Void Bastards is inspired by some of my favourite games—primarily System Shock, but also other immersive sims like Deus Ex and Thief. I used to play these sorts of games on a constant loop, but these days I don't have the time. I have a job to do, a kid to raise, a house to maintain, a garden to stare longingly at from my upstairs office window. My leisure time is short and sporadic, and you can't really drop into a game like System Shock for fifteen minutes. They're called immersive sims for a reason.

But I do have time for Void Bastards. It takes the fundamentals established by System Shock and boils them down into something that can be played in quickfire sessions. Set in a sprawling space graveyard crammed with derelict ships, you hop between these forsaken vessels scrounging enough resources to keep you alive for the next jump.

Each of these drifting spaceships is a little environmental puzzle for you to solve. Before you board a ship, Void Bastards provides just enough information to make a hazy plan of how you might explore it. You get a layout of the ship, but no indication of where important loot might be hidden. You're told what kinds of enemies you might face, but not where they'll be roaming. You then get to pick three (of around a dozen) gadgets to take with you, ranging from a simple pistol to exploding robot kittens and a weapon that temporarily places enemies in a pocket universe.

Once you enter the ship, you've got five to ten minutes before the oxygen in your spacesuit runs out, meaning you must be decisive and efficient. I like to head to the flight deck to update my map with the ship's loot containers first, then grab what I can as I move toward the Atmosphere chamber. Here, I'll snatch a few extra minutes of O2 before checking any rooms that I've missed.

Of course, a run tends to be far less organized in practice. I'll often find myself dashing through a ship's corridors to escape its ghostly mutant inhabitants, frantically locking doors behind me because I've only got a handful of bullets left.

Given its rigid time constraints, Void Bastards packs in an impressive number of problems that require quick thinking and immediate action to solve. In one recent run, I was about to exit the ship I was pilfering when the power went out, trapping me inside. With only a minute of O2 to spare, I had to leg it back to the generator to activate the airlocks. I escaped with seconds to spare.

Where a floor of System Shock's Citadel Station might take hours to unpick, I can hurtle through two or three derelicts in Void Bastards within half an hour, each one foiling my best laid plans in surprising and entertaining ways. At a time when every minute of life seems accounted for, I appreciate Void Bastards and its propulsive reminders that every spare second counts.

If you're interested in some bite-sized immersive simming of your own, pick up Void Bastards on the Epic Games Store.