There's nothing quite so alluring as the prospect of interstellar travel, and of claiming one's destiny among the stars. Moons of Ardan is a city-building game with depth that belies its casual, accessible presentation, blending both city builder and management game themes to make it something akin to Factorio in space.
You play a lost group of aliens known as the Axonauts, who've crash-landed on a planet out in the depths of space. Your long-term mission is to rebuild your civilisation and reconnect with your homeworld. To do that, you must build a network of production chains of ever-increasing complexity.
Your immediate job is just to meet the needs of your citizens, but after that, you'll build the infrastructure necessary to explore the solar system in which you find yourself, before expanding and exploiting the resources of other planets as well. The demo features a rather small system of three planets, but excitingly it's simulated in real time, much like Kerbal Space Program. Efficiency, strong logistics, and a bit of forward planning are the key skills that will propel you through more and more production chains, with the lure of getting out to space always tempting you into the long sessions that can pass in the blink of an eye in the best of this genre.