A sci-fi action game with a first-person perspective. The player must fix a series of starships with failing systems before they explode, contending with runaway alien lifeforms throughout.
ST-urday's going to keep going down this Eurotrash hole for the time being, looking at the sorts of unique products coming out of my home continent in the late 80s and early 90s. We're back in the UK with Gremlin Graphics as it turns out, the developers behind the adaptations of board games Space Crusade and HeroQuest - the former was covered during the Estival ST Festival and the latter's definitely on the upcoming list. They acted as publishers for this particular game: the developer was a guy named Dr. Dinosaur. Yeah.
As for the past week, well, it's been a period of highs and lows. The passing of Satoru Iwata is a heavy blow that this industry, let alone Nintendo, won't be quick to recover from. It's a common observation that the higher up a corporate chain a person gets, the less they seem like a human; every public appearance they make is carefully crafted and stilted so as to not to lose face or seem weak in front of investors and millions of consumers. Iwata cared more about the games he was producing to ever let any of those corporate charades get to him, and dared to be silly in his frequent appearances in the Iwata Asks and Nintendo Directs his company would regularly produce. Dude always came across as genuine, and I hope Nintendo carries on in that spirit. Please understand.
On the flip side, between Contradiction: Spot the Liar! and Rocket League, we've had a lot of fun with GBEast coverage this week. And I was concerned there'd be nothing to show this month, smack dab in the middle of the Summer slump. Here's hoping next week will be just as entertaining; between SGDQ (check out my write-up for a Wiki Project concerning SGDQ if you haven't seen it yet) and Rick and Morty season 2 on the 26th, I just need to hang in there for another six days. I suppose there is that Metal Gear Solid 4 playthrough I've been putting off...
Federation Quest 1: B.S.S. Jane Seymour
Federation Quest 1: B.S.S. Jane Seymour (US title is "Spacewrecked: 14 Billion Light Years From Earth") is one of those games that, from all appearances, seems steeped in obtuse rules and mechanics, but is actually deceptively straightforward. You do need some direction before playing it though, which is why I'm here (or perhaps the wiser choice would be an online copy of the manual). There's a lot to unpack, but let's just start with the title.
I believe the Federation Quest series was meant to be a multi-part series of dungeon crawling games with a sci-fi theme. Think something like Captive, which I covered a little while ago in a Brief Jaunt: the mechanics of Dungeon Master, just with a handful of modifications to make it work in a sci-fi setting. I don't know how well this first game did, but it probably says something that there wasn't ever a Federation Quest 2. B.S.S. Jane Seymour is the setting of the game: a spaceship that was briefly lost to the Federation for over a year after being hit with the radiation from a nova before reappearing with failing systems and still a considerable amount of distance to go before reaching Earth (no Event Horizon hell dimensions, fortunately (or unfortunately?)). The player is one of the surviving crew, and must systematically repair each ship in BSS Jane Seymour's fleet (there's twenty, so that's twenty "dungeons") until they can get the transporters back online and can head over to the next one. The flagship at the very end of the chain is thought to have enough fuel to make the trip back home to Earth, though it'll also be the closest to full meltdown in the time it'll take to get there.
Of course, it's never that simple. Captured alien specimens have escaped and are rampaging across the ships, crewmembers have mentally deteriorated due to sustained cryosleep and are now psychotic madmen and every ship is continually losing power to vital systems, including life support. There's a ticking clock to every mission, though fixing a few key systems gives you some breathing room to fix the rest. While it's all a little confusing and stressful with that time limit and your limited means to defend yourself from hostiles, each of the twenty ships follow a similar repair process and you'll get into the swing of things quickly enough.
It's also distinctly less "RPG" than other games in the genre as your character never goes up levels or gets stronger: rather, the goal for each mission is to explore the ship, repair the key systems with coolant and move onto the next one. It's simply that items and geography get shifted around, tougher monsters are present and more systems begin on the fritz as you get further along. It's an odd format for a game - an action-adventure game with a dungeon-crawling format that emphasizes your role in the story as an engineer and mechanic with limited martial ability. It's a bit like EA's Dead Space in that regard, and almost as spooky when the lights go out.
That's essentially how every mission goes in BSS Jane Seymour: the player has to quickly establish a foothold, find a number of items that range from crucial (flasks, pass cards, a weapon) to handy (an applicator, a communicator, robots) to downright pointless (crappier weapons, that dumb guidebook joke). As there's no RPG mechanics and no merchants, there's no reason to hang onto anything you don't need. It's a game about efficiency and exploration, and you're always bouncing between one objective or another. It does mean that the game gets a little repetitive - especially as every solution is the same - but there's a clarity that comes with always having some clear target to work towards. The game can also do some mean things with the "established route" once it gets further in, like hide the flux whatsit on the opposite side of the ship and turn all the lights off.
It's an interesting experiment, using the constraints of this very specific real-time first-person format with which to create a game that's really more like a sci-fi puzzle/strategy affair with some action and exploration thrown in. The sort of curiosity I purposefully began this feature to highlight, in fact.
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