Beyond These Stars Launches in Full Release

New Zealand studio Balancing Monkey Games has launched its city-building strategy game Beyond These Stars directly as version 1.0, with PC Game Pass access available on release day. Players must build a civilization on the back of Kewa, a sentient space whale, and maintain a relationship with him as he drifts through a procedurally generated galaxy. The game has already earned Mostly Positive reviews on Steam and is available with a 20% launch discount.It's an unusual formula. Instead of a static map, we travel around the galaxy aboard a living creature. Kewa is a sentient whale with a will, moods, and needs of his own. How well you care for him affects both the whale and the fate of the entire colony on his back. Resources on Kewa are limited, so the Peeps, the game's inhabitants, must do more than build a city on a hexagonal grid and set up production chains. They also need to communicate with their host through a separate Whale Communicator interface. The quality of that relationship can even influence the route Kewa takes through the galaxy. The other half of the game is exploration, with a map of star nodes, research ships, outposts on habitable planets, alien factions, and mysteries to uncover.The road to launch took three years. The game was announced in 2023, delayed a couple of times, and eventually skipped Early Access altogether. The developers aren't worried about comparisons to The Wandering Village, where a town is built on the back of a walking dinosaur. Here, the creature is a living character with a voice and personality, and there's a procedurally generated galaxy instead of one static map.