• Emergent gameplay: use gadgets like teleporters, stealth shields and subverters to invent your own solutions to tricky situations.
• Zoom smoothly from a view of the whole galaxy down to your character sneaking up on guards inside the spaceship you're boarding.
• No time pressure: you can pause any time and take as long as you need to plan, aim shots, and figure out your next move.
• Choose your difficulty: you choose each mission, ranging from trivially easy to nightmarishly hard.
• Randomly generated missions: each one picks a random combination of guard kit, ship layout, and complications like space battles.
• Each life is a character: choose between randomly generated characters with different starting kit, and when you die, play as someone new in the same galaxy.
• Unlock new technologies: your missions help liberate stations, and stations unlock new gadgets for all future characters to buy.
• Personal missions: every character has one grand heist to work towards: rescue their brother, steal their gun back, get revenge on their partner's killer.
• All seamless: the ship you're on continues to fly around the galaxy as you sneak about inside, even as it gets into ship battles.
• Full modular destruction of every spaceship: shoot a fuel barrel to blow up the room and be flung into space by the vacuum. Rip ships in half, destroy secure rooms to form new entrances to dock at.
• Rescue your friends' characters: If someone on your friends list gets their character captured, and they aren't able to rescue them, maybe you can! You'll sometimes get a character whose personal goal is to rescue a friend's character. If you manage it, you unlock your friend's character to play as! They don't get it back. They had their chance. It's yours now.
• Find your friends' items: When you retire an accomplished character, you can choose one item to pass on. You get to name it, and both your Steam friends and your own future characters have a chance to find these as loot. Equally, you'll come across items your friends have named

Unique Shipment: The Everything Gun
For launch week only [now extended to two weeks], there's a ship carrying a unique weapon passing through the galaxy. It's called the Everything Gun, and if you steal it, you'll also unlock it as a random drop in this and all your future games

Be One Of Our Trading Cards
Heat Signature is all about the stories that emerge from what you get up to in game, not our pre-written lore. So for Steam Trading Cards, we want them to be about your stories. We want to see GIFs or short videos of crazy situations you've got into or clever tricks you've discovered, and we'll turn the best into trading cards with your name on! You'll have the strange sensation of being traded, sold, and perhaps broken down to make a badge.

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A scrappy, open-ended, infiltrator's delight for the player who enjoys breaking levels more than beating them.
Choice upon consequence upon choice upon consequence - Heat Signature is good at indulging the urge to overreach yourself, wring chaos from even the most humdrum scenario. But as with Spelunky and co, the game's sheer volatility would be nothing without its stable fixtures, its bendable but predictable checks and balances.

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That's the most striking thing about this game. Though much of Heat Signature is random, it's all seeded in such a way that creates these wonderful, unique stories. That could be through some sort of clever solution you come up with for getting through a ship, or some mistake you made that ended in a hilarious way, or two characters having an unexpected connection. Each of these moments feels personal. Heat Signature doesn't give you a story to experience — it lets players find their own.

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Taken together, these elements make for a uniquely to-the-point experience. Occasionally, a mission will go off without a hitch, but if you just take easy/medium difficulty missions in pursuit of risk-free perfection, it quickly becomes boring. Heat Signature is a game about salvaging the moments when shit hits the fan and the ”holy shit, I can't believe I pulled that off" stories that arise from that. You're always outnumbered and outgunned, but you're rarely outsmarted.

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Still, those 15 hours are a great time. Heat Signature inspires creativity through emergent complexity like any great immersive sim. I can't stop regaling friends with my stories of heists gone bad or boasting about my flashes of brilliance in the heat of the moment. Heat Signature is brilliant at teasing these anecdotal threads out of a procedural universe.

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Head Signature's space mercenary puzzles are great playgrounds for its creative thieving and murdering tools.
With a set of thieving and assassination tools that beg to be used creatively, Heat Signature's puzzle-like missions are great for jumping into for a few goes at a time to try something just crazy enough to work. That's when the fun stuff happens.

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What Heat Signature is not:

We don't want you to buy Heat Signature if it's not for you. We'd always rather have a happy non-customer than an unhappy customer. So here's what it isn't:

- It's not story-driven: there's a backstory to this place and a few conversations with characters, but there's not a story that develops as you play. It's much more about the stories you generate by playing, about how you got out of impossible situation X or pulled off crazy stunt Y.

