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Holy shit Michel, I'm so glad my game meant so much to you! I had no idea it would impact anybody this deeply, but this is absolutely awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that – I can't say this without it sounding like a platitude, but seriously, it means a ton to me that you enjoyed it this much.

And thanks so much for the in-depth review, too. I agree that the in-game navigation is kind of iffy – that was largely a side effect of my inexperience with Twine. (I originally wanted to integrate a search bar like a real wiki would have, but couldn't figure out how to do that before the assignment was due.)  Talos Machine wound up being constrained to pretty much just a choose-your-own-adventure experience because of that. But I'm planning to expand upon this concept in the future (possibly a full release, but no promises!) and if I do, it'll definitely take your critique into account.

Again, thank you so much for this feedback – I can't reiterate that enough – and I hope you're doing well!

-- Aidan

(PS. A game with similar singularity sci-fi themes is Universal Paperclips, if you're interested.)

OK, I'm facepalming seeing that splash screen now that you mentioned it, lmao. As director I take full responsibility for that – most of the work on this was done in a three-week timespan, but that's the sort of thing I should have noticed when playtesting, then gone back in and fixed a long time ago. We'll probably release a small update soon with stuff like that sorted out – I can probably jump in and change that no problem.

EDIT: I tried making bigger changes when I did this and I'm not sure if I want to push out a big update or just revert back to a simple splash screen fix yet. Eventually some update will be uploaded, but I don't know when, depends how large it winds up being when we either upload it or scrap everything and just change the splash screen as originally intended lol.

Also, it's great to hear the evolving soundtrack had a visceral impact like that. I'll definitely keep that in mind for future games.

Your observations are pretty astute – we made Asteroids Inc. as a parable about the oil industry, and to a lesser extent corporations in general, so it's good to hear a lot of this came through in the game itself. I* can confirm that pretty much everything you wrote about here was by design.

For example, many oil companies' stock values are based on how much oil they have found, but they can never sell all of that or it'll be enough to destroy civilization several times over with global warming and whatnot. So the stockholders are investing in this "carbon bubble", as it's often called, even though it can never actually make them money in a practical sense. In Investors Inc. – erm, Asteroids Inc. – we designed the investment system to reflect this. Your business has a natural limit – number of asteroids and quality of the world, which actually gets destroyed here if you don't quit and close your business down – but the real money's in fooling the investors. So that's the sort of thing that guided the game design process, unconventional mechanics and all. 

If you have any more feedback about how Asteroids Inc. turned out, it'd be great to hear it so we can incorporate it into future games and projects. (But even if you don't, it means a lot just hearing what you said already, and knowing that you played the game through – even if, as you said, "the only winning move is not to play".)

*Aidan Andreasen, the game's designer, by the way.

https://reppo-games.itch.io/asteroids-inc