About This Demo

The system is dark. You are the spark.

The sun went out. The planets are still there, cold and empty, and one thing is still awake: P.O.R.T.I.A., the caretaker intelligence, who has kept the lights off and the logs open for a very long time. You are the first thing to answer her in a hundred thousand years.

What you do

• Choose your star's color, then light it.

• Catch the stars that drift in. Catch several in a row and they pay more.

• Buy Forces in the Array to make the light work harder.

• Raise Mercury, Venus and Earth in the Nurture Console, and keep the rocks off them.

• When the star is spent, Reignite. Your worlds stay. The light comes back stronger.

How long it is

The first Reignite comes at about twenty minutes if you stay at the console, and the demo ends there. The game runs while you are away, so you can also light it, leave it, and come back to a fuller sky.

What P.O.R.T.I.A. brings

She talks. She remembers what was lost, notices what you do, and tells you her own story in transmissions as you go. The demo carries the first chapter of her novella and the first of the cipher puzzles she leaves for you.

Also in the room

A playable piano. A harmonograph that draws your worlds' orbital resonances. Prime spirals, a double pendulum, and a tape deck with her music on it. None of it is required. All of it is there.

What waits in the full game

The outer system, from the belt to the edge. Eight more chapters of the novella. Every generation past the first, with the Works, the dilemmas, and fifty three more themes for the console.

Before you start

Stellar Nursery plays best with a mouse. The beam that defends your worlds is a hold and release on the right button, and the vacuum wants a hand that can move fast.