Rezium: Ten Years in the Making, and It Shows

There’s a particular kind of indie game project that you come across occasionally. One where the ambition clearly outpaced the resources for a long time, but where the team kept building the world anyway, long before a single line of game code was written. Rezium is that kind of project.

In development in some form since 2015, Rezium is a base-building space strategy game set in the 24th century. The team at Sublight Studios, led by Australian creative director Matt McGinniss and French concept artist Aurèle Pradal, has been quietly constructing a universe, a political system, a cast of characters, and a body of lore for a decade. The game itself is only now catching up with the world they’ve built around it.

The vertical slice just landed on Steam. It’s time to pay attention.

The Concept

The premise is tight and functional: Rezium is a rare mineral with the molecular power to terraform barren worlds. In 2385, it’s the most valuable resource in the galaxy, and three mega-corporations have carved up the territory around it. You are an independent commander trying to build a mining operation in the middle of their cold war.

That political pressure cooker is divided across three dominant factions. Roqore Offworld controls the Western Hemisphere of Mars, a mining-focused operation with its capital in Nova Ares. Saryon State holds the moons of Jupiter, with a military-first philosophy, a large synthetic workforce, and a grip on Earth that the game’s opening novella makes clear is not gentle. Zaikov Industrials operates from Triton near Neptune, pushing deep-space research and the gate technology that makes interstellar expansion possible.

Each faction has a distinct philosophy, a defined territory in the Sol System, and a bloc of senators in the USF Senate — the governing body that, in the game’s later multiplayer phases, players will actually be able to influence. The political simulation element is ambitious, and it’s one of the more interesting design ideas in the game’s roadmap.

The game’s own developers describe the aesthetic as Frostpunk — that punishing resource management under pressure — combined with the grounded, lived-in aesthetics of The Expanse and the space strategy feel of Falling Frontier. If you know those references, you already have a reasonably accurate picture of what Rezium is aiming for.

The base-building system works on a 20×20 grid of 400 pre-defined slots, unlocked progressively as you level up through five tiers — from a core four-building setup to full infrastructure including research, terraforming, and market access. Resources span five primary materials: Ferrium and Krystalen for construction, Voltrium for power, Plasmanite for advanced tech, and Rezium itself as the endgame economy driver. That last point is a smart design decision — Rezium can’t actually be mined on Mars. You have to trade for it or transport it from deep-space locations in the Kalin System. The mineral that gives the game its name is always just out of reach, which creates a persistent economic tension from the start.

The market system reinforces this. There are three trading hubs: the Nova Ares Exchange for stable bulk trading, the Phobos Moon Exchange as a black market with higher risk and reward, and the Syntara Trade Hub for research components. The economy is player-driven, with resource prices fluctuating on sector supply and demand and the USF actively regulates Rezium purchases to prevent market crashes, which is a neat way of making the governing body feel present in the gameplay rather than just in the lore.

The World Behind the Game

What separates Rezium from a lot of crowdfunded sci-fi strategy games is that the universe existed before the game did. The team built out characters, planetary systems, faction lore, and a novella series before committing to production timelines.

The illustrated novella Rise of Mars, written by McGinniss and illustrated by Pradal, follows Jalen-G82, a factory worker under Saryon’s authoritarian grip in the Detroit Enclave on Earth. It’s a solid piece of world-building; Cyberpunk in aesthetic, The Expanse in tone, and genuinely interested in what it means to be an individual caught in the machinery of corporate-state power. Jalen’s escape to Mars and his recruitment into Roqore Offworld serves as the player’s induction into the game’s first location.

The creative influences are explicit and well-chosen. McGinniss has cited the grand scale of Star Trek and Star Wars, the realism of James Corey’s Expanse series, and the cyberpunk tradition of Blade Runner and Gibson’s Neuromancer as reference points. The result is a universe that’s trying to feel like a plausible extrapolation of where geopolitics and corporate power lead, rather than a fantasy space setting with a thin veneer of plausibility.

Whether they fully achieve that is a conversation for when there’s more game to play. But the architecture of the world is credible.

Where the Game Is Right Now

Sublight Studios is being methodical about the rollout, which is either encouraging or frustrating depending on your patience.

The vertical slice — 15 to 20 minutes of gameplay covering base-building on Mars, resource extraction, basic defence, and early faction influence — is currently available to community members via Steam key on the Rezium Discord. It’s unlisted, playtest-stage, and paired with a feedback survey that the team is using to shape the next phase of development.

The roadmap is detailed and, notably, doesn’t promise the moon on an unrealistic schedule. The team completed game world pre-production from 2023 through 2024, covered core design documentation and team expansion in early 2025, and is now in the community feedback phase following the vertical slice. A Kickstarter campaign is targeted for Q4 2026, alongside a Steam demo release, with Version 1.0 targeting Q4 2027.

That’s a realistic timeline for an indie studio building something genuinely complex, particularly one that’s also producing comics, novellas, and a soundtrack alongside the game itself.

The community side of the project is already active. The Rezium Discord ran an asteroid-naming competition in late 2025 that resulted in six community-named asteroids — Aenae, Squire, Skulle, Monolith, Reezus, and Falconn — being written into the game’s official lore. It’s a small thing, but it’s indicative of how the team is approaching community building: as actual co-creation rather than engagement-metric optimisation.

What to Watch For

The thing that makes Rezium worth tracking isn’t the vertical slice, it’s too early-stage for that to be the story. The thing to watch is whether Sublight Studios can hold the line on their design philosophy as they move toward Kickstarter.

The universe they’ve built is coherent and interesting. The faction design is smart. The combat system has a sensible progression arc, moving from early-game base defence against AI scavenger raids through mid-game artillery and sector cooperation to full spacecraft fleet battles, with each faction bringing distinct combat styles to the table. The political simulation layer of senators, USF elections, and player-influenced governance could be genuinely distinctive if they execute it. The Frostpunk comparison suggests a game that will demand real decision-making under pressure, not just base-building optimisation loops.

If you’re into space strategy games or you’re following the indie development space, this is one to keep on the radar. The team has been building this world quietly for a long time, and they’re clearly not in a hurry to compromise it.

The vertical slice is available now via the Rezium Discord. The website, including lore, faction guides, and the Rise of Mars novella flipbook, is at rezium.io.

Rezium is in development at Sublight Studios. Kickstarter campaign targeted for Q4 2026. PC via Steam.