Heat Signature is perhaps the best game ever made, because I’m really good at it. It lives in my bones like nicotine, but it doesn’t give me lung cancer.
It’s the perfect mixture of skill, strategy, dumb luck, and comedic failure. Any game that lets you fuck yourself over in so many ways (setting off alarms and now 30 guys want to kill you, shooting out windows and getting sucked into the vacuum of space, bouncing a bullet off a shield and shooting yourself in the face, accidentally exploding an entire sector (and getting sucked into the vacuum of space), accidentally turning a turret back on so it shoots you, killing a guy with a sword who explodes when he dies, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.) but also lets you get out of so many fuck-ups through ingenuity and equipment (slowing down time to avoid the 30 guys who wanna kill you, piloting your pod remotely to catch yourself in the vacuum of space, using your own shield to reflect bullets back at guys, hacking turrets to kill your enemies, using exploding enemies as a distraction,etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. ) is gonna end up being one of my favorite games.
I’m a little too good at it now unfortunately. I know all the mechanics by heart and can basically take on almost any challenge entirely unarmed without even resorting to hijacking a ship and entirely blowing up the enemy ship, so it’s a little too easy. But I like that the skill ceiling is honestly not that far from the ground. Very few games let me achieve total mastery like Heat Signature.
It also really encourages role playing by giving characters different traits, good or bad, and letting you (me) build a back story for them as you (I) play. see:
Great game, perfect game, I love it, it will live in my heart forever.