In Beyond These Stars you run a production economy on ground that is alive. Your city sits on the back of Kewa, a giant space whale, and the whale decides when to move on. Hooded Horse and Balancing Monkey Games released the city builder on October 16, 2026, on Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store. It costs $29.99, with a 20% launch discount for its first two weeks, and it is also on PC Game Pass.
Your settlers, the Peeps, start on a mostly bare patch of whale with a little green by the water. From there you build production chains, trade between star systems and research toward the stated goal, which is finding the way home. You can also change the land itself: terraform it, dig canals and plant forests. The store page warns that if you neglect the ecosystem, your habitat shrinks. Outposts on nearby planets supply what the whale cannot. Kewa can also choose to leave a system, so an outpost is only as useful as the whale’s patience with that planet.
From fending off space whales to living on one
Balancing Monkey Games is a small studio in Dunedin, New Zealand, that makes non-violent games, and this is its second city builder. The first, Before We Leave, came out on PC in May 2020 with Team17 publishing, and later reached Xbox, PlayStation and Switch. In that game the Peeps rebuilt a fallen world and spread across planets, and space whales were a hazard to fend off. The studio calls Beyond These Stars its sequel. The whale has been promoted from threat to map, which in this genre counts as career growth.
The record so far is short. The game passed 250,000 wishlists before launch and is translated into 14 languages beyond English. As of October 20, its Steam user reviews read Mixed, 68% positive out of 132. That is a small sample, and the store page gives no reason for the split. Its publisher, Hooded Horse, also handles Manor Lords, Against the Storm and Old World.
This is a builder for players who want the map to push back. Anyone unsure about the early reviews has the two-week discount as time to watch them settle, and Beyond These Stars is on Steam now.
