Hello, humans!
For those of you trying the game for the first time: welcome aboard. Returning players can skip ahead to the demo details if they wish. We won't report you to Despot. Probably.
Humanity’s last hope is me. Humanity’s second-last hope was just turned into fuel.
In Hull Rupture, you play as Despot, an AI dictator leading humanity's last warship toward the alien homeworld.
Your mission is simple: survive long enough to complete your revenge against the Galactic Union. The crew's survival is a secondary objective.
Hull Rupture combines roguelite progression, base-building, tower defense, and space exploration into a constant balancing act between growth and survival. As you travel through a sprawling network of star systems, you'll expand your ship, build production chains, manage power, gather resources, and adapt to whatever opportunities (or disasters) you encounter along the way.
Of course, the Galactic Union isn't particularly enthusiastic about your plans.
Alien boarding parties regularly rupture the hull and attempt to turn your ship into drifting scrap metal. To stop them, you'll build defensive networks using turrets, traps, automated systems, robots, and whatever humans happen to be available at the time.
The challenge is that every defensive system competes with your economy for resources and power. More production means a stronger ship. More defenses mean a greater chance of surviving the next wave. Finding the balance between the two is what keeps the ship moving.
And if the aliens manage to destroy Despot, the run is over.
With unlockable ship models, artifacts, game modes, and new challenges to discover, every run offers new opportunities to optimize, experiment, and occasionally make catastrophically poor decisions.
Progress takes time… Especially when puny humans are involved.
Last month, we held an open playtest that was met with a very positive reception and reached an impressive median playtime of 1 hour and 40 minutes. We’ve received a huge amount of feedback, and the Steam Next Fest demo builds on that with balance changes, UI improvements, and a brand-new game mode.
The demo includes one starting ship and two game modes:
Classic Mode – the core Hull Rupture experience, combining base-building, resource management, exploration, and tower defense.
Trade Mode – a new combat-free mode where alien attacks are replaced by economic pressure, forcing you to focus entirely on resource management and long-term planning.
Trade Mode is our first step toward expanding the game's mode selection beyond the standard experience. Rather than simply adjusting a few numbers, we want different modes to encourage entirely different strategies and priorities.
And yes, we're also planning a mode that leans much more heavily into combat!
We've also made several improvements to the user interface. One of the most useful additions is the ability to collapse the shop and inspect your ship more easily. This makes it much simpler to evaluate your layout, review existing modules, and plan your purchases.
As we’ve mentioned, the playtest provided us with a huge amount of valuable feedback, and we're currently working on several major changes that simply weren't ready in time for Steam Next Fest. Rather than rushing unfinished content into the demo, we decided to focus on balance improvements, quality-of-life changes, UI updates, and introducing Trade Mode.
The larger changes are still coming, and they'll have a significant impact on how the game is played. We'll be talking about them in future development updates.
And no, we haven't forgotten about the bioreactor. 😉
So even if you completed the playtest, optimized every production chain, and fought your way onto the leaderboard, we hope you'll jump back in and give the demo a try!
As always, we're looking forward to your feedback, discussions, bug reports and clever strategies.
Good luck!