I get rather longwinded. So if you were interested in just the short & sweet version of my thoughts on Space Kraken, you can see me gush here:
This game has occupied my mind since we started messing with it. It’s got everything you want in a solo rpg, plus multiple ways to play with other people. There’s strong emergent narrative generated by the gameplay, there’s just enough pre-scripted narrative with some CYOA elements to drive the story (and it changes every playthrough!). There’s 3 separate combat systems for space battles, crew fighting on the ground (during location exploration), and boarding parties (during space battles) and they all work well and feel tactical (boarding battles are much lighter but to be fair they are a subset of rules within spaceship combat). There is so much game in the core box it’s hard to believe this was all made by a solo dev. And then expansions that add so much more variability and potential playstyles on top of that already rich base game. If you’re looking for a tabletop RPG experience in a box and without a GM this is as close to flawless as I’ve ever seen anyone actually get. Often these sorts of games feel like they break down into mechanical repetition and you risk losing the story to the tables and procedures. Or they go the other way and you get a ton of story with unsatisfactory gameplay. Or maybe once you look under the hood at the engine driving the game you think, “Oh, is that all?” But Space Kraken is hitting the perfect balance between mechanics & narrative. And when I peer at the engine, I’m awed at how it was put together. The world feels alive, dangerous, and full of wonder. You could tell me this game was a classic text-based & ASCII graphic space sim roguelike for PC in the 90s and that would make sense to me.
If these sort of games are up your alley then I recommend giving it a go. It’s got a lot of rules, but if you can hold D&D 5e in your head this shouldn’t be a challenge. I’m just absolutely blown away by the scope of this game and how well it manages to work. And it does it without using minis and while staying lighter than your average skirmish game. It gives an experience that so many others have attempted to offer, but I can’t think of another game that hits all these aspects so well while never requiring more than some notes on a few pages. In a way, this is the Star Trek game I’ve been waiting decades for someone to make. And I feel like I could get an insane amount of incredibly joyful playtime out of this game. Seriously, my wife and I spent Sunday shushing our teens and waving them away when they tried to interrupt our gameplay. This game makes me a worse parent! It’s that good.