Balancing Monkey Games Launches Beyond These Stars, a Space-Whale City Builder

Balancing Monkey Games has shipped Beyond These Stars, a city-building strategy game that drops its colonists onto the back of a sentient, star-traveling whale. The small studio, based in Dunedin, New Zealand, and publisher Hooded Horse released the game on October 16, 2026 for PC, closing out a build cycle that stretched back to the title's first announcement in 2023.

A City on the Back of a Space Whale

Beyond These Stars casts players as caretakers for a community called the Peeps, who wake up stranded on Kewa, a colossal whale drifting through deep space. Rather than handing over open, stable ground, the game ties its entire city-building loop to the whale's body: builders have to work around the natural contours of Kewa's back, routing production chains and housing across uneven terrain instead of a flat grid.

That relationship runs both ways. According to the game's Steam store page, Kewa's health and mood respond to how the Peeps treat their new home, nudging players to treat terraforming as a negotiation rather than a one-way extraction job.

Terraforming, Trade and a Fragile Equilibrium

Mechanically, Beyond These Stars leans on systems familiar to fans of the genre, reshaped around its premise. Players dig canals, lay topsoil and plant forests to convert barren patches of Kewa into farmland, while production chains grow more complex as new technologies unlock access to advanced goods. Interstellar trade and contact with other species widen the loop further, letting a city in orbit of nowhere in particular trade for resources it cannot grow or mine on its own.

• Terraforming: reshape Kewa's terrain to open new building sites and adjacency bonuses.
• Logistics: balance production chains and mining as the Peeps' needs scale up.
• Exploration: travel between solar systems and meet alien civilizations while keeping the home city running.
• Outposts: establish planetary footholds that feed resources back to the whale-borne capital.

A Second Game From a Small Studio

Beyond These Stars is only Balancing Monkey Games' second commercial release, following the studio's 2020 debut Before We Leave. That earlier game already carried a found-civilization premise, but Beyond These Stars widens the scope considerably, trading a single rebuilt world for an open-ended journey across an entire galaxy carried on the whale's back.

Hooded Horse, the publisher behind Manor Lords and Against the Storm, picked up the project as part of a catalog that has leaned heavily on small and mid-size strategy studios rather than in-house AAA development. For a team working out of Dunedin, that distribution and marketing backing is likely a large part of why a niche concept like a space-whale city builder was able to reach a pre-launch wishlist count of 250,000, according to the game's launch press release.

Before We Leave built its reputation on a cozier, lower-stakes take on the city-builder genre, letting players rebuild a lost civilization across a handful of connected planets without any combat system at all. Beyond These Stars keeps that non-violent framing but swaps the fixed planetary map for a single, moving home base, forcing the Peeps to plan around a host that can carry them somewhere new at any time.

Where to Play It, and for How Much

Beyond These Stars is available now on PC through Steam, the GOG store, the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store, and it is included on PC Game Pass from day one. It carries a list price of $29.99, discounted 20% to $23.99 for a two-week launch window that runs through October 30, 2026.

The game ships with text and interface support across more than a dozen languages, including French, German, Japanese, Korean and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, with full audio support for English. There is no console version at launch; Balancing Monkey Games and Hooded Horse have not announced PlayStation or Xbox console ports.

What's Next

With the 1.0 build out, the immediate test for Beyond These Stars is whether its whale-back city-building hook holds up past the opening hours, a question that will largely be answered by Steam reviews and early Let's Plays rather than anything Balancing Monkey Games has said publicly since launch. The studio has not detailed a post-launch content roadmap, and there is no word yet on whether Beyond These Stars will follow Before We Leave onto consoles.

For now, the launch itself is the headline: a small New Zealand team has gotten a genuinely strange premise, a city balanced on a living creature crossing the stars, out the door and into players' hands.