SPACEPLAN

Most idle games treat the wait as a leash. You start a timer, you close the tab or the app, and the whole design exists to get you to open it again later — a notification, a login streak, a reason to keep the number climbing indefinitely. SPACEPLAN starts from the same mechanical building blocks as every clicker on Steam and points them at a completely different job. Here, the timer you're staring at is doing narrative pacing. It's making you wait the length of one paragraph, or one joke, before the next line arrives. That's a small distinction on paper and a genuinely unusual one in practice, and it's the reason a three-hour potato-themed clicker built by one designer in his spare time is still worth talking about most of a decade after Devolver Digital put it on Steam.

The premise is exactly as strange as it sounds. You're aboard a satellite in orbit around an unfamiliar planet, your systems are dead, and the only power source you have left is a potato hooked up to some improvised electrodes. From that one absurd image the game builds an entire progression ladder: charge the potato, power a scanner, unlock a new component, build the next device, repeat — each tier stranger and more ambitious than the last, all of it narrated with a dry, self-aware sense of humour that treats its own premise as seriously as it deserves, which is to say not very.

The idle curve as a story clock, not a leaderboard

What SPACEPLAN gets right that a lot of the genre still doesn't is restraint. The numbers here never get large enough to stop meaning anything — there's no moment where you're managing a resource counted in scientific notation for its own sake. Instead, each new tier of potato-derived technology is gated behind a wait just long enough to make the next revelation feel like it was worth earning, and short enough that you're rarely bored before it lands. The design isn't asking "how do we keep this player engaged for a hundred hours." It's asking "how long should the reader wait before the next page turns," and building the mechanical layer to answer that question instead of a retention one.

That distinction matters because it changes what you're actually doing during the idle stretches. In most incrementals, the correct play during downtime is to go do something else and come back to a bigger number. In SPACEPLAN, the downtime is short enough, and specific enough to what's about to happen next, that closing the game and forgetting about it means missing the rhythm the writing is built around. It's a clicker where paying attention to the wait is closer to the intended experience than tuning it out.

The trade-off is that the mechanical layer underneath all of this is genuinely thin. Strip away the writing and you're left with a fairly conventional gather-and-unlock loop: charge a resource, spend it on the next item, watch a new timer start. There's no meaningful decision-making, no branching strategy, nothing resembling the tournament sub-game that makes something like Universal Paperclips work as a systems puzzle in its own right. SPACEPLAN doesn't pretend otherwise, and it doesn't need to — the mechanics exist to serve the pacing, not to be interesting on their own — but it's worth being honest that judged purely as a clicker, there isn't much game here without the words wrapped around it.

Writing that stays odd instead of running out of ideas

The tone is the part that has to carry the whole experience, and it mostly does. The dialogue treats a potato-powered space probe with a completely straight face, mining a fair amount of comedy from the gap between the mundane object doing the work and the increasingly large-scale things it ends up doing. New devices and discoveries keep introducing fresh angles on the joke rather than repeating the same beat, which is the main reason the opening hour holds up as well as it does — the writing earns its own premise instead of just restating it.

It cools a little as the story moves into more serious territory later on, which is a fair trade rather than a flaw: a game this committed to a real narrative arc has to let the tone shift when the stakes do, and SPACEPLAN handles that shift without losing the reader's goodwill. What's worth flagging honestly is pacing rather than tone — a few stretches ask for a wait with nothing new to read at the end of it, and those moments test patience the writing hasn't fully banked yet. They're the exception rather than the rule, but they're there.

Sound doing more work than the visuals

Visually, SPACEPLAN is plain by design — a handful of clean, sparse illustrations of the satellite, the planet and the devices you build, with none of the ambition to look like more than it is. Sound is where the presentation earns its keep. Logan Gabriel's soundtrack, sold separately as an optional DLC for anyone who wants to keep it, is doing real work signalling tone shifts and pacing the quieter stretches between story beats — it's the kind of score that makes a genuine difference to how the waiting periods feel, and playing with it muted loses something the visuals alone don't replace.

Desktop, phone, and what changes between them

SPACEPLAN launched simultaneously on Steam, iOS and Android in May 2017, alongside a free browser prototype Jake Hollands had already put online the previous year — the mobile and desktop releases are the same expanded, narrative-complete version of that idea rather than separate products. On desktop it's a mouse-and-click experience with no controller support at all, which barely matters given how little precision the game ever asks of you. On phone, the short idle intervals and single tap-to-progress interactions suit the format naturally — this is closer to a game designed for picking up between other things than one that wants your full attention for a sitting. The one caveat is that a phone screen makes it easier to treat the waiting periods as genuinely idle time, which is exactly the instinct the pacing is trying to work against.

Value

At its discounted NZ$1.48, this isn't really a purchasing decision worth agonising over — it's three to five hours of a specific, well-executed idea for less than the price of a coffee. Even at its undiscounted list price of NZ$4.49 the arithmetic barely changes. What you're not getting is anything resembling replay value: there's no branching path, no faster second run with carried-over bonuses, nothing to optimise once the story has told itself. That's a real limitation, not a rounding error, and anyone buying this expecting a long-tail incremental to sink hours into over weeks is buying the wrong game. Buying it for a handful of short sessions and a story with an actual ending is buying exactly what's on the label.

Verdict

An 8.0 for a game built around a joke premise and a genuinely thin mechanical layer is a claim that needs defending, and the defence is simple: SPACEPLAN understood something about idle design that most of the genre still avoids, which is that the wait itself can be an authored experience rather than a monetisation lever. It doesn't ask for your attention across weeks or months. It asks for a few short sessions, tells a strange, specific story at exactly the pace it wants to tell it, and then stops — commitment that's rarer in this space than it should be.

It doesn't climb higher because there simply isn't much game here once the writing is set aside, and because a game this short leaves no room to earn back a slower stretch or two along the way. Anyone who likes watching small systems keep ticking over on their own terms, the way Wanderer's gathering loops run between sessions, will recognise the appeal of a timer that's actually going somewhere.

Pricing and Steam review data checked 30 July 2026.