The Orville's ship, rebuilt room by room — and empty if you board alone

A small studio keeps fine-tuning its replica of the show, one deck at a time — and the players who genuinely recommend it almost always brought company aboard.

An obsessive replica, deck by deck

At the helm on the bridge, you can try to reproduce one very specific gesture from the show: hugging the donkey. It is an inside joke that lands only with viewers who have seen the episode it came from, and it is exactly the sort of detail that Messy Desk Interactive, the studio behind the project, tucked into every deck of the USS Orville. The mess hall looks out through the same glass at the Planetary Union shipyard in Earth orbit that the series puts on screen; Bortus and Clyden's quarters can be trashed or tidied by whoever wanders in; and somewhere aboard sits a program the game itself will only call special, never saying where — finding it is your job.

You can roam the ship on your own, in first or third person, or pull friends in over text and voice chat and divide the stations among you: one at the helm, one working the matter synthesizers to conjure objects, place them and decorate their own quarters, one taking a shuttle out for a lap around the shipyard. You can bowl in the simulator, switch the ship's alert status and watch the whole environment answer — there is a mode whose only purpose is celebrating like a Moclan — or head into the Unknown Sector against Kaylon ships. Underneath all of it runs an original score by Patrick Phillips, with themes that echo the show's.

Steam files the title under casual, simulation and Early Access, and it runs on Windows and Mac. It launched on July 23, 2019, published by Messy Desk Interactive itself — whose website is, with no attempt at disguise, orvillefangame.co.uk. The name gives the game away: this is fan work, built by people who wanted to walk around inside a ship that existed only on screen.

Still under the hood, long after launch

The studio's update feed is one patch after another, a long run of small repairs and fine adjustments, year after year. The latest fix on record, dated September 11, 2026, deals with things that are tiny and telling at once — chairs that stayed flagged as occupied after the player sitting in them dropped out of a multiplayer session, or music that ignored the volume slider on the quarters-decorating screens. That is the kind of repair you only make to a game somebody is still genuinely playing and testing.

The most visible leap came on November 20, 2025, when the studio ran the cables between Stellar Cartography and the helm. Suddenly you could push past the starting catalogue of scenarios and actually explore the galaxy: long-range sensors to read the neighborhood, new classes of star and planet, a new supernova site, worlds sitting inside their own star's habitable zone. A game that in 2019 handed you a ship to visit had, years on, a reason to leave it.

The March 15, 2026 update added Spanish as a new language, fully translated, and Simplified Chinese, still partial — but not Portuguese, the language a good share of this dossier's admirers wrote in. And not every addition reaches everyone at the same time: the September 2026 fix shipped for Windows only, because work on the Mac build had already moved on to the following update.

Anyone who has seen the show recognizes every corner

In the reviews left on the game's own Steam page, the praise that comes back most often is not about what the game does — it is about what it brings back. One player who returned to write about the project on June 25, 2023, with no playtime at all logged on the account, talks about missing the show and about the promise of assembling a real crew in multiplayer, but cautions that, of what they tried, only the pilot's station truly responds; the rest of the bridge is still waiting for you to keep testing. Another, with two hours in on August 30, 2024, hopes the project earns a future of its own, out from under the shadow of the series that inspired it.

Players with more screen time tend to boil the merit down to a single line: what impresses is the technical skill of a tiny team, not the game itself — that was the verdict on August 13, 2022, from someone with three hours already on the clock. And a player who came aboard in November 2020, one hour in, is blunt about who this is for: without the series behind you there is not much here; with it, there is some fun to be had.

The most recent entry on the favorable side, from September 19, 2026, is also the most qualified. The writer identifies as a fan of the show and credits the sheer level of detail in the replica, but points out that the graphics engine underneath cannot carry that much reconstruction: performance and image quality wobble, and some flaws surface. Even so, they recommend half an hour aboard to anyone fond of the series, and add a separate regret — that another project from the same developers was shut down on an outside decision, handed down by the Hollywood studios. A few days earlier, on September 16, 2026, another player could not even get the elevator to work, and recommended it regardless, finding the merit not in the craft but in the stubbornness of a small group keeping a project made by fans, for fans, on its feet.

A warship in the trailer, an empty house on the decks

The harshest verdict in the dossier is also the most recent: on September 26, 2026, with no hours on the counter at all, a player sums the experience up as something that barely functions — it freezes, it stutters constantly, there is no map to orient yourself with, and the little physics there is was done badly.

A longer review from September 13, 2026, written by someone with three hours behind them, helps explain the shock. The promotional video promised Kaylon ships and other characters in motion; what is actually there is animation — nothing you pilot, nothing you fight. The ship itself becomes a second letdown: not one enemy, no mission script, maps small enough that there is little to do in them, every door and every action locked to a fixed, pre-set sequence. Walking it feels like getting lost in a silent maze with no signage to point you anywhere. Their conclusion is precise: it works for fans of the series willing to trade away stability and optimization, because what this is is improvised role-play among friends, not a combat game.

Bring someone along, or leave the hatch shut

What splits the dossier's most recent reviews is not whether the writer likes the series: it is what each of them expected to find on boarding. If you are happy to wander rather than fight, you come away satisfied even after tripping over a broken elevator. If you are after the action game the promotional video implies — Kaylon ships, real combat — you find precisely what the harshest verdict described: small maps, no enemy, a fixed script repeating the same handful of gestures.

The real measure has nothing to do with loving the show: it is whether you go aboard alone. The review that prizes the project most highly talks about rounding up people to share the stations on the bridge — while admitting that, so far, only the pilot really answers the controls. On your own, even with the helm unlocked and the donkey waiting for its hug, what you are piloting is an empty museum.