With the new year starting off with a bang, it felt like there was no better time than to sit down, forget about world events, and just enjoy a nice, relaxing cozy game. Little Rocket Lab is a game about building a rocket ship, but you’ll actually spend the vast majority of your time solving problems around town and setting up elaborate (and hopefully efficient) supply lines. You’re not just building machinery here, you’re rebuilding a community and the legacy your mother left behind.
Plot Ahoy!
Little Rocket Lab is currently available for the PC on Steam and the Xbox Series X, plus the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
Little Rocket Lab follows the story of a young girl named Morgan, who lived with her mom and aunt in a backwater town until her mom’s passing. After growing up, Morgan returns to St. Ambroise to finish the last project her mother was working on before she died: a rocket ship. Due to personal circumstances, however, Morgan’s aunt continually redirects Morgan and won’t fully explain why she’s sealed off the old rocket laboratory.
Morgan isn’t going to let a few bumps in the road prevent her from finishing her mom’s last project, of course, and what proceeds is a touching story of Morgan working with the townsfolk, revitalizing a dying town, and finishing her mother’s legacy. Little Rocket Lab is full of sweet and interesting characters, even a ghost that inhabits machines as well as a rude washing machine whose dialogue you need to decode using a cipher. The story in Little Rocket Lab is driven by its cast of likable characters, and there’s a full breadth of customization you’re allowed to do in the town by setting up machinery anywhere you want, even allowing you to set up a mass transport of materials right through the town, if you so choose.
Review Notes
The process of revitalizing a rocket laboratory isn’t exactly an easy one, and you’ll need loads and loads of materials and ways to process those into components or new machinery. Your first few days in the game function as a tutorial, getting you used to breaking down old machines and collecting ore using your hammer, then using a furnace to convert that ore into ingots, and using that to create conveyor belts or objects like an assembler or dispenser. Little Rocket Lab takes the cutesy 16-bit aesthetic of titles like Stardew Valley or those of the early Harvest Moon series and combines it with the obsessive desire to maintain an efficient supply chain, like what you’d see in games like Factorio.
Setting up elaborate production lines to convert ore into bars into components into contraptions is a lot of fun in Little Rocket Lab, and you’ll regularly be given tasks where you’ll need to repair something in the town, maybe make a train run again while also experiencing the day-to-day events going on with the characters who live in St. Ambroise. There’s no romance in Little Rocket Lab, but players can befriend almost any character in the cast. Players will also receive side jobs that can be completed from time to time that will reward with useful items and equipment.
In Little Rocket Lab, Morgan has equipment you can find, much of which will either allow for customizations to her look or will yield various bonuses like increasing your item pickup range. On top of this, Morgan also has to research new blueprints to craft new machines, and your starting experience is reasonably guided by giving you objectives to work towards and various problems to solve to bring life back to the town and finish the rocket in the lab.
TLDR
The story of Little Rocket Lab is very sweet and filled with adorable characters that help bring this Stardew Valley cross with Factorio world to life. Setting up groups of machines, tearing them down, and reconfiguring them to increase efficiency is a huge portion of these kinds of titles, and Little Rocket Lab does a great job of letting you change up the lab whenever you feel you can improve the conveyor setups. Everything repaired in the town brings about purposeful change, and players can place conveyors and machines basically wherever they want to really customize absolutely everything.
This is, effectively, baby’s first factory sim, though Little Rocket Lab does a great job of gradually increasing the difficulty of factory puzzles and more complicated base designs while progressing through the story. Those who heavily play games like Factorio or Satisfactory may find it a bit rote, but for those who aren’t steeped in the genre, Little Rocket Lab can be a fantastic jump-in point. The cutesy visuals and story can do a lot of heavy lifting to get players invested.
Little Rocket Lab is also available on Nintendo Switch with a free Nintendo Switch 2 upgrade pack, and it’s easy to imagine that this kind of title would greatly benefit from the pick-up-and-play stylings of a handheld system like a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck. Speaking of which, Little Rocket Lab runs beautifully on the Deck with no hitches, glitches, or stitches (workplace safety is important after all).
Developers: Teenage Astronauts
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Steam, Xbox Series X