- There aren't other careers: You can't mine asteroids. You can't build ships. You can't recruit a crew. You're an infiltrator, you break into spaceships for a living, it's all about that.

- There are no planets: The whole game takes place in this nebula full of space stations. You can dock at any friendly station and board any hostile ship, but it's not a space exploration game.

- It's not multiplayer: The friends features mentioned above are fun but they're just sharing content, it's not multiplayer at all and you're never in the same world together.

There are cool games about all those things. This is a cool game about something else!

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Much like @GunpointGame, the intro & main title to @HeatSig instantly establishes tone and personality in a ridiculously smart & concise way
Heat Signature especially impressive because it has more to communicate, like the scale of space and the travel & danger associated with it

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2 guards. I have no gun. Whalloped first one. For the 2nd, I turn on a reflector shield at close range &let him shoot me

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Rescue mission in warzone, hostage and pod destroyed, blitzkrieged entire ship army to fight warzone ship and get back home only in @HeatSig

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I just had one of 'those' moments in @HeatSig Target locked behind a level 3 door. I blew the only guard with a key into space
Used a swapper to get him out, a visitor to move him away from the nasty fuel barrel, then a visitor to blow the barrel. no more door!
Thats the moment everything in the game just clicked for me. Can;t wait for full release!

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So @HeatSig is coming out soon, and I've been playing it, and it's really good, and I want to share the odd story from it. Here's one
I'd been playing as a stealthy ghost, with all nonlethal weapons and gadgets, and taking lots of Bloodless missions (no innocents harmed).
On my third mission, I realised too late that I had agreed to assassinate someone. But there wasn't anything lethal on-board. Anywhere.
I couldn't even break a window or breach the hull. So I had no choice but to drag my target, quietly, back to my pod and leave with her.
Now, Heat Signature is a dangerous world, so I figure I can just find a way to kill her on the next ship I come across. Simple.
I clear out the first ship: nothing. Second ship: ditto. I have stumbled into the most considerate sector of space in the entire galaxy.
After clearing out the third ship and sifting through sci-fi beanbag guns and no-chafe handcuffs, I finally find something: a glitch trap.
Glitch traps let you teleport guards to other locations, which means my unconscious sidekick and I can finally part ways. Into space.

I discovered an alternate strategy literally seconds after my target asphyxiated in space >_>

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a @heatsig story: on my char's final mission. Out of bullets. Only have a shield subverter (inverts enemy shields so they shoot themselves)
My objective, a previous character I played as who is now captured, is at the end of a long hallway. Four baddies. My subverter has 3 shots.
I subvert the 1st guy just after he fires, dodging his bullet. His next shot bounces off his inverted shield and kills him. 2 more approach.
I dodge their bullets as my subverter cools down. I manage to invert their shields. They die, too. Now just me, the captive, & 1 mo baddie.
I'm out of subverter charges. I got a gun, but the gun won't penetrate shields. But I sprint past the last baddie and grab the captive.
I realize there's a window in this room. A window leading to the vacuum of space. I can't go out the way I came in...so i shoot the window.
Me, the captive, and the final baddie (who will explode when he dies of oxygen deprivation) are flung into space.
I remote pilot my ship to rescue me and the captive, and rocket away from the baddie just before he detonates.
Heat Signature is real fun.

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Sorry for another @HeatSig story, but plz let me tell you the tale of Vega Horizon, who abandoned her values to save her mom, Jazz Comfort:
Before the rescue op, Vega had completed 10+ missions and liberated 3 stations without killing a single person or taking a single hit.
Her Mom (once again, named JAZZ COMFORT) was on a heavily guarded ship with 9 levels of security.
Vega didn't carry lethal weapons. Ever.
So she gets on the ship, and is doing alright sneaking around and avoiding folk. She gets past the third door, and shit hits the fan.
She gets shot, for the first time in her career, and flung out the airlock.
I figure at this point, in the cold of space, something snaps.
Vega escaped the ship with Jazz over her shoulder, 16 bullet wounds and 30 people dead in her wake.
That was the last mission she ever ran.

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Shari said:

Thanks for the thread. Love the title.

Can't wait. Pinging JaseC to tell us the exact unlock time. A live countdown would be nice.

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DouglasteR said:

So its duskers with hotlinemiami ?

Im in !

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AHA-Lambda said:

So it's not story driven but is it campaign driven with missions? Or is it an endless experience?

