At first blush, Galacticare looks familiar. If you've recently played a hospital sim, you probably have a good idea of the basics. You're a director who's been put in charge of a hospital that's in outer space, and you need to keep it profitable while assuring that patients actually get treated. You do this by micromanaging everything, from the staff to patients to the buildings themselves. The basic interface is comfortable and familiar. While everything might have a space theme, it's still a hospital. It's clear the developers know that a lot of elements of the basic design are not broken and don't need to be fixed and are focusing on what makes Galacticare distinct.

What separates something like Galacticare from a standard hospital simulator is your patients and staff. As you might imagine, you're treating a variety of different alien races with different needs, and that plays into how you intend to manage the stresses of a hospital. Some alien species might require certain temperatures or thrive better in certain environments. Some are more durable and patient and thus can be asked to wait longer without getting upset. This adds more complexity to the process of taking in patients than with an entirely human organization.

The same goes for your doctors. Doctors of different species thrive in different environments, and it's important to make sure your doctors are happy with your buildings. From what we can see, it appears that most of these desires subtly push you toward upgrading the hospital in different ways. This means well-maintained hospitals will have happy doctors, and poorly maintained ones won't. It might sound straightforward, but depending on the staff you have, it can require very different priorities. You're also encouraged to think of the various doctors on staff as actual characters because they have their own skills, level up, and even have their own histories.

You're not necessarily going to build one hospital and be done. The game is divided into various chapters — or perhaps "episodes" seems more correct. You'll be able to retain doctors and staff you've already leveled up and gotten used to, but each scenario asks for something different. It's framed like something like an episode of "House" or its ilk, where you're dealing with an unusual medical situation every other week, instead of merely focusing on the raw profits of the hospital. (Raw profits are, of course, still important. We are talking about the healthcare system, after all.) This adds a different feel from a lot of similar sim titles, where you're mostly focused on a singular place.

Galacticare has a lot of potential to be a fun pick-up-and-play hospital sim that allows players to focus on specific scenarios instead of the more mundane elements of running a hospital. The charming outer space setting also offers a lot of potential for unusual situations that you couldn't get in something more grounded. Also, come on, it's just cool to be treating space aliens! I'm looking forward to seeing more of Galacticare before it comes out later in 2023 for consoles and PC.