The game actively messed with you. About 1/2 through it would pause and throw up a “Thank you for playing the demo! Look for the full game coming soon!” That sort of thing.
“Either extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) are incredibly rare (or non-existent), or they are deliberately avoiding contact with us (aka. the “Zoo Hypothesis“).”
There is a 3rd possibility - it may not be deliberate.
Our position in the Milky Way is really out on the ass-end of it. We are nowhere near galactic central. If our current understanding of slower than light travel is correct, it just may not be possible for other civilizations to reach us.
When it comes to communications, and our radio sweeps of the galaxy turning up nothing, well, we’re assuming any advanced civilization is still using radio transmissions.
Look at our recent experiment with laser based communication:
100 or so years after radio communication was widespread, we have the technology to eliminate it. There may be other methods orders of magnitude beyond that. We could be awash in alien communication streams we just can’t percieve because ours are too primitive.
I’m going to be the negative nancy on this one, because I had the same deal, super cheap price and I wanted something to play on my Steam Deck.
It LOOKS great. It PLAYS like shit. You navigate the world as a character who maybe got hit in the head too hard a few too many times. None of the dialog choices are good, they are all just varying degrees of “Stupid” to “Who hurt you?”
Some people get off on it, I couldn’t stand playing a character that fucking stupid. I asked around going “So… did I just roll the stats wrong? It’s not too late for me to re-start…”
No, it turns out, regardless of your stats, it really is just that badly written.