Lost Nova Review

Lost Nova is such an addictive and fun game that it is the best indie game of 2022 that is already released in my opinion. Completion takes around 7h and the game has no missable achievements.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: Around 7 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: I wrote this achievement guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: One is a little bit grindy
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Lost Nova is an amazing game! It looks so good and the gameplay is so addictive that I had a very hard time putting the game down. In some games, the gameplay is just so addictive, and that is the case here. Collecting resources is just so much fun. I have been thinking about why this is the case, as in a lot of other cases it can be boring, but I think the effortless method in which you can farm the resources is a big part of it. Also, the animations for collecting them and restoring them in your ship feel rewarding. Both picking them up and restoring them goes automatically, to make it more effortless. How fast you can collect them and how many will drop increases while playing the game and upgrading your items, to make it even more rewarding.

This game reminds me a lot of “Forager“, for which the developer Jon Nielsen did the artwork. It also reminds me of “Merchant of the Skies” with how NPCs request items and you’ll get them from another place, and it reminds me of “Cozy Grove” with finding items on the map. 3 Good games in my book, but I think I would even rate this game higher!

I have encountered 2 small problems while playing the game, the first one is not really a problem but might be confusing at first: when you start the game, there will a screen pop up and that will freeze up, this is loading the game but that window just acting a bit weird. Just give it time and the game will start. The other thing is that Lost Nova does not always recognize my (XBOX) controller. Sometimes I had to start up the game again for it to recognize that I use my controller which was already connected through a wire. This even happened when starting the game through the big picture mode with a controller so that I don’t use a mouse during starting the game and maybe not confuse the game? Sometimes the controller didn’t work in the main menu but when loading my save it worked, other times even then it didn’t work and I had to restart the game to get it working.

One other small quirk that I want to share is that jumping with a controller takes time to get used to. The button combination is a bit weird and in my opinion the cursor for jumping moves too fast. I would love to see it slow down so you don’t move it on accident when pressing the jump button.

These are in my opinion only small things and the game is so amazing that I can easily forgive those things and just enjoy the game.

Hunting down all the achievements will take around 7h. Maybe even shorter if you just keep in the back of your mind that you never have enough cores, and do everything on your way to collect more of them. So keep planting stuff to convert them to cores, keep fishing and jumping on rubble, stuff like that. There is one achievement that is a bit grindy and requires you to buy a very expensive item. If you doubt if you already got past this point, you for sure haven’t, because then you wouldn’t doubt it. Gladly there are a lot of ways to collect cores (the most important currency in this game) and if you just keep up with it while playing through the game the grind isn’t that big at the end.

For another achievement you want to pet every bunny you see, so try to do that also while playing through the game, as it is a lot easier to do that while you encounter them than it is to go back and pet them all afterward, but there aren’t that many, so going back isn’t a problem.

Lost Nova has no hardcore or missable achievements, just an achievement list as I like them. Do a lot of different stuff while playing the game and you’ll already get most of them. If you missed something when finished, you can easily look up what you need to do for that last one and just do it.

All in all Lost nova is just an amazing and addictive indie game. It is still quite early in 2022 (May when writing this) but so far this is my favorite game that was released this year! There are some games coming out this year that I have high expectations of, but I’m pretty sure this will end up in my personal top 10, maybe even top 5 of 2022.

This review for Lost Nova was written on 11 May 2022, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 18 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.