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One Lonely Outpost Hands-On Preview: A Promising Sci-Fi Farming Sim

by on June 23, 2023
One Lonely Outpost screenshot of a blonde farmer smiling over a partially green foreign world with running water

I don’t have any robotic cows yet, and I’m sad. Hang on: there’s a chance that line needs more context. Since first appearing on Kickstarter in August 2020, I’ve had my eye on One Lonely Outpost. I love farming games and sci-fi, so unless Marvelous wants to revisit Innocent Life one day, there’s very little crossover of these genres.

I’ve spent almost 60 in-game days with One Lonely Outpost so far, though in more practical terms, it has been 14 real-life hours. In that time, the game is living up to its name, thrusting you into an intentionally lonely experience at the outset. Landing on a lifeless planet, your player character (who, weirdly, can only be a blonde male, despite the farmer girl in most of the promotional art) has only his companion robot, Qwerty, as company. While I admit to a slight eye roll at that name, once I learned he named the robot as a young teen, I gave it a pass, because that totally tracks. Think about the first email address or username you ever had and how, at the time, it was the greatest thing.

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Anyway, my first days on the planet were indeed solitary, as I couldn’t do much more than break rocks, dig up artifacts, and plant some crops. Qwerty and its storage compartment are useful but can only beep and boop, so conversations are minimal. That said, some of the scenes and dialogue options painted an effective picture of a journey that went from excitement to regret after facing the daunting prospect of carving out a life on a barren planet. The situation gradually improves as the faceless, soulless corporation that sent you here decides to send other colonists to help. It turns out your character knows how to farm and not much else, so you need others to help fix your computer and supply blueprints to open up further gameplay options like crafting, cooking, bug catching, and more.

One Lonely Outpost has the sci-fi setting down. It’s vital that the game doesn’t feel exactly like any other farming sim with the knowledge this is another world as its only distinguishing feature. Each character has their own spacefaring vessel that fits them; Aaron’s is sleek with natural foliage accents, engineer Jim-Bob’s ship is made of bold, angular lines emphasizing efficient use of space, and your character, well, has a Winnebago. Not literally, but between his charmingly goofy ship and the game’s Spacebucks currency, the Spaceballs appreciation is obvious, and I’m here for it.

The lived-in sci-fi aesthetic is a personal favorite, so I appreciate it in One Lonely Outpost. While your main tools exist as a cybernetic arm brace that tills soil, breaks rocks, and sprays water, the crafting stations and equipment have a nice chunky industrial feel. It contrasts well with the natural landscape and even the high-tech alien structure you discover early on. Much has been said about the graphics, especially the shift from 2D to the current 2D/3D hybrid, but it really grew on me. I have followed the graphic change through Steam updates, and it gives One Lonely Outpost a distinct look. The pixelated textures make the environment and objects feel like three-dimensional 2D pixel art. It works better in action than it does in screenshots — the angle of the camera, depth of field, and positioning of objects give the landscape real variances in height that wouldn’t have been as effective in pure 2D. I don’t know if the visual change was specifically for these reasons, but I’d be surprised if I wasn’t on the right track.

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While I’m certain there is plenty more game I have yet to see, I did play enough to see one game-changing thing: terraforming. When you arrive on the planet, there are only rocks, dirt, and crystals making up the landscape. All the world’s water has been frozen, and your only water source is ice crystals dotted around the landscape. Somewhere around day 25-30, I got a quest to interface with the alien entity buried in the mountain who starts the 16-day terraforming process to make the planet habitable after you fulfill some research requirements. The way the developers set this up is not only brilliant, but it clearly took a lot of work. It isn’t one of those “game things” where the planet remains rocky for 15 days, and on the 16th it’s suddenly green and lush. Instead, patches of land very slowly turn greener over time, with tiny sprouts growing a bit more as time passes. This gradual shift makes sense, but I’m also very impressed by it. I don’t know how many distinct variations there are, or how many textures they created and placed across the maps, but it had to be a lot of work to make this gradual change work, and it’s very cool to witness.

The characters I’ve met are colorful and varied (one literally has blue skin!), though it seems everyone has limited dialogue. In Stardew Valley — the comparison I can’t help but make here — every character has a ton of different things to say that change over time. In One Lonely Outpost, I feel I’ve exhausted all the dialogue already, but maybe that will change if I can boost my friendship levels enough. That said, finding the right gifts for people is tough early on, and even though I thought french fries were a perfect gift for a 10-year-old girl, I was wrong and now she hates me. Still, I see the potential in the cast, even if they seem relatively one-note so far.

