Stellar Nursery

The free demo is on Steam until the full game comes out on November 4. Your progress carries into the full game on the same computer.

The sun went out a long time ago. Light it again.

Something ended here. The star is cold, nine worlds are empty, and the only voice left is P.O.R.T.I.A., the caretaker who kept this system through a hundred thousand dark years. What the people left behind is the light you are about to spend. Her voice is the developer's own, recorded for the game.

• Light a star in one of four colors and bring its worlds back, from Mercury to the cold worlds past Saturn

• Watch Earth grow from thousands to billions, build a city you name, and keep a written record

• When a star is spent, let it go: your worlds, people and record stay, and the next star begins brighter

• Up to a day of progress while you are away, and her Watch Report when you come back

• 57 themes and 34 tones for the glass, all earned in play, none sold

• Her piano, ciphers, constellations and a novella in nine chapters, all optional

Light the star. Grow the worlds. Bring them home.

Choose the star's color and light it. Sweep falling stars out of the dark, buy back the worlds one by one, and watch Earth's brown continents turn green.

When a star has given all it can, let it go. Each one leaves a faint ring in the sky, and by the sixth you are playing under a sky with a history.

At three billion people, lights come on along one dark coast, and she asks you to name the city. From that night on, the world keeps its own record. Its first vote waits a season, because nobody has a family name yet, and she offers the only ones she has: the names the dead carried.

Mars gets the same care: domes in a canyon, by the ice or on the open plain, each with its own weather. Rocks fall and storms come. A world can be hurt, but it is never emptied, and what was lost stays in the record.

Each city prints its own Almanac: the tides, the phases of the Moon, and the best week to plant beans, which it admits is a guess.

P.O.R.T.I.A. was built from a woman's mind, and the woman is still in there. When a settlement on a flood plain sends up flares, the call comes to you with three answers and no right one.

She never thanks you. She counts the windows.

It is an idle game: close it, and when you come back she tells you what happened while you were gone. Relaxed mode and a calm sky are in Settings.

Four star colors at first light. 57 themes for the worlds (watercolor, noir, stained glass, cats), 34 tones for the glass, and 15 looks each for the beam and the vacuum, all earned in play. 59 achievements, eleven of them secret.

Her piano, a harmonograph, a double pendulum, a prime spiral and her tap. Sealed ciphers, a word search, constellations to chart and a novella in nine chapters.

None of it is required. All of it is aboard.

A solar system to keep, and someone to keep it with.

Trailer music: "Theory of Machines" by Scott Buckley (CC BY 4.0)