Moon Sweepers: cleaning the Moon sixteen-handed, on a budget that covered one toothbrush

The Moon is covered in dust.

The Lunar Surface Department, whose acronym is LSD and I do not believe for a second that is accidental, has sent you and your crew to clean it up.

Unfortunately, the budget only covered a toothbrush.

Out on 23 October. No score today.

What you do

You collect lunar dust. You sell it. You use the earnings to buy better tools and upgrade your equipment.

The studio sums up its own game with an honesty I admire: turning an underfunded cleanup mission into a growing operation, one painfully small brushstroke at a time.

You fill your storage, you deliver it to a depot, you launch shipments to get paid. Then you spend on new tools and increased carrying capacity, to take on bigger jobs between deliveries.

That is the classic collection loop, and it still works for the same reason: every upgrade removes an irritation you have just endured for twenty minutes.

The number that changes everything

Up to sixteen players in online co-op.

Sixteen. Not four, not six. Sixteen people on the same lunar surface.

The studio says you can spread out to cover more ground, or tackle the same area together, and that there is enough dust to keep everyone busy.

Then it adds the line that made me grin: whether everyone actually works is another matter.

That is exactly the subject. A sixteen-player collective labour game is not a cleaning game, it is a sociology experiment. There will be the people who organise zones, the people who deliver conscientiously, and the people who spend an hour jumping in low gravity.

And the game knows it, which is by far the best indication of its tone.

What I am watching

The upgrade curve. Everything rests on it. Starting with a toothbrush is an excellent joke, but the second brush has to arrive fast enough that the joke does not become the player's reality.

Managing sixteen people. Technically, that is a lot. Socially too. The best large-group co-op games provide organisational tools: marking a zone, flagging it as finished, seeing who is where. Without that, sixteen people clean the same crater three times.

And the reason to stay. A collection game holds as long as the thing collected changes in nature. If it is dust from start to finish, progression reduces to numbers.

What I like about this pitch is that it owns being ridiculous without being stupid.

Sending sixteen people to clean a celestial body with derisory equipment is a joke about public funding that stands up on its own. And it is exactly the sort of premise that produces memorable evenings, because the absurdity of the task licenses absurdity of behaviour.

Got a team of sixteen people available? That is already an achievement, come and recruit them on the InsertCoins Discord.