TAXINAUT

Just started a new play-through (well, I'm 40 hours into it already :-) ) with 1.0. If I just watched the videos I would think this is not a game for me. But with 184 hours logged, that's clearly not the case!

For me, this game has the charm and engaging character of the Zelda series. Obviously it's a very different setting and some aspects of the stories are very mildly adult themed. You are a space taxi driver in an enormous galaxy with more stars and planets than you will ever visit. Some of the places you go are seedy, with thugs, prostitutes, and drug dealers. But others are friendly and whimsical.

One of the best aspects of the game is that you can pretty much choose your playing style - you are not forced into combat with NPC's - you can simply not go to dangerous places. You can be an explorer and travel far from your home base, taking fares as you go to earn "vudu," the game's currency. You can build your character and taxi with skills and capabilities. And when you want to return home, very early in your gameplay you will obtain the ability to warp back there effortlessly. You don't have to spend hours retracing your steps to get home and do something different for a change.

There are multiple storylines you can follow - or ignore. They are quirky, amusing and generally teach you something new about the game. They can help you discover useful locations you will visit again and again long after the end of the storyline.

I get a kick out of the names of places and NPC's. Some are jumbles of consonants, but many are clever and reference something in another game or the real world, or just bring a smile to your face if you like a slightly warped sense of humor :) .

The music is simple but appropriate and a definite collection of ear worms. They are playing in my head hours after shutting down the game. If you'd rather play in silence or with your own tunes, you can set music volume to 0.

The save system is easy and quite liberal. You can choose to make it more punishing, but at the easiest level you can save at many locations throughout the game, or simply quit the game at any point to create a save file, and on restarting - which is fast - load that save or an earlier one. I generally don't need to do this, there are enough places like banks and motels/hotels that let you save.

The author goes by Mosgrom on Discord and is very responsive and friendly.

This game is a gem and deserves a much wider audience than it has. Give it a try!

Excellent game! Under the nice old-school graphics is a deep taxi game in an insanely vast universe. Wonderful game both if you like optimizing things (due to the plethora of upgrades, systems, vehicles) or just to zone out a bit while playing. Two thumbs up!

Lovely little taxi driver in space sim. Takes place in a massive galaxy with considerable depth of story and lore despite its simple presentation. Excellent for casually playing with one hand on the mouse and the other holding a chilled beverage.

This game scratches my Crazy Taxi and X4 itch perfectly. I love how casual the game is when I want it to be.

So I picked this up last night because the premise looked very appealing. I was not disappointed. Its a very chill game where you take on the role as a planetary taxi driver with the ability of also traveling off planet and interstellar travel. You collect fairs and buy new ships and upgrade them. There are tons of planets and galaxies and tons of upgrades and items to use. There is also some very nice music that plays over the ships radio. There is a lot of dialog with passengers and over the radio. You also have to sleep and eat and pay rent but its not like a survival game that can be stressful, its very chill. It really takes me back to games like "Starflight" on Sega Genesis or PC and Star Control 1-2. Its an awesome retro inspired game and the developer intends to keep adding to it for many years to come if it sells decently. Its very playable now. Big thumbs up.

Most of the time it's a chill experience. But there's also combat and some places are more stressful than others. Either way, I'm enjoying the game quite a bit. I like the artstyle, and it's a fairly open-ended experience. It's deeper than it looks on the surface, and it feels pretty unique.
It is not for everyone. It's a very slow game, one where you've gotta take your time. But if a nice open-ended slow burn experience is what you're after, TAXINAUT is a very good choice in my opinion.

In my opinion Taxinaut is at the same time the dumbest and smartest game there is. At it's core we are talking about almost an arcadic like top-down "try not to hit obstacles while trying to hit waypoints" game. Picture Asteroids merged with stuff from Frogger, Caves of Qud, Elite and Elden Ring. You have your taxi, you fly it through places and try to avoid hitting other vehicles or whatever the flying things are, while also exploring places to get to know way points where you can take your customers. You can also pick customers and if they happen to know exactly where they are going, take them on board, try not to hit things and once you make it the the place, you'll make some money. Rinse and repeat to learn besides more places also about equipment, news, weird temples and other utterly strange aspects of the world you are in. Then you have some "quests", where you need to find out where the hell the you need to go, to progress the quest. Which yes, is again about going somewhere and trying to avoid to hit things while flying. Plain and simple.
I'd say by the time I took a passanger to some distant system and we had to fly through a overly crowded customs check to be allowed to get the weird Cthulhu like customer to the destination, I began to understand the depth of this game. Yes, it 99,99999% about driving and avoiding ♥♥♥♥ - with some systems / planets being like seriously and brutally difficult places to move through, but maaan that can be so addictive that you just just keep on doing it over and over again until you succeed. About the world building yes... We are not talking about world building, it's a universe! Your starting location is just one planet in a system, in a whole freakin universe which again are filled with systems, planets and more weird ♥♥♥♥ to explore.
Did I say that the visuals you probably saw in the screenshots above are quite unique? No? Well - they are. Its strange, its colorful, its simplistic - someone could even say ugly, but try flying through these viewswith the extremely odd soundtrack playing in the background and you kind of sink yourself complelety into this strangeness and find absolutely nothing strange at all. Not even when your ride robbs you of all your hard earned money, or even kills you. Kind of sad, but it happens in this world and after loading your last save you know not to take customers who have weapons and look shady. Live and learn, live and learn.
There is a ton of things in the UI that would improve the user experience / lower the learning curve. Things like, automatic removal of duplicate bookmarks, or indication in a dialog option if/when you already know the answer, or make it more clear how far you are from your destination. Yep yep, but then again... in this game I kind of expect everything to be weird, hard and cumbersome. It fits the overall atmosphere - even supports it and makes it alive and addictive - you just want to explore the locations, the mechanics and so forth. It just works very very well
Like said, this is the smartest and dumbest game I've ever played and I 100% recommend to try this out