Hardspace: Shipbreaker is more than happy to let you die in a fire

In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, so much of your workaday life is going to be nothing but steel geometry. You'll get your work orders, head out to a job site, and start cutting—cutting up salvage at the decommissioned spacecraft and orbital structures, and cutting down the insurmountable number of zeroes in your debt to the company you work for. It's all tackled with the hyper-corporate deadpan sense of humor that worked in games like The Outer Worlds, too. Here, the cold voice of the company is all the more detached-sounding since the tutorial, basically, is being delivered by female Speak & Spell auto-operator voice.

This video's topic covers fire. Fire is bad in your job. And Hardspace even does an interesting job of depicting how fire behaves in space. In zero gravity, the stuff kind of burns in a ball, consuming its fuel load in every direction; not just having flames lick upwards like they do here on Earth. Either way, since Hardspace hasn't introduced some Geiger-esque alien enemy for your to xeno-blast into smithereens, you may consider this your formal introduction to the bad guy. I mean, aside from the corporation you had to sell your soul to for nothing but the acquisition of more debt. But besides the corporation, fire is probably going to be the number one reason you die and have to get cloned and sent out to the job site again, costing the company more time, energy, and resources. Just a guess, but that'll probably come out of your paycheck, too.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker goes into Steam Early Access on June 16.