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Maia has problems. Since its alpha launch, it's been something of a victim of its own success; promoted by Valve in a fashion not typically extended to Steam Early Access games of late, it saw an influx of new players intrigued by its mix of Dungeon Keeper and Silent Running, and in developer Simon Roth's futuristic warren through which layers of simulated systems and people course. The problem is, those systems haven't been flowing freely, nor quite as intended. Maia's issues run from the troublesome - an interface that's lacking not only in usability but also in some key information - to the plain comical. "As a bit of a joke, I removed the limit on the speed at which chickens can multiply," says Roth. "In the Maia community, the first thing people do is cause this bug - the chickens go absolutely nuts, and they'll replicate until your computer crashes. Because each chicken only takes a few bytes of data, you can get tens of thousands of them before your computer bricks." Hold your breath if you're on the 64-bit Linux build, which is capable of providing chickens by the million. "I should remove it," confess Roth, "but it is amusing..."
Maia's alpha, then, is very alpha - there's no save state, but there are plenty of issues that blight your progress, a lack of feedback on its systems and erratic AI that clips through walls as it pursues its own mysterious agenda. It is, despite all this, a fascinating place to tinker. You start in a small, confined colony on a hostile planet that stretches out towards distant horizons, and it's up to you to find ways to explore or, should you rather, just experiment with the various tools, ecosystems and simulations that sit under your influence.
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