A free space-age AI RPG where you choose a faction, build a crew and take missions to small worlds, then bring the stories home to your station — a very distinctive design in an open alpha, with flat characters and a memory that let us down.

Astara Infina is an AI RPG that runs in your browser and takes place in space. You do not start with a blank page. You start on a station, choose your crew’s faction, make a character and build a party, then fly missions to small worlds. Each mission is its own short storyline, and you come home with the rewards and the stories, then take another. It is built by one developer, Michał Kowalkowski, and it is an open alpha.

The game has several parts, shown as tabs along the top of the page: the Station you start from, your Campaign, your Party, your Ship, a Fabricator, a Chart of the known universe, and a Databank. Character creation begins with the people and principles you want to fly with — in our run, three factions: the Coalition (“Explorers with principles”), the Alliance (“Freedom through action”) and the Confederation (“Independent, not indifferent”) — and species and class come next. The chart showed 26 known worlds. You can also see the crewmates who stay aboard in the rooms of your ship, and in play you get a row of suggested actions under the story as well as a box to type your own.

We ran the game through our review rubric informally, because the developer asked us to review it. Because it is an open alpha, we are not publishing a score. Our methodology keeps scores for finished products, and we will score it at its public release. Our first look goes through the seven axes in words, and these are the headlines:

The design is the standout. Character creation, how you gain party members, the mission-and-return loop and the crew visible on your ship make it unlike anything else we have tried.
The systems are deep and charming. The ship’s fabricator, station news and different jobs give you a lot to do.
The characters are the weak spot. They all speak in the same voice, with different names and roles.
The memory is the other weak spot. It failed the memory test we disclose, and some others, and the interface gave us no way to find out why.

Models

You can switch models in the Profile settings. The developer told us the two he uses right now are GLM 5.3 Flash and DeepSeek V4 Flash.

Pricing

Free. The developer told us he does not sell anything and does not really plan to, unless usage grows so much that he can no longer pay for it out of his own pocket. Even then, he wants a free way to play, with power users paying for what they use, or something that does not affect gameplay, such as cosmetics. He described the game as a side project that began on a dare. We will add a pricing table if a paid plan appears.

We haven’t rated Astara Infina, and won’t while it is an open alpha. See our first look for what we found. (Astara Infina is an independent project by Michał Kowalkowski; Arcanum is unaffiliated with it.)