"It's now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy."

If that sounds like an appealing premise for a sci-fi game, rejoice, for the creator of Minecraft has set it up as the overarching setting within which he will create his next game, titled 0x10c. The reason for the name is predictably geeky: it's in reference to a coding error that caused people entering cryogenic sleep to remain in that state for eons. Your mission, should you choose to play the game, will be to explore the multiverse those people find themselves waking up to, with a trusty spaceship that you can use to battle against AI or other players or simply trade and barter your way to success.

It wouldn't be a Notch game without plenty of user customization options and indeed the promised feature list doesn't disappoint. You'll have a fully modeled 16-bit CPU at your disposal, to program and to hack away at, while your ship's power will be fixed and you'll need to prioritize your resource use.

Although the plot device of accidentally freezing humans for an age and a half may sound borrowed from Futurama and its ilk, Notch wants to keep this science fiction as "hard" as possible. By that he means that every deviation from currently accepted scientific principles will have to be justified — or corrected, where it's done in error — and he'll seek to deliver an experience that's as faithful to real science as possible.