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SPACE stations have been in the air a lot recently 鈥� literally in the case of China鈥檚 Tiangong-2, which ended its mission by crashing through the atmosphere last month. Plans for new stations are also afoot. NASA aims to build an outpost orbiting the moon, while billionaire Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has the wild idea of moving all of humanity to Earth orbit.

It got me thinking about some of my favourite space stations in video games. They make ideal settings: being self-contained, you can roam without running into artificial barriers that mark the limits of some game worlds; the cold vacuum of space provides developers with a handy excuse not to build an entire world.

Space stations also lend themselves to horror. Take Alien: Isolation, which is set aboard the vast Sevastopol station and has you playing as Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Sigourney Weaver鈥檚 character from Alien. It oozes retro-futuristic style, aping the pre-digital designs of the 1979 film, but there is little time to take in the sights 鈥� you spend most of the game hiding under tables as an alien stalks you.

Prey, released in 2017, also features a space station with a retro aesthetic. The game鈥檚 backstory involves US president John F. Kennedy surviving the assassination that in reality killed him, then teaming up with the Soviets Union in a massively expanded space programme to combat a mysterious alien threat. The station is Talos I, which looks like an art deco skyscraper, in orbit near the moon. You can explore, crawl through vents, hack open locked doors or take a trip through an airlock for a spacewalk shortcut.

鈥淧laying as an AI may be a bit passive, but it is the closest I鈥檒l ever get to being on a real space station鈥�

Both titles owe a heavy debt to the System Shock games, a pair of 1990s releases that are some of the first examples of the 鈥渋mmersive sim鈥� genre, in which players get a wide range of choices and tools, making you feel like you are really present and have agency in the game world. By today鈥檚 standards those earlier versions are a little rough, but a modern, third System Shock is coming. I can鈥檛 wait.

I also have to give a shout-out to BioShock, the spiritual sequel to the System Shock games. It is set in an underwater city rather than a space station, and is possibly one of the best games ever.

And while it isn鈥檛 immersive sim, Observation, which came out earlier this year and is made by some of the same people who made Alien: Isolation, puts its own twist on System Shock. It features an artificial intelligence, in the style of HAL from the story 2001: A Space Odyssey , called SAM (Systems, Administration and Maintenance), but flips things by having you play as the AI. You can explore the Observation station by inhabiting video cameras and spherical robots capable of jetting through its cramped modules. It is like being on a more advanced version of the International Space Station: the robots are seemingly inspired by Cimon, a mobile platform on the ISS.

At first, things seem ordinary, or as ordinary as they can be in orbit. But the station is in trouble and you have to help astronaut Emma Fisher (think Sandra Bullock鈥檚 Ryan Stone in the film Gravity ) get systems back online. Then an early twist (and a great reveal) push the story into 2001 territory.

Playing as an AI does make the experience a bit passive, taking orders from Fisher, but as a space nerd, for me the game鈥檚 grounding in science is a real thrill. It is the closest I鈥檒l ever get to being on a real space station, Bezos or no.