Crying Suns

Crying Suns is a 2019 roguelike strategy video game developed by Montpellier-based developer Alt Shift and published by Humble Bundle. The protagonist, space admiral Ellys Idaho, awakes in a cloning facility decades after the interstellar empire he fought for has collapsed, and travels the empire's galaxy in a battleship in search of answers why. The game is split into six chapters, with three sectors each; Idaho and his crew travel through each sector and its star systems to reach the sector exits while staying ahead of a pursuing threat. During the course of their travels, players battle other battleships in pausable real-time. A Kickstarter campaign funded game development. Alt Shift designed game play to be reminiscent of FTL: Faster Than Light but on a different scale: rather than commanding a small ship like in FTL, the developers wanted "the player to act like Admiral Adama in Battlestar Galactica", commanding several hundred crew members. Crying Suns was released in September 2019 for Windows and macOS, in June 2020 for iOS and Android, and May 2021 for the Nintendo Switch. Reviewers praised its story, graphics, and tactical complexity in combat, while some criticized the repetitiveness of random events. Many have compared Crying Suns to FTL: Faster Than Light. The game has made over US$2 million as of February 2021.