- Alternate Character Interpretation: The Marduk Council in general and Vanir Dolos in particular are ripe for this, regarding just how well-intentioned their motives are and how far they are willing to go to achieve their ends.
- Awesome Music: Guillaume David tops his previous outstanding work for Mechanicus to deliver a soundtrack that is stellar in more ways than one. Ranging from meditative to pounding and uplifitng, it perfectly conveys the vastness of space, the pride and grandeur of the DOLOS's mission and the determination of its participants as well as the pressure to see it through once your mission turns from "explore the neighbouring star system" to "save what's left of the humanity from dying out".
- Fake Difficulty: A relatively common complaint is the harshness of the game's logistical elements making it difficult to adapt well-established sectors against any new challenge, and much of the game's challenge being around Trial-and-Error Gameplay. To mitigate this, the game has a dedicated button in the main menu to reload the current chapter from the start.
- Game Breaking Bugs: There are a few ways to accidentally get stuck because of flawed UI.
- If you switch stockpiles around a lot, you might suddenly discover that resources aren't transferring between sectors. This is disastrous, because those include short-leash resources like the next day's food or the metal needed to hold the hull together! You checked and double-checked - there are connections between sectors, the settings look right... you triple check but the Tiqqun is still falling apart! Game over! The answer is that if any sector has a checkbox next to it when there are no stockpiles for that resource (because there were, but you changed the resource around), then resource transfer won't work for *any sector*, for that resource, until you uncheck the sectors with no stockpiles.
- If you deconstruct a science ship from a docking bay while it's waiting for a cargo ship that's loading at that docking bay, you get stuck: The science ship is first in line, so the cargo ship is waiting for it to be disassembled before it can load. But the science ship won't leave the planet without the cargo ship delivering resources! This can cost you valuable science (and ships?) earlier in the game and prevent you from finishing the game in the alternate ending! The solution is to be VERY careful about scrapping science ships!
- Esoteric Happy Ending: Both endings have shades of this. The Remus ending has your crew joining the Ashtangites and living in a new genetic paradise, but you've followed the plan of DOLOS, the same people who destroyed Earth and killed billions. Not to mention the Ashtangites have no form of defense against any future threats like the Piranesi. The Romulus ending allows you to break free of DOLOS control, but your colonists are still going to have it rough for a while on this marginally-livable world, and your crew have been denied the opportunity to live easier lives on Remus. In both cases the Tiqqun that you've labored so hard to maintain and make sustainable is destroyed to kill the Piranesi, and in the latter ending the player character is Killed Off for Real - unless you had the foresight all the way back in Chapter 2 to save a copy of the Protagoras P.A.
- Genius Bonus: Giovanni Battista's consciousness ends up piloting a ship named the the Piranesi
. - Harsher in Hindsight: Vanir Dolos is a Tech Bro, fabulously wealthy, riding on his personal brand, full of himself and lofty visions for humanity's future. His groundbreaking FTL drive shatters the Moon, leading to the destruction of all life on Earth. BUT THEN, in the ending his recorded message says he discovered the Moon's destruction was inevitable and no attempt to save humanity launched afterward would succeed, so he sent you and the Tiqqun during the only launch window humanity had to find a new home, as you've now done. It's an odd plot twist: The Tiqqun was built, crewed, and supplied for a quick pop to the next star over to try out this FTL thing, so expecting it to go on a starfaring odyssey is kinda like asking the Wright Flyer to make a transatlantic flight; Nobody on board the Tiqqun knew there was a habitable planet, they scavenged that information from wrecks of humanity's dregs who'd killed each other; Keeping the station from tearing itself apart was job #1 on board and everyone would've died if the journey had been one jump longer; Dolos didn't have to destroy the Moon to send the Tiqqun, he could've had the station back up a bit; The last-chance Tiqqun was beaten to its destination by a later expedition. The game was released in late 2022. Tech Bro antics since gained a darker, more bitter cast in the public eyenote that makes the plot twist less "odd" and more "just plain depressing." Was the Earth doomed at all? Or did Dolos get the notion from some whim or internet pundit, and destroyed the world thanks to being too rich for reality checks? Was he aware he was sacrificing the Earth for a rickety death trap, or did he think his ship was a kick-ass hot rod? Especially since the flavor text suggests Dolos once survived an industrial explosion, and he and those closest to him named this the Echo of the Future and gave it great importance.
- It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Reviews often lament that the high difficulty curve turns people off what would otherwise be a fascinating hard sci-fi narrative. A more forgiving difficulty setting was eventually patched in.
- Nightmare Fuel: The Lunaclysm. We only get glimpses of the aftermath, but anybody who's read Seveneves by Neal Stephenson has an inkling of how bad things got.
- Video Game Caring Potential: You can rescue every human you find who made it into a cryopod. Including your science teams who had to abandon ship and your failed colonization attempts. And even people from enemy factions. Then, when this causes friction with the crew, you can break up the fights and affirm that they are welcome.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Or you can abandon them all to die in space!
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