Starstruck Vagabond is a Life Simulation Game made by Yahtzee Croshaw and published by Second Wind, released on May 24th 2024. Its development was chronicled in the second season of Yahtzee's web video series "Dev Diaries," and early builds were published to itch.io.

In it, you play as an intergalactic courier set to retrieve some highly important deposits of Miraculum, which may be key to winning the war against the Machine Collective. After getting the precious cargo onto your ship, setting the destination to home, and activating the cryostasis, a stray meteor hits your vessel — and the stasis gets set for over two thousand years longer than it should be. Waking up in a distant future, everything you know is gone; time to start a new life.

You can find the game's Steam page here.

Tropes:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Magu is a sexbot programmed to fall in love with people based on their charm, intelligence, and size, with a great score in one making up for deficiencies in the others. She fell for Egg-chan because it's larger than a solar system, and that one factor trumps all other considerations.
  • Cube winds up betraying everyone and trying to destroy the egg because its desire to know everything can't let such a large unknown exist.
• Blatant Lies: Hole (who's invisible except for his eyebrows) claims he also has an invisible gun and uses it to "threaten" the player character.
• Character Customization: The Second Wind livestreams of JM8, Yahtzee, and Nick playing this game show that the player can adjust the hairstyle, gender, and clothes/skin/hair color of their player character upon starting the game. Later on, you'll have the option to also customize your character's personality.
• Company Cross References:
  • Hole, one of the companions you get, was a character in Yahtzee's previous space game, Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment.
  • Quantunneling, from Yahtzee's book series Jacques McKeown, is namedropped in a handwave for why the spaceship technology didn't move forward since the player character was frozen. Also, one of the pre-release playtesting streams used "Jacques McKeown" as a default player character name.
• Dialogue Tree: Used in the prologue as a way to predict your personality, ditched for the rest of the game.
• Eternal English: Despite the player character getting frozen for thousands of years, they don't have any issue understanding the speech of people in the new future they're born into. It's downplayed in that there's one counterexample: "Miraculum" is now known as "Mundanium", reflecting that the substance is way less valuable today than it was 2000 years ago.
• Heroic Sacrifice: You try to pull one at the very end, but your best friend amidst the crew shoves you out of the way and does it instead.
• Human Popsicle: The story opens with the player character getting frozen for just over 2000 years.
• Noodle Incident: The reason that transit technology hasn’t changed in two thousand years is that it did advance, but everyone stopped using that technology "when all those star systems disappeared".
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The Steam trailer has a The Stinger bit in which Sarge gets jettisoned into space, towards a big space station in the distance. After a Fade to Black, the station is depicted violently exploding and leaving no trace left ... except for Sarge, who's floating back to the player's ship from the station. The man had a whole adventure in there but not a bit of it is depicted onscreen.
• Outside-Context Problem: This is the core of the plot: a gigantic egg-shaped object has appeared in the center of the galaxy, and nobody knows what it is or what it's doing. Every character has their own belief, and various factions squabble over who gets to claim or control the egg.
• Ragtag Band of Misfits: Your entire crew. The primitive snakelady who barely understands technology is one of the saner ones.
• Ram Scoop: Part of spaceship propulsion systems, used for in-system travel. The warp drive takes you between systems but requires fuel; the impulse engines get their fuel from the scoops, which must be oriented to the direction of the particle flow. They also require periodic cleaning.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The initial quest to retrieve Miraculum crystals for the Earth Federation - on top of getting the player character frozen for over two millennia, it turns out the "Miraculum" crystals were a dead end and Earth Federation lost the war, and "Mundanium", as it is known in the game's present, is mostly remembered as a failure in whatever it was supposed to achieve.
• Shout-Out: The personality customization screen uses various pop-culture characters as reference points for the personality they describe, like Cersei Lannister or Princess Leia.
• Snake People: One of your potential crewmates is a primitive snakelady that barely understands technology.
• Space Is an Ocean: Flying between planets in a sector is set up like sailing between islands.
• Taxman Takes the Winnings: As soon as you wake up, your new lawyer Dripberg gives you your inheritance as the last member of the Earth Federation, which is a substantial amount of money. He then takes most of it right back as his legal fees.
• Unconventional Alignment: There are nine alignments to pick from, based on two axes: one for personality (Bitter, Private, Upbeat), and for motivation (Altruism, Apathy and Egoism). There's a crew member for every alignment.
• Unexpected Successor: Since the player character is the last surviving member of the Earth Federation, they are technically its president and inherit its remaining resources.
• Used Future: The ship is a second-hand junker that requires constant maintenance, all of the other ships you board are either derelicts or in even worse shape than yours, and many of the ports are cobbled together with wood & stone.
• Written Sound Effect: The tools' actually achieving something is marked by various sound effects (well, Unsound Effects, like "ALIGN!", "ADJUST!", "CRANK!") ejecting from the device.