Heat Signature

Heat Signature is a single-player game about infiltrating spaceships in a nebula full of space stations. You fly your pod to a ship, dock at its airlock and sneak aboard. Missions include stealing loot, assassinating VIPs and rescuing friends. You can sneak past the crew, fight them in slow-motion gunfights or use gadgets to find another way through.

Plan your escape

You can pause at any time to consider your options, switch gadgets, aim and fire without time pressure. Teleporters, stealth shields and subverters let you devise your own solutions to difficult situations. You can also blow up parts of a ship with breach grenades or fuel barrels, split a ship in half or get sucked into space through a breach.

The view zooms smoothly from the whole galaxy to your character sneaking past guards inside a ship. You choose missions from trivially easy to nightmarishly hard, and a practice mode lets you try items and tactics with no consequences and restart instantly.

Missions and characters

Missions are randomly generated from combinations of guard equipment, ship layouts and complications such as space battles. You choose among randomly generated characters with different starting equipment. When a character dies, you continue in the same galaxy as someone new.

Each character has a personal goal, such as rescuing their brother, stealing back their gun or avenging their partner's killer. Missions also bring you closer to liberating space stations from the empires that control them. Liberating stations unlocks gadgets to buy in shops and special challenge characters to play.

Friends' characters and items

If a friend’s character is captured and they cannot rescue them, you may get a character whose personal goal is to save them. Rescuing the character unlocks them for you to play, but your friend does not get them back.

When you retire a character who has accomplished their goal, you can name one item to pass on. Your future characters and your Steam friends may find it as loot, and you may find items named by your friends. These features share characters and items; players do not meet or play together in the same world.

The setting

The game takes place in a nebula filled with space stations, not on planets. You can dock at any friendly station and board any hostile ship, but there are no other careers such as mining asteroids, building ships or recruiting a crew. The game has a backstory and some conversations with characters, but its focus is on the situations and stories that emerge from your missions rather than a developing narrative.