Been messing around with two anti-capitalist dystopian outer space sci-fi games on gamepass.
Citizen Sleeper: This is the best CRPG I’ve played since Disco Elysium. It’s similarly mechanics-lite, with all choices made via boardgame-influenced dice management. The gameplay is simple but satisfying, all about prioritizing your various obligations to people in the short amount of time you get each day. It’s sort of like social links in Persona combined with dice slotting and rolling, and very simple currency and inventory management. The worldbuilding and writing are both excellent – a baseline of solid pulpy sci-fi throughout, punctuated by occasional brilliance. Basically, you’re an emulated consciousness in a robot body, you’ve escaped your corporate owners, and you’re trying to make your way as a refugee on an independent space station that’s a few decades out from a semi-successful revolution. This one is a real winner, I’m totally hooked.
Hardspace Shipbreaker: You’re a laborer at a hyper-exploitative space corporation; your job is to salvage wrecked spaceships for scraps. You work at an open-air (well, it’s space, so open-void) scrap yard, and every day you choose an assignment, one of a variety of different starship models that has been towed to your yard. In first person view, you float around in zero G and use various tools to cut the ship apart, then use a gravity gun to shoot the parts into salvage bins and furnaces. You’ve started the game with an unreasonably high debt, and you’re trying to repay it.
So far I’ve only played the tutorial and the first full ship. This game makes me think of that big trend of countless janky, first-person sim games like “Car Mechanic Simulator” or “PC Building Simulator”, but it seems a bit more polished than most of those.
The controls are incredibly fiddly and complex because you have to maneuver in zero gravity. The most annoying thing to me is that your mouse look (or in my case, controller look) has intense momentum. When you move your camera, the camera has to ramp up in speed, and then it has to slowly come to a stop at the end, usually overshooting the spot you meant to look. At first I thought this was a bug, but apparently they’re trying to simulate the inertia of, like, rotating your head in space… or something. It feels TERRIBLE, especially because the game is constantly asking you to make precision cuts in spaceship parts. It’s so hard to get your reticle in the exact spot you need it when it drifts every time you move it. I know eventually you can upgrade various parts of your suit and toolset including your thrusting mechanisms, so maybe you can fix this later with an upgrade.
Aside from the terrible controls, I actually kind of like this game. It feels really satisfying to methodically strip a spaceship for parts. Especially if upgrades help the controls, I could imagine this as a great game to play while listening to music or a podcast. The writing is alright; they lay on the corporate satire unreasonably thick, like whenever you’re in a story bit it’s 5 jokes about bad workplace policies per second. But it’s kind of funny how hard it just blows your hair back right from the start.
The game is sort of hinting that I’ll find, like, data dumps and artifacts on some of the ships I break down, so maybe it’ll go in a weird cool direction.
