FTL: Faster Than Light

It’s hard not to get hyperbolic when I talk about FTL. Is it technically perfect, by this or that standard? Maybe not. Maybe some random events repeat too often and maybe the balance of ships and weapons isn't flawless. But listen to me: FTL is a ground-breaking, earth-shaking, solar system-quaking, knock-out of doom. Awesome, fun, likeable doom.

Permadeath is the buzzword you’ll be reading about more and more, and its latest popularity is probably due to the FTL-XCOM one-two punch that hit us in 2012. But whereas death is a slow sting that cripples you over time in XCOM (maybe to a horrible, 25 hour, murder by attrition), in FTL it’s just The End. Game Over. A “run” in the game typically lasts 20 minutes to 2 hours, sometimes 3 if it’s a very methodical run. After 40 some hours with the game, I've yet to beat it on the normal difficulty. The basic idea is that because death is serious, you care more about the . This is true of most games with permadeath, but this feeling is usually quick to be replaced by frustration or boredom at the lack of real progress.

The fact that I'm still not deterred from returning, that I still get chills when I hear the ping of the menu music is what separates FTL from so many other try & die games I've played the last two years. This one is a classic. And it’s not a classic because it’s hard, but because it’s unpredictable and unforgettable – and what I mean by unforgettable is that FTL is like a bike. Once you learn it, you’re good. You can walk away and come back whenever. The fact that there is a brutal boss fight at the end of the bike ride is irrelevant, because the ride is so damn amazing. There's an argument to be made that the endgame requires players to forsake total creativity and rely on more specific, known strategies, but in my experience this is easily upended by ignoring the facts. By simply treating the first seven sectors as "the game" and sector eight (where doom awaits you) as the bonus stage, I found myself playing a dream many of us have held on to for a long time: STAR TREK.

For all the legitimate & cloner Star Trek games out there, FTL is the closest anyone has come to replicating the feel and promise of the franchise. Sure, there's less diplomacy than I'd like, but the randomness of the game and sheer ill luck that can hit you allows the game to have wild swings in tone. One run may be smooth: you'll travel from station to station, meeting friendly faces, trading where you can; pirates will pose little challenge, and your route will be unimpeded by serious storms or the dreaded, wretched solar flares. Another may be a horror: you lose half your crew early on to a surprise attack during a moment of weakness; still burning from the encounter, you arrive at an abandoned station and lose another man to the darkness inside. A lucky landing at a space trader gives you a chance to repair your hull and hire an extra hand, but fate swings again, and you find your pilot alone in a burning ship, your crew murdered by mantis pirates. They teleport away as the last of the oxygen is syphoned out the open doors, and just before your pilot takes a last cough and chokes, the ship explodes.

(break for a moment of silence)

The different ships you unlock, their variants, the race abilities, weapons and ship upgrades… these things feel like they all matter in FTL. This is why every run feels like it could be “the one”. Each tool is so different and the ships (especially) will really alter the way you approach the run. Add to this the unique crew members who join you and the skills they build over time and you’ll soon discover that FTL is an incredible emergent narrative generator, one that completely overrides it’s seemingly linear structure – the only constant is that you are a space captain, and space is a bitch. NASTRANGELO VII may crash and burn like it’s predecessors, but I swear to you I’ve never assembled a finer collection of men, women and slugs.

If I sit still and think about it for a moment, the ambient music spools back into my head. The balance of calm, slow space and tight, to-the-millisecond tension is a real addictive mix. The fact that it is the linchpin of game that desires only to replicate the excitement of managing a spaceship is enough to sell me on it a hundred times over. Not since Starflight have I felt so much in space, so much the captain on deck. Now quick! Man the engines!