Maia - Indie Seen

Life as a Maian colonist is harsh and unforgiving. If that giant glove in the sky forgets about an atmosphere generator you'll be unconscious before you know it. As Maia has been available via Steam Early Access since early December (currently in version 0.39.1) it can also be very unforgiving on the person controlling said glove in sky - the player. If the number didn't give it away, Simon Roth still has lots of stuff to add and tinker with before Maia is ready for proper release.

The basics of Maia are simple. You build the colony up with various rooms and equipment with that hopes that your crew will survive and potentially prosper. Your trusted robot (why do we always trust robots in these situations, hasn't Hollywood taught us anything?) can decimate rock formations outside in a matter of seconds (for room to build out the base and minerals). It's Sims/Dungeon Keeper in space with plenty of quirks and amusing humour thrown in for good measure.

Maia has gone through both Kickstarter and Indiegogo and received a lot of attention and press (for your average indie title at any rate). So we were naturally curious to see how it played at this stage.

When you start up the game there's a brief tutorial that feels like a parody of a tutorial. Instead of presenting you with a step-by-step where you need to complete one step to reach the next, it's a series of long texts where you're given 15 seconds to try and accomplish the actions in between. Pro tip: [Ctrl+t] let's you skip out of it. Our next problem arrived when we realised our cursor (the giant glove) wasn't able to access the menu option at the bottom of the screen. A quick search later and we came up with the short cut keys. Not ideal for overview, but it's likely how you'd end up playing the game anyway.

Maia is the kind of game that prides itself in not holding you by the hand. It's easy to make a mistake, place a door in the wrong place or fail to realise that the workshop room you've just built and want to create a work bench it needs a door for your colonists to access said room. This version of the game is very light on feedback so you won't be told what you're doing wrong. Again we suspect this is partly by design. Maia wants to challenge you and wants to make it hard so that once you're doing well you've actually accomplished something. Then again, we wouldn't mind more feedback. In hour first hour we constructed difficult to navigate rooms - storage, hydroponics, research lab. And it was in the research labs where H. Jones met his demise (likely a result of lack of oxygen). What's even more sad is that he was trying to set up a research lab when research is yet to be implemented in the game. One small step...

It's probably a little early to get Maia if you're looking for a polished product to enjoy - you could say that you'll need to invest more into it than you're likely to get out of it at this point in time. But then again that is why Steam Early Access exists - so that people who have an interest can help developers by testing early versions and through feedback help guide the project on its path. Even in this early state it's easy to see it holds plenty of promise. There needs to be more direction and objectives, even if the free sandbox approach has its benefits.

Maia really comes across as a management game based on a 1960s sci-fi show. Some would argue that it looks a little bland design-wise, but that is perfectly in tune with what's being attempted here. As the core mechanics grow more solid we expect more character and atmosphere to be added - and while we won't play it again tomorrow, we're excited to boot it up again after a couple more updates to see what's new and how it's evolved.