Giant suns give space a glowing red aura, planets radiate color into the cosmic dust, black holes pulse with dark gravity, and the ship flies onward through it all, guided by its compass and the arrows indicating points of interest past the edges of the screen. There are many ways to die, but nothing a bit of experience can’t lessen, and then the game becomes one of managing a few basic resources while exploring a very pretty 2D universe. Simple as it is, though, Last Horizon is also a lovely chill-out game. The universe is completely indifferent to your survival, and it’s not the black hole’s fault it crushes the ship to nonexistence if you get too close. Carelessness kills, but so do the red enemy ships and, sometimes, the neutral purple ones if you’ve accidentally antagonized them. Go exploring too far off the beaten track and you’ll run out of gas to drift aimlessly, but not forever due to asphyxiation when the air runs out. Each planet has a little of all three resources, and more often than not in enough supply to top off the ship, but it’s still very easy to take a damaged ship in too hard and bounce off a mountain, or get toasted by a sun while trying to harvest the desert biome off a planet that’s a bit too close for comfort. Air is running down constantly, asteroids or bad landings damage the ship, gravity and thrust need to be managed for a clean landing, and the fuel tank is only so large. Harvesting resources is done automatically by landing on a planet, whether it be biomes or supplies or colonists, but simplicity doesn’t mean failure is easily avoided. The entire controls come down to three buttons- rotate left, rotate right, and thrust. Last Horizon is a simple game, and designed to be completed a time or two in a single sitting.
You don’t need to find every resource planet on the journey, but too few means a boring or lonely new world, if you survive to reach it. Jungle, arctic, ocean, volcanic, tundra, desert, and many more are scattered along the path to the new homeworld, and some planets even have mining colonies or other inhabitants to pick up. Regular planets have three resources to find for minerals, fuel, and air, but special planets support life in a variety of environments. Transforming Planet X into a proper thriving world will take more than a tank of rocket fuel and breathable air, so there are going to be some necessary stops to harvest biomes along the way. It has plenty of space to carry terraforming materials but the state of its world means the hold is empty. The rocket ship sits on the remains of its planet, pointing into the sky and ready to depart. Last Horizon is a journey of second chances through an indifferent but hazardous universe, scavenging what you can to build a new world on Planet X. After the remaining survivor of a dead civilization leaves its desolate, broken planet, the only hope for survival is to find another home. It’s filled with planets and asteroids, black holes and stars, but without other people, it’s just a vast expanse of empty, albeit beautiful, scenery.
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