Astro Prospector and Messenger | Off the Radar

_{Astro Prospector | Reveal Trailer}

Available on: Steam, itch.io

Price: $4.99 USD, Demo available

Release date: July 14th, 2025

Developer, publisher: Incrementalist SpaceJazz

You know those games that just kind of come out of nowhere, and within 15 minutes you know that it could take over your entire evening? That kind of creeping, exciting dread that you know you should resist but give into anyway? For me, Astro Prospector was the most recent example of that experience. I tried its demo on a whim during Steam Next Fest earlier this year, and was hooked right away. That demo had its own progression system made specifically for it, and I was fiending for more, so I joined the game’s playtest before release just to get another taste. Before I knew it, the full game was out with much more to do in it. Simply put, I quite enjoy this game and think its perfect for anyone who just needs something addictive that can also be beaten within a few hours.

At its core, Astro Prospector is a simple game. A pretty manageable bullet hell where you control a spaceship, blasting coffee asteroids with a laser to collect resources all while dodging enemy spaceships from a rival corporation. You use the resources gained from blasting things to pieces to upgrade your ship, facilitating longer runs on a level-by-level basis to face harder and harder patterns of enemies and asteroids. As the developer name suggests, the expectation is that you’ll make incremental progress each time. Perhaps you won’t beat a level, but you may get just enough screws from enemy ships to nab an upgrade on your skill tree that greatly boosts your capabilities.

It’s the little wrinkles along the way that really took hold in my lizard brain. Soon “Focus Rings” get unlocked, spawning in set timed intervals, and flying through them gives you additional strength and other boosts during that run. Some upgrades also allow you to fire an additional laser for every set amount of Focus Rings that you fly through. So you get to a fun balancing act of focusing on asteroids, firing on enemy ships, dodging their bullets, keeping an eye out for each level’s boss to show up, all while looking around for the next ring that might give you the edge you need to push through that level. And if you don’t get through the level, you probably just got enough of the currency from those Rings to upgrade something else.

This is the game’s loop, and it truly is so simple. My impression of the final game is that it is tuned rather well, I only had one short stretch around the middle where it felt I was surviving for a decent amount of time without really getting anything useful to upgrade. However, again, the game is only around 4 hours long. There’s even a Steam Achievement for beating it in 3 and a half hours. So even that short stretch was maybe like, 8 minutes of a break from the constant dopamine hit.

The upgrades along the way are fun as well. Missiles that automatically hone in on enemies, “moons” that circle your ship and replenish a few seconds after impact with objects breaks them, turrets that “charge” as you stay within their radius and fire at things. There are then plenty of upgrades that enhance the efficiency and power of each additional weapon you can unlock, as well as base power upgrades. Simply put, if you like watching numbers go up but want to actually play a game while observing their rise, this is going to get its hooks in you.

For me, that was the most appealing part of this game. I’ve had my stints of idle games over the years, where you get incremental upgrades over time, but they are often ludicrously endless and the novelty does eventually wear off in them. So finding a similar addiction here with an actual fun game under it was great. Plus, it ends. I’ve reiterated that a bit now, but knowing there was an actual destination I was working toward with the upgrades instead of a mere “prestige” system to reset it all and do it again but harder was lovely. To the point that if they do decide to add one to this game down the road, I trust that they’ll find an engaging way to do it.

This isn’t a deep game to talk about, it’s pretty cut and dry. It’s well made, it’s addictive, and it knows when to wrap it up before it gets stale. For five bucks you can’t go wrong here unless you are adamantly against bullet hell games, but I promise that it’s incredibly approachable compared to how the genre’s most famous games tend to present themselves. Here, dying to stray bullets just means you get to come back and do it again but even stronger. And that’s pretty neat. That’s all I have to say, I think you should play it if you just need to feel addicted to a video game again.

Available on: https://messenger.abeto.co/

Price: Free

Release date: September 25th, 2025

Developer, publisher: Vicente Lucendo and Michael Sungaila, Abeto

I’m pulling a double feature here, since Messenger is a cute little browser game that slots in nicely as a bonus. I’d “finished” it within 15 minutes, so know that it’s no time sink by any stretch. It also plays on phone browsers, so give it a try on yours and see if it loads for you. In Messenger, you play a mail carrier who slept in and has 5 deliveries to make. You’ll run around a tiny, charming cel-shaded globe to find out who will give you the letters and who will be receiving them. Some townspeople are also scattered about with little bits of quirky dialog to enjoy.

It has a few little cute “moments” of discovery as well, depending on when you play you may realize that some of the people running around are actual other humans playing the game at the same time as you. You can communicate with them via little emoji emotes, but otherwise it’s just the novelty of a little shared space with others. I didn’t have any deep takeaways from Messenger, but I do value it as a neat little thing that does exactly what it sets out to do. Little experiences like this are increasingly rare in recent times on the internet, so I wanted to shout it out for you to poke at and appreciate.

‘Off The Radar’ is available on Beehiiv in text and audio form, on your podcast service of choice, and will be delivered early to my Patreon supporters when no embargoes are in the way. Speaking of, a special thanks to Adrian, Buckles Chucklo, Harry Baker, Hiro, James Boss, GoldStorm07, Svendelica, Jeet, TheCrazyEven, Patrick Thompson, and Cooking Mama for their support.