Adr1ft – Solitary Space
Adr1ft is one of the most gorgeous and awe-inspiring games I’ve seen in a long while. The foreground of a space station in earth orbit that has sustained heavy damage with a backdrop of a beautiful globe that transitions from day to night and back again before your eyes is simply incredible. Unfortunately a lackluster mission structure that repeats itself and story that’s only slightly interesting compound to make an already short experience feel all the shorter by the lack of meat on the bone.
Adr1ft begins in an increasingly familiar style these days – following a disaster on the HAN-IV space station we’ve inhabited for years with our colleagues, we are left with a busted EVA suit and a need to evacuate as quickly as possible. The first thing immediately noticeable in Adr1ft is the pure beauty of the game and magic that ThreeOneZero was able to cram into the spaces the player wanders through in their adventure to depart the HAN-IV and return to earth.
As Commander Alex Oshima, we quickly learn that we are most likely the only remaining crew member of the HAN-IV and our only objective is to get out, and hopefully home. As we pilot Oshima through the environment using WASD to move in the typical fashion, the movement feels almost weightless. Momentum can continue to carry you forward, and a quick tap of the S key while moving forward helps slow or stop. Holding left or right click has Oshima go up or down, respectively, and hitting Q or E rotates the cosmic vagabond. Adr1ft could pretty easily be nauseating or disorienting, but ThreeOneZero nailed not just the controls but also the feeling of orientation in a way that if you try to assign a horizon to part of the game, you’ll always feel off. If you instead orient your own vision and mindset to being free of a true “top” or “bottom” you’ll have a much better time and find your way more easily. Holding both mouse buttons at once serves as a type of air-brake, F is used as the general interaction key, and G pulses out a scan to find things like oxygen and other collectibles (audiologs, SSD’s, repair stations, etc.).
Oxygen management on your EVA suit is the name of surviving the harsh realities of space. Safe from things like temperature and management of things like hunger, thirst and other survival staples, the real challenge is charting course from internal to external environments while grabbing oxygen canisters along the way. Some of the most harrowing moments happen early in the game as a fairly crippled Oshima with limited oxygen supply. Floating out of the relative safety of the last checkpoint while staring at what you are pretty sure is your next objective and hoping that your aim and oxygen get you there in one piece. Flying from structure to structure in order to repair systems to fire the emergency lifeboat for Oshima to get home is genuinely fun, as the set pieces built around these moments are actually gorgeous to take in, and serve as the closest most of us will get to a spacewalk for many years to come.
Adr1ft is absolutely stunning to look at and be in. The juxtaposition of dark space and the huge, detailed, and bright Earth model that takes up a majority of the skybox when floating around the space is inspired and near motivational as memories of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot run through the mind and instantly convey the feeling that the player is all alone, and space is indeed a lonely place. Traversing the shattered husk of what was the engineering marvel known as HAN-IV is another instance of incredible design. The crisp whites splashed with blue, orange, green, and the occasional red, brilliantly showcase the ingenious use of color and lighting in Adr1ft and easily serve as great screenshot and trailer material. Sections of the serene beauty of space dotted with debris and full of shrapnel from the initial accident fill the space and make the whole play area feel extremely tragic, yet beautiful. Indoor scenes are just as beautiful in a different way – with those splashes of color applied in a thoughtful manner; vivid green plants line the hall you’re floating through, the blue lined walls bounce off the pure white while dots of condensation sit in stasis between you and the door. It’s simply fun to float through these environments.
Problems come with the mission structure of this experience, as it’s the same thing repeated four or five times. Approach console, get a report saying the core is bad, needs fabricated, repaired, and replaced. Got it. The true disappointment here is the fact that the feeling of desperation, loneliness, and enduring hope present in other media like The Martian or Gravity just aren’t explored. It’s up to the player to feel these things as they aren’t inherently part of the story and only seem as though they’re hopefully going to make their way in to your play through. This lack of expansion and sense of doing the same thing over and over, even if the end-goal is one you want to see delivered, gets boring and especially predictable to the end of it being disappointing and ultimately a huge turn off. There’s also disappointment to be found in capitalizing on great audio moments. For instance, an audio log can be found referring to the JFK moon speech hitting the comms while one of your colleagues was on a spacewalk. While this is neat, we hear this from a recording, when it would’ve been infinitely more interesting to hear that speech or another come across at some point after hearing this audiobook.
Progressing through the different sections to power up and repair before returning home, we are treated to some upgrades like more oxygen capacity, a boost while moving and holding the shift key, and more that are shown on the HUD but disabled until you unlock them. While they’re good and well-meaning upgrades, reflecting now, I enjoyed my early game hours more because they were so precious. Every moment from oxygen chest to oxygen chest was a gamble. As you progress, the game doesn’t get necessarily more or less difficult, but only introduces a few new challenges and the abilities unlocked seem to negate them pretty quickly.
Pros
- Absolutely stunning environments in and out
- Controls are responsive, surprising especially as weightlessness can be difficult to hit
Cons
- Mission structure is not just repetitive, but identical
- A few crashes, but the ThreeOneZero team is aware and working to resolve (according to Steam forums)
- Short experience meant to inspire ends up feeling lacking
The Bottom Line
Adr1ft is an absolutely stunning visual experience. It looks amazing and feels great to be in nearly at all times. That is until you progress to the point when you realize you’re doing the exact same thing in a new sector of the ship, not even with different objectives or quick time moments to try to mask the fact that you’re hitting enter to make yet another core and plug it in. The whole experience is relatively short, and while it’s something to behold visually and feels good while in it, it might not be something for everyone.
Disclosure - this review was originally posted elsewhere by myself, but as there are currently no reviews for Adr1ft I wanted to put my critique up. I did receive a code for review purposes on PC courtesy of ThreeOneZero games.
