Snail Games shows off For the Stars with five new screenshots

Snail Games USA has unveiled five new screenshots for For the Stars, its upcoming space sandbox survival game, revealed exclusively through IGN Fan Fest 2026: Fall Edition.

The images, published by IGN, show off the game's biomes, weapons, flora and fauna, along with vehicles and spacecraft. They also give a first proper look at how the multiplayer side works, with friends exploring the same universe together.

According to IGN, players travel from planet to planet and establish outposts to upgrade their tech, study alien artifacts and natural phenomena, and survive whatever the galaxy throws at them. The studio says the aim is to grow more powerful so players can "explore further into the unknown".

Those outposts are more than scenery. Players will need to balance the needs of each area with laboratories, factories and living quarters, while spacecraft can be upgraded and customised for the task at hand.

Built for company, or for conflict

Multiplayer sits at the centre of the pitch. Friends can collaborate on building projects, share discoveries and work together to overcome obstacles. Snail Games also teases contested regions, where players "choose to enter contested regions to fight other players for control of the galaxy" — so settling quietly is one option, not the only one.

The studio's own marketing calls For the Stars an "open universe" survival title and ties the team to the ARK series. A second developer diary, published in April, showed off early base-building and survival systems, and the Steam listing currently carries a coming soon date rather than a release window.

That leaves UK and EU players without a firm date, regional price or pre-order to weigh up, so the reveal is a look at the game rather than a commitment to when it arrives.

The full set of screenshots sits in the IGN Fan Fest hub, alongside the rest of the event's reveals.

Our opinion

For the Stars is the ARK survival loop with a galaxy map bolted on, and that is a crowded lane: No Man's Sky, Empyrion and Star Citizen have all sold the same open universe, and five screenshots cannot show the only thing that decides these games — whether the twentieth planet still feels worth landing on.

The most telling line in the reveal is the one about contested regions. Snail Games is not describing a shared sandbox so much as a sandbox it expects players to fight over, which reads like an admission that exploration alone thins out. The real question when a release date finally lands is how much of that galaxy is built by hand and how much is procedural wallpaper.