There are many things Stardew Valley inherited from Harvest Moon, and likewise, many sim games today inherit ideas from Stardew Valley. While that remains true to an extent with One Lonely Outpost, I’m pleased to see that little feels truly derivative and the developers are taking care to forge their own path. For instance, you start with all four core tools, but they have dedicated slots on your toolbar and are always available. I enjoy little touches like how your walking movement slows while watering so you can water crops in a single pass, and the highlighting on interactive elements to easily see when a crop is harvestable or the range of sprinklers and power stations.

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I’ve focused on most of the positive elements of One Lonely Outpost so far because, hey, I like positivity and overall have been enjoying my time. But one thing that has grated on me is the slow and inconsistent pacing. So many things take far too long, and many portions of the first 50 days dragged. For instance, when my first colonist arrived, he offered to fix my ship’s computer, but he needed a day. He also helped fix a broken Qwerty, after another day. Next, I showed him the alien structure. I had to craft a device to interact with it, and he could sell me the blueprint. But not until tomorrow. Remember, at this point, there is nobody else on the planet yet, so there’s very little to do to pass the time. This comes up often when there is a new blueprint to get, during terraforming, and more.

Also, resources like minerals do not regenerate, which makes sense for the setting, but it also means that if you mined most of the ore early on like I did, you can’t even gather. Part of the reason I got nearly to day 60 is because on some weeks I couldn’t do much but wait. For days at a time I would just wake up, water the crops, and be back in bed by 10am. Rinse and repeat until there would be a quest or anything to break up the monotony. Post-terraforming, there are more crops and options that appear almost all at once, and even with my planning, I almost failed a weekly food delivery because you have seven days to deliver items that take 12-14 days to grow. If I hadn’t happened to plant the new seeds when I did, the colony would have starved. Up until then, things were so slow I’d sleep weeks away, and suddenly even my intense amount of farming barely got me by. In short, the early game pacing is uneven, and I hope this improves drastically.

One final item I hope is a priority for Freedom Games is character creation. This is the only sim game I have played which has NO level of character customization, and that’s unexpected. You can’t even set a name. Like I said above, we’ve been seeing the cute blonde farm girl holding that oversized beet thing for years, so why can we not make that character? We don’t need a million options, but give us something. Let us pick some styles (which thankfully has been more common in games than “gender”), skin tone, hair style and color, and so on. The complete lack of customization means that, unlike any other similar game, your (nameless) character always feels like someone else’s and never fully “you.” Early screenshots of the game show this was planned, so I’m sure it will come back, but again, it’s a strange omission for now.

One Lonely Outpost artwork of a farmer girl holding a massive alien beet thing with a robot cow looking on
Where hast thou gone, farmer girl?

I have loosely followed One Lonely Outpost enough to keep tabs on the drastic visual changes since its Kickstarter campaign and the community reactions. It would be weird not to address this at all, because the shift from purely 2D pixel art to the 2D/3D hybrid has met with a fair amount of criticism. The handoff from original developers Aurorian Studios to publisher Freedom Games last fall also caused concern from backers, with complaints such as that the game is no longer what they felt they backed anymore. I’m not going to editorialize in this preview, and if you want to learn more, you can follow the link to the developer announcement above. What I can say is that I was among those shocked and dismayed at the visual change when I first saw them, but those concerns went away after playing the game. I’m not saying the initial 2D art didn’t look great, but I really do like the look Freedom Games landed on, and it feels very polished already. And if the graphic shift helped the game approach a release and not become a cautionary crowdfunding tale, I’m won’t complain.

With that out of the way, I hope I’ve covered my 57 days with One Lonely Outpost effectively! As the upcoming launch is still an Early Access product, I don’t expect it to be perfect, but I wanted to discuss my concerns in the hopes Freedom Games can address them. Despite the lack of character customization, serious pacing issues, and flat characterization, One Lonely Outpost is shaping up much more nicely than I expected, given the somewhat rocky development, and I look forward to seeing how it progresses.

Also, I still want my cows.

One Lonely Outpost launches in Steam Early Access on June 26th, 2023.

A note on macOS support: the One Lonely Outpost Steam page only lists Windows support, but as macOS support is apparently planned one day, I learned the game actually will launch on a Mac, but what I got was an incredibly early pre-alpha build that largely doesn’t function. I assume the team will fix this and the game will not launch on macOS until officially supported. But know that if you try it and have a “what the fork” moment, the game runs fine on Windows. We’ve reached out to Freedom Games about this, and will update this article if we hear back.

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Mike Salbato

Mike Salbato

Mike has been with RPGFan nearly since its inception, and in that time has worn a surprising number of hats for someone who doesn't own a hatstand. Today he attempts to balance his Creative Director role with his Editor-in-Chief status. Despite the amount of coffee in his veins, he bleeds emerald green.

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