Seedship is an absolutely wonderful game, but between its complex moral decisions, risks and rewards, and deceptively simple gameplay, my favorite thing has to be how the game connects you to the story.
In the context of the game, you are an AI created to find a second home for humanity, and to think like a human. At first this seemed like a cute way of putting the player into the game, but the more I played the more I realized it was true. To an AI, and to me as a player, the colonists were just numbers on a screen. I wanted them to survive and thrive, yes, but in the end my mission was to win the game. I made some decisions based on human biases, but they weren’t clouded by fear or panic or loneliness like they would if they were made by an actual member of the crew. I commanded a faceless army of sleeping colonists, and whether or not they succeeded was my priority, yes, but it didn’t make me cry myself to sleep because I’d killed hundreds of colonists.
The game truly does make you feel like the AI in charge, and that’s just one of the beautiful things about the story. I highly recommend this game, which can deliver a beautiful, heartfelt sci-fi narrative in just a few minutes with a few paragraphs of text.