev head. Your objective: perfectly execute your plot whether bombing the emergency shuttle or assassinating vital heads of staff. Outsmart an entire station hunting the saboteur you.

Success means engineering utterly unforgettable narrative shifts that become the stuff of legend retold for years. Players still whisper in awe retelling stories like infamous traitor Curlybeard’s climatic last stand against an army of crewmen pursuing him through maintenance tunnels only for his final grenade to breach the last functioning APC plunging the station into total darkness just as he gets dragged down by sheer numbers, buying his traitor accomplice time to detonate the explosives Curlybeard helped him plant within the AI core earlier, eliminating the final threat to their hijacking escape as Curlybeard cackles like the maniac he is even as his actual final breath escapes his bleeding lungs – ultimately a bittersweet victory for Curlybeard’s bloody legacy.

Moments like those above become SS13 treasure.

Creative ways to cause chaos

In addition to outright damaging objectives, part of the thrill playing antagonists involves seeing what creative ways you can indirectly nudge along station degradation:

• Liberate dangerous cortical borers or pathogens from secure containment or external threats onto crew for mayhem.
• Corrupt laws to turn AI or borgs against former allies.
• Subtly disable critical monitoring equipment so problems get missed until reaching catastrophic levels.
• Mislabel dangerous canister contents that when inevitably mishandled cause psychic avatar manifestations, radiation floods, or toxin clouds.

Finding imaginative plot hooks satisfying your antagonist objectives while staying plausibly in character makes earning that greentext victory so much more rewarding. Going loud rarely works out well – instead death by a thousand subtle cuts leads stations to implode wonderfully.

Teamwork and cooperation

Skilled crew-play also relies heavily on interdepartmental teamwork between crew members filling capability gaps. Coordinated stations utilize comparative advantages wisely.

Overcoming challenges together

Threats easily handled by multiple groups proves impossible alone. Fires contained fast by coordinated engineers, medics, security can rage out of hand without cross-training. Meteor storms and radiation bursts surviveable via teamwork turn lethal without backup. Companions watch your back – don’t wander alone into darkness.

Building a strong crew

Stations with strong leadership organizing departments prove most resilient against escalating hazards and sabotage. Delegating tasks, mentoring newbies, preparing countermeasures, rallying morale and purpose, leading the charge against threats; such direction separates great commanders from those quickly abandoned in mutinies after credibility erodes.

Integrate assistants into meaningful roles. Avoid allowing boredom since idle hands inevitable open airlocks better left shut. Consider curiously talented recruits for apprentice training expanding your department flexibly. Build unity through shared ordeals.

Surviving the shift requires cooperation, camaraderie, purpose and vigilance from all crewmates. However, never forget that any among you could secretly harbor sinister motives despite outward appearances… trust, but verify.

The Impact of Space Station 13

Influence on other games

As one of the earlier indie multiplayer sandbox games, SS13 pioneered many concepts that later became commonplace mechanics in the gaming industry. The DNA of SS13 lives on through its spiritual successor projects.

Despite its obtuse interface and aging graphics, SS13 proved roleplaying crewmembers navigating emergent station disasters made for compelling multiplayer dynamics decades before the mainstream adoption seen today.

titles like Among Us and Deceit copied SS13’s alkaline corpse by making social deception and betrayal accessible to wider audiences. Barotrauma directly cloned SS13’s various high-pressure environment management systems. Many survival sandbox games adapted atmosphere and construction systems pioneered by SS13 coders.

Without SS13’s daring experimentation and innovation driven by passion, today’s gaming landscape would feel far emptier. All spacers owe it to themselves to experience SS13’s direct descendants at least once after cutting their teeth on more modern spiritual successors.

A platform for creativity

In addition, SS13’s easily moddable open source engine over its long life has enabled tremendous creative output from contributors. Both coders and artists found ways to build their skills and portfolio pieces by shipping SS13 community content spanning:

• Custom antagonists like vampire thralls or wizard factions
• Original alien species like the memorable Gonk droids
• Elaborate cyberpunk ship interiors for servers like Cyberiad
• Graphics packs like the recent Positron style’s crisp HD look
• Custom soundtracks fitting shift moods from ambient to intense
• Patched bugfixes and efficiency refactors modernizing aging code
• Optimized lighting systems supporting smooth animation
• Expanded crafting, medical, atmos, and wiring systems

Many current professional game developers credit working on SS13 modifications as formative experiences demonstrating scoped project management challenges at scale.

The simplicity underlying SS13’s engine makes it approachable even for coding newbies to meaningfully contribute after self-teaching basic Javascript foundations – an onramp opportunity the wider gaming industry desperately needs to enable more diversity in production talent.

A testament to the power of community

Finally, SS13 stands tall after 20 grueling years as a developer passion project uniquely buoyed by pure community support. No profits drive value generation. Everyone intrinsically motivated by shared purpose and camaraderie arising from memorable emergent stories SA13 facilitates.

Financial incentives would taint the experience for veterans and newcomers alike – imagine the outrage if even mere cosmetics entered SS13’s shops! Instead freely given mods from an ever-refreshing influx of contributors avoids stagnation despite incredibly high churn.

By retaining indie spirit as a community curation, quality remains high even as quantity balloons thanks to pipelined pre-screened code from aspiring contributors eager to give back and earn commit rights.

In many ways the shining spirit encapsulating everything wonderful about gaming as an artform and builder of bonds between hearts flows strongest these decades later through SS13’s storied hulls. Find where you belong among the stars!

Why Space Station 13 is a must-play for any gamer

After 20 exciting years of continuous development and legendary stories arising from its passionate community, SS13 has firmly cemented its place as one of the most unique and compelling multiplayer experiences available for any gamer.

While opaque and challenging for newcomers to penetrate at first, the learning investment needed to grasp its complex blend of controls, interfaces and job mechanics pays of tenfold in terms of just pure fun and social dynamics arising from the chaos onboard dying stations.

Nowhere else can you find gameplay quite as immersive thanks to the emphasis on teamwork between crewmates, where success means heroically overcoming cascade threats and disasters through clear communication, cooperation, and quick thinking.

The rivaled thrill that comes from outsmarting an entire vigilant crew as an devious lone wolf sabotour meanwhile generates gaming memories sure to be treasured for decades hence by those lucky enough to have “been there” for tales still retold in hushed whispers of infamy and awe.

Give Space Station 13 a try yourself if you crave creative narrative freedom, memorable emergent storytelling, and a welcoming community pursuing multiplayer excitement you won’t find anywhere else! Just be warned the jank and brutality awaiting new arrivals can be severe for the faint of heart or easily frustrated gamer.

But if you push past that initial brutal hazing, a whole new world with two decades of in-jokes and veteran camaraderie awaits. Personally, I can’t wait to crew with you again for our own tales someday! Surviving the shift is all that matters in the end after all.