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JaseC said:

It unlocks worldwide coincident with tomorrow's store update.

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AHA-Lambda said:

So it's not story driven but is it campaign driven with missions? Or is it an endless experience?

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a @heatsig story: on my char's final mission. Out of bullets. Only have a shield...[...]

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Shari said:

Picking up from Twitter's impression that More_Badass got us:



So there's an ending? Because AFAIK you only change your character when you die, but maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

Anyway, can't wait.

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More_Badass said:

Every character has a very challenging personal mission to work towards; you can keep playing after that though, you can also retire and switch to a different character

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More_Badass said:

Review embargo goes up at release, but in the meantime, beta players have been sharing stories and thoughts on Twitter

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iiicon said:

Jeff Gerstmann had positive things to say about it on this week's Bombcast as well.

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More_Badass said:

The #499 (9/19) episode?

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Sinatar said:

Definitely looking forward to this. Gunpoint was my 2013 GOTY.

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iiicon said:

Putting Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Destiny 2 aside once this releases tomorrow. Can't wait.


Jeff Gerstmann had positive things to say about it on this week's Bombcast as well.

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More_Badass said:

Tom said on Twitter that there will be a 10% launch discount

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NandyRewman said:

Everyone interested in Heat Sig should definitely check out the Crate and Crowbar podcast - Tom Francis, the developer, is a perennial guest and sometimes host, and always has something interesting to say. Would definitely recommend.

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Designing In The Dark: Game design involves wildly guessing at things that always seem obvious in retrospect. Here are two metaphors about that, with maximum gesturing.

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• Breaking down why Prey's opening works and Mankind Divided's doesn't: http://www.pentadact.com/2017-05-29-what-works-and-why-preys-intro/
• The game design philosophies behind Morphblade: http://www.pentadact.com/2017-03-11-morphblade-and-imbroglio-making-a-game-to-test-a-critique/
• How Hitman rewards creativity: http://www.pentadact.com/2016-05-14-rewarding-creative-play-styles-in-hitman/
• Thinking of ways to improve XCOM's design issues: http://www.pentadact.com/2016-02-25-solving-xcoms-snowball-problem/
• Analyzing how MGS V lets you react to being spotted: http://www.pentadact.com/2015-09-13-things-about-metal-gear-solid-v-spoiler-free/
• What to do if your prototype isn't fun: http://www.pentadact.com/2016-06-22-what-to-do-if-your-prototype-isnt-fun/

More_Badass said:

This is the best video to get an idea of what the gameplay is like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKpSHa3RT-A

I went from kind of interested to wow, I need to get this day one after seeing that video

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More_Badass said:

GB Quick Look
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYCLn6Ev8_0

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A scrappy, open-ended, infiltrator's delight for the player who enjoys breaking levels more than beating them.

Choice upon consequence upon choice upon consequence - Heat Signature is good at indulging the urge to overreach yourself, wring chaos from even the most humdrum scenario. But as with Spelunky and co, the game's sheer volatility would be nothing without its stable fixtures, its bendable but predictable checks and balances.

Click to expand...

Head Signature's space mercenary puzzles are great playgrounds for its creative thieving and murdering tools.
With a set of thieving and assassination tools that beg to be used creatively, Heat Signature’s puzzle-like missions are great for jumping into for a few goes at a time to try something just crazy enough to work. That’s when the fun stuff happens.

Click to expand...

That’s the most striking thing about this game. Though much of Heat Signature is random, it’s all seeded in such a way that creates these wonderful, unique stories. That could be through some sort of clever solution you come up with for getting through a ship, or some mistake you made that ended in a hilarious way, or two characters having an unexpected connection. Each of these moments feels personal. Heat Signature doesn’t give you a story to experience — it lets players find their own.

Click to expand...

Taken together, these elements make for a uniquely to-the-point experience. Occasionally, a mission will go off without a hitch, but if you just take easy/medium difficulty missions in pursuit of risk-free perfection, it quickly becomes boring. Heat Signature is a game about salvaging the moments when shit hits the fan and the “holy shit, I can’t believe I pulled that off” stories that arise from that. You’re always outnumbered and outgunned, but you’re rarely outsmarted.

Click to expand...

sonicmj1 said:

The first three minutes of this game really do a remarkable job of setting the tone. Reminded me how much I enjoyed some of the writing in Gunpoint.

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