KEROS-9
KEROS-9 is a minimalist sci-fi incremental in the spirit of A Dark Room.
You wake alone on a dead orbital station. No light, no sound — just cold metal
and the black outside the viewport. Bring the core back online, and the station
begins to breathe.
REBUILD · MINE · RETURN
• Salvage debris and wake the station, system by system
• Thaw crew from cryo and assign them to keep production running
• Launch sorties into deep space — richer veins lie farther out, so does the danger
• Repair a wrecked ship and make the final run home to Earth
A slow-burn loop of salvage, growth, and one last journey through the dark.
Runs in your browser · auto-saves. A real-time slow-burn played across sessions —
close the tab to pause, return any time to pick up where you left off.
Art by Kenney (CC0).
A note from the dev: I'm Korean and my English isn't great, so I use AI to help write this page and reply to comments. Sorry if anything reads a little stiff. Thanks for playing, and for the feedback, it's genuinely shaping the updates.
Development log
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
core is at flickering and more crew won't wake what can I do?
Some gameplay, some critique ;)
hey, thanks for featuring KEROS-9 in the series. appreciate the coverage
There is a lot of waiting in this game, either needs more automation or more interactive elements early on to hold people's attention
Yeah the build up right now has no automation yet.
Next update adds an Automation Core (auto-collect) + speed tiers, should cut most of that early waiting.
Uploading soon.
Thanks for flagging it
What is the Hauler doing? Not sure on the benefits of building it...
The Hauler doubles the scrap you get from each asteroid harvest.
It's not shown in-game right now, which is my fault.
Next patch adds a short description to every build option.
That would be lovely thanks
Potential Bug - When you harvest one asteroid, all asteroids become unharvestable for the cooldown
Good catch — right now there's a single shared gather cooldown, so harvesting one asteroid locks them all, which definitely reads like a bug.
I'm reworking it so each asteroid harvests on its own cooldown (so you can work several at once), and bigger asteroids will yield more but take longer to recharge.
Thanks for the sharp eye — patch coming.
lack of possibility to automate asteroid collect and check net. The game is no more an idle one, just a slow and long game which require attention
You're right, and thanks for calling it out — right now the manual collect/net-checking fights the "idle" tag.
I'm reworking it so those get automated once your station's automation core comes online,
and I'm cutting the early cooldowns way down so the manual opening stretch isn't such a slog.
Patch coming soon — would love for you to give it another shot once it's live.
Dear god there is a lot of waiting in this game...
Ha, fair — there's too much dead waiting right now.
Next patch shortens the early action cooldowns a lot, automates the repetitive collecting once you unlock it, and adds a speed-up for the later stretch so the back half doesn't drag.
Thanks for sticking with it enough to notice!