You begin with a small budget to equip your ship and train your crew. These are tough initial choices. Should you add weapons and shields or train your Science Officer to scan planets accurately? There's no hand-holding here: leave the star port without cargo pods and you have cut yourself off from much of the revenue-generating opportunities in the game.

Once ready, you can open the ship's galactic map. It's awash in nebulae, worm holes, hundreds of stars and over 800 procedurally generated planets waiting to be explored, making one feel very small and alone in this sea of opportunity. Your only limitation is fuel.

The ship is easily piloted by the cursor/numpad keys, no pesky Newtonian physics to deal with. Further actions are spread across your officers, in a simple and immersive UI – e.g. to heal a crew member, select the Doctor, open its menu and choose the Treat option.

Once you reach a planet, you can order your Science Officer to scan it, and based on his skill you will see important details like gravity and average temperature. Should you decide to land, simply select a landing area and confirm. The game will then render a first-person landing into the exact point you selected – quite an impressive feature at the time!

The crew will then disembark into a tank-like rover and start exploring the procedurally generated surface, using a scanner and your intuition in search of resources. Where do you go? Anywhere you please! But don't stray too far from the ship, as your rover's fuel won't last long. This creates some of the most stressful risk/reward decisions in gaming: to travel just a wee bit further to get some valuable mineral or alien creature, or head back to the ship.

Mistakes are deadly. Permadeath means not only does your intrepid crew dies a horrible death, but the game bounces out to DOS and deletes your save file.