SPACEPLAN, I always wanted you to go, into SPACEPLAN! Intergalactic drive. Ah, just a nod to one hit wonder band Babylon Zoo their with its song Spaceman. You had to be around in 1995 to get that.

But you don’t need to be in 1995 to play Jake Hollands’ SPACEPLAN, which is a unique and itsy-bitsy incremental clicker game.

It immediately became one our all-time favourite indie games through its heady mix of fast-paced clicking and idiosyncrasies. Don’t miss out on this, especially it had a gameplay overhaul in 2023 to make it more immersive.

SPACEPLAN is the Ultra-Addictive Minimalist Clicker (and it has spuds)

The game is by Jake Hollands, an indie developer based in Sheffield of England (as opposed to Sheffield on Jupiter).

SPACEPLAN is part of the clicker genre (or incremental games), where players perform really basic actions to participate.

Kind of like text adventure games, but this one has a banging soundtrack and nods to physics and The Martian’s obsession with spuds.

The experience is summarised on the official site like this:

“Use manual clicks and the passage of time to create and launch potato-based devices and probes from your nondescript satellite orbiting a mysterious planet.

Unlock the mysteries of the galaxy or just kill some time in what the astrophysics community is calling the ‘best narrative sci-fi clicker game of all times’.”

Basically, you’re deep in space and orbiting a mysterious red planet (no, it’s not Mars).

For reasons unexplained at first, you must repair sonar panels, make potatoes, and create spudnik satellites to generate watts.

You do that by clicking a button, although watts also generate automatically the more your resource management grows.

One of the points of games like this is to walk away and leave it running in the background. This works well for SPACEPLAN, as you can wait for your total watts to shoot up and spend the energy on useful upgrades.

At its best, SPACEPLAN is a most relaxing and engaging experience; serene.

However, you can take a more frenetic approach. Our second playthrough had us complete the game in about two hours of frenzied watt generation. Really, we were so engrossed it’s one of the reasons we think this is one of the best video games for autistic adults.

Away from the gameplay we have the graphics and, as minimalist as they are, they have a beautiful simplicity. That’s complemented massively by the chillout masterpiece of a soundtrack by American composer Logan Gabriel (more on this further below).

And as your spudnik probes orbit the planet, we were enthralled by it all.

The story develops as you play, with a type of apocalyptic scenario developing out of a deliberate misunderstanding of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, plus the Sun going supernova (due to potatoes).

It’s a strange game, no doubts. But it’s fantastic. SPACEPLAN has an addictive charm and if you only ever play one clicker game in your life, this is the one to pick.

It costs £2 (about $3) and is available on Steam, Android, and iOS. We can highly recommend it.

SPACEPLAN’s Banging Soundtrack

Tunes! One of the key makers of SPACEPLAN as something of a mini-indie game classic is that fantabulous soundtrack.

Seriously, we weren’t expect something quite as brilliant here. This is one of the best indie game soundtracks we’ve ever heard.

We’re sure glad Hollands commissioned Logan Gabriel to do the work, though, as this is stellar (or, should that be, interstellar) stuff.

It’s kind of a banging mixture of relaxing and ethereal numbers, merged alongside dance beats (like with the above Launch, our favourite from the game).

Bearing in mind this is a game where you, essentially, have to leave it be once you’ve setup your basic watt generation tactics.

Whilst your watts churn ever onward, you’ve got pelting numbers to keep you engaged and tuning in. And after SPACEPLAN got a 2023 upgrade, we got some new tunes to go with the overhauled gameplay experience.

Muo immediately became a new favourite of ours. It’s all further cemented in our minds that SPACEPLAN is a cosmic wonder of a clicker experience.