Prison Architect devs finally make it to space with The Last Starship

Prison Architect and Darwinia developers Introversion Software have taken to Twitter to announce they’re working on a new spaceship management game, The Last Starship. It’s a procedurally-generated romp through various mission types such as asteroid mining, battling space pirates and rescuing ships in distress, all spread throughout the galaxy. Introversion have quite a bit more to say on what they call their “broken, unfinished and bug filled prototype” in their announcement video, which you can watch below.

One person wasn’t immediately happy with Introversion’s announcement though. Robust Games’ Adam Riches, currently working on comedy point-and-click adventure Loco Motive, noticed that the trailer and Steam store page for The Last Starship included some astronaut sprites he’d produced. Introversion hadn’t approached Riches to ask for his work’s inclusion, but when he alerted them to it they reached out and apologised. Riches subsequently tweeted that they’d compromised, and “both parties are satisfied”.

Introversion acknowledges that there’s “placeholder art and sound” in The Last Starship, which has begun a closed playtest on Steam. They say to expect glitches, with regular free updates to fix bugs and implement feedback from testers. There’s a sizeable hint of FTL: Faster Than Light about The Last Starship, what with you needing to pimp out an empty space-going hull with all manner of life-support, weapons and propulsion systems.

Paradox Interactive bought Prison Architect from Introversion in 2019, so they haven’t worked on any of the DLC released since. Introversion have been trying to make something space-related for a few years. They’ve taken a shot at various prototypes but nothing has stuck until now. Most of their prototyped games have been sold off for charitable purposes, which is decent of them.

No release date yet for The Last Starship other than ‘late 2022’, but we’ll let you know when we hear more. For now, if you’re interested, you can request access to the alpha on Steam.