Crying Suns

Crying Suns is the kind of game that feels like it was made in a cloning vat spliced with FTL’s star charts, Foundation’s robo-philosophy, and Dune’s deep-space daddy issues. You play as Admiral Ellys Idaho, a clone with a bad case of galactic amnesia, waking up to find the empire you once commanded has crumbled into weird cults, malfunctioning AIs, and suspiciously quiet planets. Your job? Piece together what went wrong… one doomed run at a time.

At first glance, Crying Suns walks and talks like a roguelike: procedural maps, random events, fleet upgrades, the whole kit. But once you’re a few hours in, it becomes clear, this game’s more Foundation than FTL. It’s less about surviving endless runs, and more about crawling through the bones of a dead civilization while making meaningful choices and occasionally getting blown up by space pirates.

Combat is pausable RTS chaos: squadron dogfights, railgun volleys, asteroid cover. It’s punchy and tense, even if the AI likes to spam the same strategies like a drunk chess bot. But the real juice is in the writing. One moment you’re rescuing kids. The next, they explode. Then you meet them again… and they’re fine? It’s like Groundhog Day in a crumbling space monarchy.

The big problem? Repetition. You’ll see the same events. Make the same calls. Win with the same loadouts. Crying Suns isn’t hard enough or weird enough to scratch that “just one more run” itch. But what it lacks in roguelike bite, it makes up for with atmosphere, storytelling, and enough existential dread to make HAL 9000 nervous.

It’s not a perfect clone, but Crying Suns still earns its stripes.