Astronaut:
The Best

Astronaut: The Best (2023) is a team management game where you coach a cohort of dead-beats to become great astronauts for your Soviet-style nation. Play involves completing minigames, managing your team's stats and choosing dialogue options. It's unique because it combines nerdy interstellar mishaps and classic management simulation gameplay.

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You play as the new director of a national space academy where you help cadets avoid disaster and pass funny challenges. You recruit characters, strengthen their abilities through minigames and chance, and try to get results for the High Priests. Managing your money wisely is important since going bust can mean mission failure.

As you progress, pandering to your nation's leaders becomes even more important since your revenue depends on how much they like you. This can be aided by casting spells and performing rituals at the right time, but a wrongly placed spell can cause even more calamity. Over time, hidden characteristics of your astronauts are revealed, with each space cadet gaining various traits that can either help or harm your hopes of success.

This results in a bizarre management game where failure is fun. Much of the enjoyment is found in the quirky outcomes and random catastrophic events that happen to you and your astronaut hopefuls.

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Astronaut: The Best 11 days ago. It was re-examined by Joe Eaton and updated yesterday.