I love games like this, with intricate systems and zero hand-holding, where learning and discovering how the game works and how to progress is part of the journey and fun. You are not just a rat in a maze following breadcumbs to reach a goal. The game respects your intellect and intelligence.

Gonna give you two examples:
- Ship upgrades work more like the way you like to fly your ship and play the game instead of plain upgrades and stats increase.
- How do you wanna take each dive: you wanna do a fast dive, where you try to take the most amount of minerals regardless how much they worth - or at least in a minimum price range - or you wanna take your sweet time and hunt for those valuables rocks and enjoy the inertia while floating in the emptiness of space, maybe listening to your favorite Spotify playlist, or podcast, checking other ship signals and hailing them for possible job opportunities, and so on.

And the game is very open ended: you make your own goals. There are no quests-list or things you need to do in order to progress: launch the game, mine for X amount of hours, do one or two dives, save money for that sweet looking ship or to improve your current ship's equipment, hire better and more experienced crew members, choose your favorite HUD style, so on.

Can't recommend it enough if that's your type of game!

The game is a bit overwhelming at first, then turns in a both athmospheric and precision requirering space simulator.

If you played other realistic space simulators before, like Kerbal Space Program, you will quickly feel at home. But keep in mind, the game will not hold your hand. Informations are present if you know how to look for them, interpret them and how to use them.

For me that's a great game and I keep coming back to it.

Good lord, this is worth so much more then ten bucks.

I was tentative on this purchase - I do have a love for hard sci-fi gaming in general, the more plausible and grounded the better, but in my experience, the price you pay is in gameplay. Terrible UI, unintuitive controls, more menus then you can shake a stick at - I normally dread trying out these titles, no matter how good the premise is, because I expect to get drubbed senseless by all the things I need to play the game before I can even touch the core gameplay loop.

I was stunned at just how much Rings of Saturn exceeded my expectations.

The autopilot, if you want to use it, does the vast majority of heavy lifting for the necessary high-precision maneuvers for navigating the Rings. You want to match velocity to something? Left click. You want to go somewhere? Left click that somewhere. You want to brake? Hit X - The autopilot will slow you to a (Relative - This is space, after all!) stop. You want to chase that chunk of high-value ore and increase your speed to overtake it at a leisurely 2 m/s? Left click, drag your mouse a little so the autopilot aims 'past' the object in question.

That's it.

And because of this one absolutely beautiful quality of life feature, you can really relish in the simulation aspects without being (as) terrorized by it in doing the most basic element of interacting with your environment. Right now, as I write this review, every time I engage forward thrust, my ship veers to the side, unbalanced by the cargo container I have attached to my low-stress hardpoint. This would be *incredibly* annoying if I had to manually pilot for every single maneuver, but instead it's a neat part of the physics simulation.

I could talk about the incredible depth of being able to modify even your starting ship, the plausible (and awesome) propulsion concepts that, fingers crossed, we might see in practice in 20-30 years, the fact that you can totally change your playstyle with in-situ ore refining and propellant processing, your ability to launch drones to do all the close-up mining, the ability to sit on ore and wait for good prices, or the ability to amass a mining fleet, but I don't have nearly enough playtime to do all of that justice.

I'm pretty sure I will sooner rather then later, though. Who needs sleep, anyway.

Shout-out to the devs: You should be proud of the game you made. Rings of Saturn is expectation-defying and fantastic. I really can't put it any other way.

A help window in game that explains some of the mechanics would be great. but otherwise i love the realism of this game, 8/10

This game scratches my space autism so hard i love it

Visually simplistic, mechanically complex. Simulating things that matter without making realism too frustrating

awesome game, difficult to get used to at the start but a very chill game to play

HOLY CRAP
This game is amazing, I love it, I'm pretty new to playing but I've had so much fun. Gives strong The Expanse vibes, I'm very experienced with Kerbal Space Program so it wasn't too much of a learning curve, but still there was a lot to learn. I love the physics system, compared to so much Sci-fi media where ships 'point and go' and never have to worry about heat radiation, or change in velocity limits.

The game is moderately hard, and I could especially see people finding it difficult for people who don't already play something like KSP+RSS/Principia ... My one complaint is the ability to fully turn off autopilot, I got the 'Driving Stick' achievement in 15 minutes of playtime, I like finicky af controls and I find it especially annoying when autopilot kicks in when you highlight an asteroid and you can't even cleanly manage velocity.

Very fun game though, I got it on sale but if you like hardcore space sims, I 1,000% recommend it!

POLAND FINALLY CAN INTO SPACE!

But seriously, this game is a must buy if you like space and aren't afraid of a small bit of learning curve.
The game has only two downsides. The first is that with more content it could become so much more than space mining simulator. That doesn't mean that this game lacks content - after 20 hours I still have many things to do. The game is dirt cheap but still has more content than lots of games that cost like 4 or 5 times more.
BTW the devs deserve praise because they released free demo which is literally full unrestricted version of the game.
The second downside is mediocre HUD design. There are many HUD styles in the game but none of them are easy to read, From UX design perspective those designs are poor. This isn't a big issue, you just have to take some time to learn where and how to look for info you need, but still, it could be improved.

Best space mining game ever, I love it.

great game for the space mining hyper nerd, like me