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A dream among the stars — or a nightmare.
Released 25 Jun 2026
A dream among the stars — or a nightmare. 1,000 colonists in the dark between stars. Every pragmatic decision rewrites who they are. Discover what your choices mean for humanity, for better or worse.
Developed by Garan Lorn · Published by Selenodrome
Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift has about 152 positive and 29 negative player reviews out of a total 181. We'll add a detailed breakdown here when there are more reviews.
A dream among the stars — or a nightmare.
1,000 colonists. One ship. A destination that may be fifty years away — or centuries. Some will land. Some will be born, age, and die in the dark between stars without ever knowing if the mission succeeded.
Inspired by John Ayliff's Seedship, Dead Reckoning is a game about the slow, invisible erosion of civilization across generations. Every decision you make is defensible in the moment. The horror is retroactive.
Manage food, power, and hull integrity across centuries of deep space. Navigate crises, uprisings, and failures that compound silently into irreversible outcomes. The crew that arrives — if they arrive — may not remember where they came from, what they believed, or what it means to be human. A society of clones. A ship that has become a cathedral. An AI that no longer needs to ask permission.
Five forces reshape your colony across generations: genetic drift, ideological fracture, AI integration, technological regression, and class stratification. Every choice nudges the needle. None of them reset. The faction that rises in year 200 was built from decisions you made in year 40.
Settlement. Extinction. Digital transcendence. A ship that turns back. A crew that ascends without landing. Every run tells a different story. What reaches that planet is the sum of everything you did — and didn't do — across centuries in the dark.
You may not recognize it. You may not want to.
| Platforms | Windows, Linux |
|---|---|
| Achievements | 27 |
| Age ratings |
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| Controller required | No |
| Demo | View demo on Steam |
| AI disclosure | Dead Reckoning is written, and designed by one person. I want to be precise about where AI tools do and don't appear in it.Creative content — no generative AI. All writing, narrative, and design is mine. I've worked as a technical writer for twelve years; the game's voice is my own. All art and visual assets are hand-made or licensed from named human artists. All music and sound effects are licensed from named human creators (public domain / Creative Commons) — none of it is AI-generated. This is a hard line and I intend to keep it.Development & release tooling — where AI assists. I use AI in the engineering and release pipeline only, never to author the game itself:- Coding assistance while writing the game's GDScript.- An automated QA/test harness that plays the simulation thousands of times to catch crashes and balance regressions.- Assistance in building linters (Valve YAML sheets) that check the project's text.- Drafting and summarizing the release notes (patch notes) from the project's changelog.None of this creates any of the writing, art, audio, or design inside the game.Localization. The four translations (German, French, Italian, Spanish) are machine-translated by DeepL from my English source, with automated guards that fall back to English wherever a translation would break. This is an accessibility vs. quality decision, and I decided on the former. Proper localizations are planned and will be contracted out if the budget allows. |
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| Website | Official website |
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