You can't do anything on one screen in Objects in Space. It's not a space game like Elite: Dangerous or Star Citizen, where you sit in a sleek cockpit with every control at your fingertips. In Objects in Space you have to get up and move around. The map is on one terminal, comms on another, emails another, battery management another, repairs another... It's as if you're flying an old submarine, where there are different panels and buttons for everything. Only here, you do it all alone.
There's tactility because of it. You make repairs by unscrewing panels, lifting the lid, swapping components, closing the lid, rescrewing the panel and reconnecting the component to see if it works again. You hear the clack of a keyboard while arrowing through the news or emails, echoing the noise your own PC keyboard is making. And you press big dramatic buttons to do big dramatic things, like put your ship into EmCon (emissions control) mode to make yourself as space-invisible as craft and components allow - shutting off engines, comms, thrusters, anything which could emit a scannable trace in the void. Even your music player.
It looks as retro as it sounds. You never see outside space-action in 3D, the way other games show it. Here, it unfolds as small pixelated blobs flying around a 2D map. What the outside of your ship looks like you can only imagine; all you ever see are interiors, which you move through one screen at a time - either on your ship or on the space stations you dock at for cargo, repairs, passengers or supplies. The characters you do see are starkly polygonal, pulled from an early era of 3D, and all the conversations you have - almost all of your interactions with the game, really - are handled chunky via old-school text.