Arrive
Drop into a system with incomplete or corrupted information about where you are.
/ˈɡɪnːuŋɡɑp/ — in Norse cosmology, the yawning void that existed before the world. Not empty. Waiting.
You will never see the whole picture. It will.
You and your crew keep an interstellar ship alive across a chain of jumps you cannot fully plan. The hull leaks. The sensors lie. And the thing living in the ship with you — the Bloom — is learning how you work.
Every system is operated physically. Navigation, repairs, fabrication and mission work happen at stations you walk to, not in menus you summon. The helmet display is reserved for your own body and suit: oxygen, pressure, dose, stability. If you want to know what is happening to the ship, you go and look.
One jump is one cycle. The order never changes; what you find at each step always does.
Drop into a system with incomplete or corrupted information about where you are.
Read hazards, resources, routes and mission opportunities through sensors you cannot entirely trust.
Operate, repair and defend. Recover the materials the next jump will demand.
Commit to one of no more than six candidate destinations, on evidence that may be wrong.
Miss it and you carry the consequences. Stay outside the ship and you may not carry anything at all.
While you are frozen, the Bloom adapts — to the hazards you met and the choices you made.
Only after you wake. Then begin again.
The Bloom is xenobiological, distributed, and patient. It evolves during jumps, drawing on the hazards you survived and the tactics you leaned on.
Flush a corridor with vacuum and it will remember. Move only in the dark and it will stop relying on light. The game reports symptoms and consequences — a sound in the wrong compartment, a reading that will not settle, a door that was open yesterday. It never reports the Bloom's internal state, because the crew would have no way to know it.
Sensor confidence degrades with distance, hull damage and Bloom corruption. Readings shown are the ship's best guess and are not authoritative.
Specialisation is equipment, training and procedure — not a class fantasy. Everyone can patch a suit. Not everyone should be the one doing it.
The generalist berth. Reads the approach, flies it, and works the salvage.
Keeps the ship alive. Measured in what one pass at a fault actually accomplishes.
Triage through a suit, with gloves on, while the compartment is still venting.
Recovery and protection. Armour is mass; it never makes you faster.
Passive training stays true of your character forever. Active procedures are drilled actions you trigger deliberately — and you carry three.
Resin over a breach, held while it cures. The suit holds — and you are doing nothing else.
Drop your rate and ride it out. A long stretch of very low consumption, if you can stay calm.
Lamps off, deliberate pace. Very hard to pick out, and nearly blind for the same stretch.
Every procedure costs something while it runs. That is the point — a skill that only helped would be a passive, and passives are free.
Ginnungagap is in active development on Unreal Engine 5.8, working toward a playable vertical slice. This is where it actually stands.
Suit traversal, magnetic boots and thrusters; hazard, oxygen, radiation and pressure survival; the four-role skill tree with permanent passives and a three-slot active payload.
Stealth and perception — light, noise and movement signature, with optional microphone input feeding enemy hearing.
Bloom adaptation across jumps, versus mode, and the destination picker exist in code and need tuning against real play.
Inventory and fabrication: containers, use and drop, quick slots and the full interface are unfinished.
Authored mission chain, role oversuit art, and a balance pass across solo and co-op.