In Everspace, players awaken on board a battleship in a remote corner of our galaxy. They receive a mysterious command to appear at a specific place. Searching for the origins of their own existence and the unknown commander, they must fight their way through more and more new, uncontrolled territories where they will encounter other skilled combat pilots, who range from cooperative to hostile. Death will be a constant companion and constantly recurring flashbacks of the protagonist will gradually shine a light in the darkness of the mission.

During the course of the game, players will not only have to continually prove their combat skills, but also gather fuel and raw materials in order to travel to various star systems and repair and upgrade their equipment. The roguelike character of the game offers a quick and easy entry to the game and adds constant twists and surprises to the game events. Along with gameplaying skills, this also demands improvisation by players and provides an individual, always motivational game experience. Unlike in classic roguelikes, game progress is not completely lost at the moment of death, but rather remains available in the form of persistent upgrades.

Indie developer Rockfish Games just released a major update, adding the all-new Hardcore Mode, TrackIR, and fully customizable HOTAS (joystick) support to their fast-paced roguelike space shooter Everspace on Steam and GOG.com.

With this major update and the release of the original soundtrack and the official art book of Everspace, the veteran dev team delivers on the last remaining promises of their wildly successful Kickstarter from 2015, where they raised about $500,000 from close to 11,000 backers. Anyone who missed out on the soundtrack and the art book can now upgrade to the Everspace Deluxe Edition for $9.99 on Steam.

The stand-alone Hardcore Mode offers a whole new level of challenge for veteran pilots. It is as demanding as hard difficulty, but players are not allowed to improve their starting conditions. Each new run starts out with the same fixed set of pilot perks and without any ship perks upgraded. Players can upgrade ship perks only at the end of each sector, provided they have collected enough credits. Hardcore Mode also introduces another nasty surprise: before entering a new sector, players must select from different “handicap” modifiers which have adverse effects on the overall gameplay, letting them choose between the frying pan or the fire.

In spite of the fact that the HOTAS support stretch goal was not unlocked, Rockfish Games also added fully customizable joystick support due to strong demand from the community. Now, space game enthusiasts can fully configure the controls layout including button and axis mapping, and even tweak settings for sensitivity and dead zones to their liking.

“Everspace is still as fast-paced and twitchy as ever, so we still think that using the mouse and keyboard is the best way to fly. But, some of our fans have been pretty vocal about it, and we heard them loud and clear: they are finally able to use their HOTAS to pilot their space ship on their dangerous journey,” said Michael Schade, CEO and co-founder of Rockfish Games.

With this major patch, there are coming further features requested by the community, like options to toggle Motion Blur, Chromatic Aberration, different kinds of anti-aliasing, changing the screen percentage in non-VR Mode, Colorblind Mode, as well as mouse/keyboard controls and further improvements in VR.