EVERSPACE (now on Early Access, ARRP'ish) $

[getter77]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/396750/ $29.99 Win/Mac
https://everspace-game.com/

EVERSPACE™ is an action-focused single-player space shooter combining roguelike elements with top-notch visuals and a captivating non-linear story. It takes you on a challenging journey through an ever-changing, yet beautifully crafted universe full of surprises. Your skills, experience and talent for improvisation will be tested continuously while learning about your own existence through encounters with interesting characters, each having their own part of the puzzle to tell. Each run will be exciting as you will have to face completely new situations keeping each part of the game long-lasting and generating lots of individual, meaningful moments to experience. However, no matter how skilled a pilot you are, death is inevitable, but only the beginning of a much larger journey.

    Fight! Dash into exciting dogfights and experience furious space combat using a wide range of weaponry and devices.
    Craft! Use collected or mined resources to craft equipment and modifications for a much needed advantage or repair your ship's systems. Your choice.
    Loot! Collect blueprints for crafting and go on the hunt for exotic weaponry and equipment. You never know what drops next.
    Explore! Travel through huge procedurally generated levels with lots of hidden treasure and danger. A game of risk and reward awaits.
    Die! Giving in to the seductive embrace of death does not mean the end. Spend collected credits to unlock new perks and keep your blueprints to boost your chances for the next run.

Early Access Features

    Single player roguelike space shooter with persistent progression
    Vibrant art style with top-notch visuals featuring ultra-hires textures
    Rock solid 6DOF controls optimized for fast-paced space combat
    In-depth crafting and damage system

Upcoming Features

    Two additional player ships with different capabilities and starting gear
    Dynamic cockpit displays for all player ships
    Captivating non-linear story featuring interesting and thoughtfully designed characters
    Hardcore Mode with permadeath for die-hard roguelike fans
    VR support for oculus Rift and HTC Vive
    Supported languages: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Braz.), Russian, Spanish and Turkish

Why Early Access?
“The EVERSPACE™ Beta is already fully playable, balanced, and generally free of bugs. Over 10,000 players have been enjoying it since our Kickstarter in August 2015 and we believe we got a pretty solid space shooter in place already, but it is still lacking a few elements that we originally envisioned. Now, we would like to give everyone the opportunity to join in and get their hands on the game to help us create the best possible space shooter for you.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
“Featuring the scope that we promised in our Kickstarter, we plan to release the full version some time in Q1 2017. Still, unexpected hurdles might occur during ongoing development or some ideas we had in mind might turn out to be not so good after all making us change the direction, postpone promised features or even drop them entirely.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“Over the next months, we will gather feedback from our community and work with you to improve EVERSPACE™ wherever reasonable based on the budget and the resources at our disposal. Bare in mind that we are a fairly small team of 12 developers. We have been working together on space shooters for over ten years but major additions like real-time multiplayer simply are out of scope, at least for the time being.

These are the features that we plan to add over the next few months:

    Two additional player ships with different capabilities and starting gear
    Dynamic cockpit displays for all player ships
    A captivating non-linear fully voice-acted story featuring interesting and thoughtfully designed characters
    Hardcore Mode with permadeath for die-hard roguelike fans
    VR-Support for oculus Rift and HTC Vive

”
What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“The Early Access version of EVERSPACE™ is based on the Beta which was released on July 29, 2016. Since then, we have fixed most of the bugs reported by our backers, did some tweaks and added a few new features. The most notable changes since Beta are a more challenging boss fight, introduction of some voice-acted events as well as improved overall balancing. You can find the complete changelog on our forums:
https://forum.everspace-game.com”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
“We plan to gradually raise the price as we ship new content and features.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
“We have been working closely with our fans since our Kickstarter in August 2015 and we will continue to do so. Just to give you an idea, the Early Access version comes with over 250 new features, tweaks and and bug fixes, largely based on community feedback since the initial Alpha release. You can follow the discussions on our forums and we would like to invite you to contribute as well:
https://forum.everspace-game.com”

A stunning aesthetic looker, and close enough for that vaunted ARRP'ish 2016 incidental designation.      Quite possibly the new high bar for Roguelike doings woven into such ridiculous visual spectacle.   

[Zireael]

I was interested until I saw the price tag. EA games are sometimes pricier than finished games - I heard tell of an EA game priced at $100 - while it should be the other way around. Not only we're effectively beta-testing, we shouldn't have to shell out on unfinished products. (That's why so many roguelikes, which are often "not finished" always, used to be free)

[getter77]

The price tag is definitely a bit unusual, though I suppose what they've billed as Early Access would in this specific case of the way they've done it more traditionally count as something of a "Late Beta" instead of an early alpha.  IIRC, albeit vaguely, Kickstarter backers got in at a much lower rate---not unlikely that this phase of pricing is to tip the hat towards the risk they took all those months ago as that's something of a trend in the KS to Steam life cycle of late.

An unorthodox situation, but that's how it goes with the advent of KS mixing things up that allows for crazy projects like these to at least have a shot at running their race that they'd have likely not had otherwise.