A short horror game about isolation and powerlessness, in space!
A sturdy and important part of any ship, space or otherwise: a way to open and close bulkhead doors. These feature some mysterious knobs, a port of some sort, and a little atmospheric readout. The big red handle animates to open and close doors between different parts of the ship.
7/22/2026
Poisoned Gravity is set in the present, but in an alternate timeline where the Russian moon landing was successful. I won't go into all the details here, since that's something I want to highlight in the game's opening a little. The short version is: a discovery led to the US and the USSR cooperating to rapidly develop a form of faster than light travel.
The biggest change from our history is that technology progressed along very different lines. Limitations of the FTL technology led to a rapid boom in conventional rocketry and the development of efficient liquid methane thrusters in the early 90s. In this timeline, the consumer was never tech companies' focus in the 80s and 90s. Instead, that boom was driven by the medical technology sector, as resources were poured into companies developing cryogenics and support technologies for a new era of colonization.
Computers still exist, but were never made with the end user in mind. Personal computers are bulkier and more-closed, with very little competition driving anyone towards open platforms and user-modifiable software. Input devices tend to favor durability and reliability over usefulness in most cases. Trackballs are the standard when there's a mouse cursor, monitors are often built into the computer case, and buttons are often just integrated directly on the machine rather than split into a full keyboard.
Part of why I'm going this route with the setting will make more sense with the context of some of the game's story, but honestly it's mostly just that I think some medical technology design is super-interesting. It's often user-hostile, but not in the deliberate, almost vindictive ways that modern software is hostile.
There's a resentment, a hatred bubbling below the surface of every recipe site. One that only fully-manifests when you're trying to use your phone to bring it up in the kitchen, to actually review the steps while preparing a meal. Ads immediately flank you from top and bottom, video kicking on. As you scroll past page after page of background, any line break could bring a new ad that hijacks your full-screen to tell you about a new Apple TV show. If you finally make it down to the ingredients, linger too long and the site will reload, sending you back to the start to tread the gauntlet again.
Everyone with a phone knows what this is like, it's universal to that set. What I think is way more interesting is technology that's developed for decades without any consideration of the end user at all - where the person at the other end of the interface is so distant from the purchasing decision that they don't even exist to the designers. Medical devices that are technically full-featured computers, but are meant only to be interacted with via a handful of simple waterproof buttons arranged in a line below the screen. If you want to get in to set up software or configure anything beyond screen brightness, you'd need a technician to come in, peel up the warranty sticker, and hook a portable terminal into a special socket on the motherboard.
So kind of my goal with the setting is to create something that's recognizably bad - this is not a "good future" reimagining of today, but it's not any more dystopic than the real world either. It's just different in ways that I hope won't be depressing! I've always hated when games have you work for a big corporation or something and the writing is constantly like nudging you in the ribs like "hey isn't it hilarious how your company actually owns you, isn't it funny that you're going more and more into debt the more you work?"
I think that style of cruelty only really works in stuff like Hardspace Shipbreaker, where the cruelty is fully-realized, integrated into the story in a cool way, and the workers are given agency and actively fight back against it in super-realistic ways. I hate stuff like Satisfactory where part of the joke is that your character just silently accepts everything, entirely isolated from anyone except the corporate AI.
Since this game is about isolation and the dangers of running with the bare minimum of employees, even for super-important work, I want to avoid rubbing the player's nose in how bad thing might be. So I think that technology is a good way to express that feeling without having to tell the player that they don't matter over and over.