Welcome Aboard the Tiqqun, Administrator — Please Ignore the Screaming Alarms!
IXION is what happens when a city‑builder, a survival sim, and a sci‑fi tragedy walk into a bar and decide humanity deserves one more chance… but only if you can keep a giant corporate space station from collapsing like a wet cardboard box. You’re the Administrator of the Tiqqun (Pronounced Tycoon), DOLOS A.E.C.’s prototype mobile ark, which—through a series of events that HR would describe as “non‑ideal”—is now drifting through a dying universe with the last scraps of humanity aboard.
Your job? Keep everyone alive. Keep the hull intact. Keep the lights on. And above all, keep the crew’s trust high enough that they don’t decide to eject you into the nearest star.
IXION is unrelenting, unforgiving, and occasionally hilarious in the way only catastrophic failure can be. It’s Frostpunk in space, but with more spreadsheets, more existential dread, and significantly more hull breaches.
Sector Management: Six Neighbourhoods of Panic
The Tiqqun is divided into six unlockable sectors, each a self‑contained district with its own population, jobs, power grid, and emotional baggage. Opening a new sector feels like discovering a new room in your house—except this room is on fire, demands housing, and immediately drains your power supply. Each sector in IXION demands a delicate juggling act as you struggle to keep your increasingly irritable crew alive and functional. You’ll need to provide proper housing—because, shockingly, people hate sleeping in the hallways—while maintaining a balanced workforce where too many idle hands lead to complaints and too few result in accidents, strikes, and the occasional “accidental” airlock incident. Food production becomes its own ongoing crisis, with insect farms and algae vats raising the eternal question of how many cycles you can serve nutrient paste before the crew riots. Stability must be managed through policies, memorials, propaganda centres, and the ever‑watchful Data Listening System, which is basically Space NSA with better branding. And through it all, the Tiqqun’s fragile power grid threatens to collapse if you so much as sneeze in its direction, turning every expansion into a high‑stakes gamble.
Every building you place affects trust, power, and resource flow. Every decision has consequences. And every sector eventually becomes a beautifully optimized dystopian nightmare.
IXION’s greatest joy is how it weaponizes chaos. Space is not your friend. Space is not even your frenemy. Space is an active participant in your downfall.
In IXION, you’ll constantly battle the station’s tendency to self‑destruct in increasingly creative ways. EVA teams must be sent out to patch the hull before it peels open like a tin can drifting through the void, while hull breaches themselves are a routine reminder that the Tiqqun’s outer shell decays at the pace of a cosmic banana left out far too long. Inside the station, electrical fires erupt with the enthusiasm of a power grid that resents your leadership, and overloaded systems plunge entire sectors into darkness if you expand too quickly—leaving the Tiqqun blacked out like a Victorian mansion during a séance.
Managing risk is a full‑time job. You’ll build backup batteries, fire stations, infirmaries, and cryonics centres—because sometimes the best way to solve a population problem is to temporarily freeze the problem.
While your sectors burn internally, you’ll also be sending ships into the void to gather resources, rescue survivors, and uncover the wreckage of other failed human experiments.
Your exploration toolkit in IXION is a finely tuned machine of cosmic discovery and logistical chaos. Science expeditions venture into the unknown to investigate anomalies, uncover fragments of the universe’s lost history, and—on particularly unlucky days—lose an entire crew to “unforeseen circumstances.” Probes sweep the darkness to reveal hidden planets, asteroids, and other celestial secrets waiting to be exploited. Once identified, mining ships move in to extract vital resources like iron, silicon, carbon, and ice from these distant bodies, while cargo ships dutifully haul the harvested materials back to the Tiqqun like space‑age delivery vans keeping your fragile station alive.
Managing population, trust, and the ever‑looming threat of mutiny is the true endgame in IXION, because your crew is far more than a statistic—they’re a volatile, emotional, panic‑prone mass of humanity who will absolutely overthrow you if pushed too far. Trust becomes your most precious resource, as losing it triggers an immediate coup, while policies force you into the familiar cycle of promising things you can’t deliver and then scrambling desperately to make them happen. Cryopods add another layer of tension, letting you recover frozen survivors and thaw them out when you need more workers—or, inconveniently, more mouths to feed—while rising death counts drag morale into the abyss. IXION constantly corners you between the morally questionable and the catastrophically stupid, and somehow both choices always feel like the only viable path forward.
Research & Upgrades: Science Will Save Us (Probably)
Cut off from DOLOS HQ, you must research your way out of every crisis. New buildings, upgraded hull plating, better food production, more efficient power systems—everything requires science points earned through exploration.
Research is the backbone of survival. Without it, the Tiqqun becomes a floating tomb.
The Story: A Slow, Beautiful March Toward Hope
IXION’s narrative unfolds across multiple chapters, each introducing new star systems, new threats, and new revelations about humanity’s fate. You’ll encounter other survivor groups, derelict stations, and the ruins of civilizations that failed before you.
Your mission is simple: Find humanity a new home.
Your reality is not: Everything is on fire and the hull is screaming.
Final Thoughts: IXION Is a Masterpiece of Stress
IXION is a city‑builder that doesn’t simply challenge you—it evaluates you with the cold, clinical precision of a cosmic judge. Every decision you make feels like it’s being quietly recorded for later punishment. The game waits patiently for that moment when your confidence peaks—when food is stable, power is balanced, and the hull isn’t screaming—and then it gently tips the first domino. A blackout spirals into a strike, a strike delays repairs, repairs fail to prevent a breach, and suddenly the Tiqqun is less a space station and more a slow‑motion disaster reel narrated by your own panic. IXION thrives on this tension, turning every victory into a temporary ceasefire and every mistake into a cascading catastrophe that feels both inevitable and entirely your fault.
And yet, despite the stress, the alarms, and the occasional “oops, I starved half the station,” IXION remains brilliant, gripping, and unforgettable. It’s the rare game that makes you feel genuine pride in your people one moment and genuine horror at your leadership the next. Only here can you say, with complete sincerity, “I’m proud of my people. Also, I accidentally starved half of them.” The emotional whiplash is part of the magic: IXION blends narrative weight, mechanical depth, and relentless pressure into a uniquely compelling experience that lingers long after you’ve shut down the Tiqqun for the night.
IXION is OUT NOW on Steam!
