Signs of Life: thirteen years of Early Access, and a game that has finally finished growing

January 2014. Signs of Life enters Early Access on Steam, after going through Steam Greenlight, which half the readers of this article never knew.

November 2026. Version 1.0 comes out.

In between, almost thirteen years. The two developers at Sweet Dog Studios, Alex and Hayes, say the idea was born in 2011, one night playing Terraria 1.1 and thinking how cool it would be to make a sci-fi version with more story. Neither of them had ever finished a game. They finished this one.

Terraria with a plot

The lineage is obvious, and the game does not hide it: 2D platforming, a procedurally generated world, you dig, gather, build a base, craft armour, weapons and gadgets. You can play alone or in online co-op with friends.

What sets it apart is the premise. Your colony ship, the Hephaestus, never reaches its destination. You find yourself on Osiris with AGIS, an onboard digital companion of questionable reliability, and the question is not just how to survive but who lived here before you. You scan alien inscriptions, search abandoned facilities, follow clues through hand-built ruins set into the generated world.

The latest updates added Xenoid cities with families, archives to extract once you have mastered the language, and post-story colony management. The narrative side is real, and that is what many games in the genre lack.

The weight of the years

Thirteen years shows, too. The interface carries the mark of several eras of development, and getting into it takes an effort newer games have learned to spare you. The pixel art is pretty but it has an age. And some players never forgave the wait: of 721 reviews, 76% are positive, a decent score for a game that has lived through three generations of Steam.

For a newcomer, it is a very good sci-fi Terraria-like at 10.06 euros that tells a real story. For those who bought it in 2014, it is time to reinstall.

Were you one of the people who bought it back in 2014? Come and tell us on the InsertCoins Discord what the game looked like back then.