For the last week, I’ve been shooting potatoes into space, trying to solve the mysteries of the universe. Not in real life, of course — I’ve been playing Spaceplan, a simple but strangely engrossing new sci-fi game that has a curious obsession with spuds.
Spaceplan is what’s known as an idle game, or a clicker. They’re the video game equivalent of background noise. You put them on, let them run, and check in whenever you get bored. For the most part they play themselves — you just need to click on something every so often to keep things moving. Spaceplan doesn’t stray too far from this formula. It’s a game where you find yourself in a ship orbiting a mysterious red planet. In order to figure out just what’s going on, you need to generate...
