Incredible rougelike. There’s so much content and variety and different skills and ways to play.

It’s a lot different from the traditional rougelike loop of survive till you find OP items and then win. It’s a lot more about how you explore and interact with the galaxy in an RPG sense.

For instance, I was playing an ecology/scientist type character. I spent all my time running from fights, landing on planets and studying every animal and plant on them. I thought it was odd that I only got XP from killing the animals so I asked the dev if an option to peacefully study the animals as an ecologist would be possible, and the dev agreed and put it in the next update! From then on I kept “peacefully” exploring and selling ecological data and was confused as to why so many factions hated me, only to find I had been selling all my data to the most hated faction just cuz they had paid the most!

Plays great on steam deck as well, it’s the perfect type of pick and and play game for it

I purchased Approaching Infinity almost ten years ago, when it was sold for quite an hefty amount of money at Shrapnel Games. And people could tell you what a cheapassgamer I was back then!
I had given the demo a try, and to say I had fallen in love with it in matter of instants would almost be an understatement.
Not because of its visuals, quite basic although very stylish, thanks to David Gervais' talent, nor because of its writing, redacted in a very simple style and with references to Star Trek that I had no way of understanding then, neither because of its game mechanics, which were pretty much what you'd expect from such a game.
No, what had grasped me was the insane ambition of giving the player infinite adventures in a random universe. But, you'll say that number of games claim to do that, and boy are you right. Indeed, many claim, but Approaching Infinity is one of those extremely rare gifts that actually manages it, thanks to its humility and its homogeneity.
Bob Saunders, its creator, wanted, to sum it up very quickly, to create an infinitely replayable rogue game using elaborate mathematical formulas, taking place in a lore scape that he enjoyed, the universe of Space Opera.
What he achieved, without even knowing it at the time from his own account, is to build up and create an infinitely playable Starflight.
The player's imagination is tasked to make it happen, stimulated by textual and visual elements spread around. What happened in my case was the birth of epic or ironic tales, like that time when my fine landing party explored an underground cave system and killed on sight the people they found there, only to realise when it was done that they had wiped out a band of tourists on a space safari.

Oh, enough babbling: in the end, I could simply sum it up by saying Approaching Infinity is the game that made me watch Star Trek.

If we try to divide roguelikes like in the olden days into hack-likes and band-likes, Approaching Infinity is definitely a band-like. It ain't no quick run in a claustrophobic dungeon with ever-dwindling resources to death or glory. You have infinite (it's in the title) planets and shipwrecks to explore, stations to trade with, gear and weapons to upgrade to. While opportunities to get resources in each sector do run out and difficulty is slowly rising with each sector, pace is forgiving enough that you'll almost never fall into common to hack-likes "walking dead" scenario where you are too weak but must venture forwards to certain death.

Together with your character you can have a crew of up to six classes out of ten possible. They can cover a lot but being an absolute generalist is impossible so you have to choose priorities for your run: will I be focusing on ground combat, and if I do will I also be diving deep into caves? Will I likely end up making enemies with lots of alien races? Will I be using found and bought equipment or make my own? And so on and so on. Once again game is generous enough that you do not have to make some hyper-focused build to thrive. Being a bit of jack-of-all-trades is expected for a rogue space captain.

One feature I personally find really cool is artifacts. Finding one is a whole journey from collecting clues to assaulting mini-dungeon to figuring out what it does by experimenting. And it can do anything - from duplicating any possible crewman skill to ship device to some artifact-exclusive effects. Accidentally finding one that really complements your ship feels pretty nice.

All in all, a good game to escape into for a while every now and then.