Beyond These Stars preview: A city-builder that’s about listening

It was Thursday evening when I met Sam and Anna Barham, the two co-founders of Balancing Monkey Games, at the New Zealand booth in Gamescom’s B2B area to speak about Beyond These Stars, their upcoming city-builder. I mention the time, because anyone who’s ever been around the international hall in this window will know that it’s essentially one big party. France and Quebec had already brought out the champagne, drawing an exhausted – and thirsty – crowd around their nearby booths, giving the whole area the feel of a festival. 

All that to say: If your product isn’t engaging, the circumstances pretty much equal an early knock-out, because it was a long day and those glasses of bubbly freshness look enticing.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Beyond These Stars has everything a city-builder fan like myself could desire. First, of course, its twist: Your main city is built on the back of a massive space whale called Kewa, which comes with several implications. One of these is that you’re stuck on the same… boat? That doesn’t sound right, but you know what I’m getting at: You’re having to compromise, indeed, empathize with this enormous being for your own benefit.

Most city-builders are about ruthlessly exploiting whatever resources and space you find, but Beyond These Stars requires a little more thought. If your industry doesn’t care about proper safety regulations and waste management, the resulting toxification will hurt Kewa and lower their trust in you. Why should I care, you ask? I repeat: Your main city is on Kewa’s back. A space whale. In space. Where the space whale controls the movement.

If Kewa doesn’t particularly care about you – a natural consequence of trying to poison them – they might set course into cold deep space without warning, leaving your city to freeze. It’s all a give-and-take with Kewa. The creature is happy to follow commands if they trust you, such as flying to a specific star system on the galaxy map as quickly as possible. If they don’t trust you, well, they’ll still get you there… eventually, and on a route of their own choice that may or may not be healthy for your citizens.

See, Kewa has needs. They need to eat asteroids from time to time or cool down their body. As long as you oblige them by choosing appropriate routes, giving them space to fulfill those needs as you travel, you’ll get along splendidly. The same goes for terraforming Kewa’s back and exploiting the raw materials you find there. It’s important to maintain that equilibrium.

But that’s where the second cool aspect about Beyond These Stars comes into play: You can actually colonize the worlds you pass by. Setting up outposts is expensive and comes with risks, but once you’ve got a stable colony going, it can easily produce goods and resources for the main city, allowing you to forgo exploiting raw materials on Kewa. In this way, you slowly create a galactic trade network and production chain on top of the logistics of each individual city and outpost — obviously, another big plus for any genre enthusiast.

Balancing Monkey Games put a lot of effort into making the UI as useful and accessible as possible. For example, when sending off a transport to settle a planet, you can simply select future buildings you’d like to construct there, and the ship will automatically load the resources needed for the task, which is a really neat idea.

There’s much to discover in the universe — technologies to research, alien civilizations to engage with, and a galaxy-spanning narrative to uncover. It’s also packed with humor and light-hearted moments thanks to the creative dialog written for the Peeps, the inhabitants of Kewa you’re taking care of.

Balancing Monkey Games and Hooded Horse’s Beyond These Stars is set to be released for PC later in 2025.

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