The Hull Rupture tutorial is a settings option, not a cutscene you click through: it lives in General settings and switching it off takes a few seconds. There is no skip button in the middle of a run, which is exactly why players who were not interested in it kept asking for one — but the toggle is in the menu, and it works.
Where the Hull Rupture tutorial lives
Open General settings in the main menu and switch the tutorial on or off there. Once you are inside a run, you cannot skip the tutorial level partway through; the setting is the only off switch, so deciding before you launch is the whole trick.
What the tutorial teaches you
The tutorial level is where Hull Rupture introduces the three systems you will touch in every single wave: energy, humans, and your first weapon stations. Those three are the reason it is worth finishing once rather than fighting the settings menu — by the time the tutorial ends you have already seen the economy tick over and watched aliens walk into a turret, which is the fastest possible explanation of the core loop.
After it, the first real wave is about applying what you saw. The 20-wave survival plan picks up from exactly there.
The demo's second tutorial step
The Steam Next Fest demo shipped with a tutorial level, and its first major update on September 14, 2026 added a second tutorial step explaining Hull Construction — the mode that replaces travelling to a Shipyard in order to expand your ship. That second step is the one most players missed, because the demo did not ship it and the tutorial in the full game covers it.
If you never played the demo, the tutorial in the full game teaches you Hull Construction directly.
Returning demo players need to re-enable it
There is a quirk for anyone who played the earlier demo. When the September update landed, an earlier playthrough's tutorial was already marked as complete, so the new Hull Construction step did not start automatically. The old completion flag suppresses the new content, and the fix is to switch the tutorial back on in General settings.
The same September update also marked the tutorial complete for returning demo players, and unlocked the no-combat mode and all previously available artifacts for them. The demo progress guide covers what carries over from the demo and what does not.
Is it worth finishing?
In the full game it is a one-time cost at most. The launch post states that players who completed the tutorial in the demo will not have to play through it again, and new players pay it once, in the first run, in exchange for the fastest explanation of energy, crew and guns the game offers.