• Game: Blackbird Interactive's Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
• Release Month: May.
• Quick Look: Here (Vinny / Rorie [Unfinished]).
• Started: 17/12.
• Completed: 31/12.

The reason I've never taken to job simulation games—the Farming Simulators and Truck Simulators of the world—is because their overly quotidian nature lulls me into a stupor before I've even had the chance to boot one up and find out what makes it tick. Each game of its type presents challenges both expected, such as carefully navigating the roads and obeying traffic laws to take Truck Simulator as an example, and unexpected, such as the amount of momentum added by the trailer and the significant difference between your turning cycles with or without it. That is to say, between the nuance and the realism and the slightly slower pace these games are usually compelling for a reason, yet in my aversion to hard graft and an honest day's work I just can't seem to find my way into them. That's why something a bit more out-there (like, way out there) such as Hardspace: Shipbreaker has proven to be a more effective gateway into games that, by intention, feel like work.

In Hardspace: Shipbreaker you are an anonymous job-seeker who signs up to be one of LYNX Corporation's orbital spaceship-dismantling technicians. The task is simple enough on paper: using a versatile cutter and an anti-gravity grapple capable of wielding a considerable amount of mass (though things don't tend to weigh much in outer space) you are to take apart decommissioned spaceships one component at a time, sending the parts to one of three destinations: a furnace for soft metals like aluminum and titanium, a processor for nanocarbon and other impenetrable space-faring hull materials that are built to survive incinerating heat, and an inertia-dampening "barge" forcefield to collect reusable components like computers, aerials, light fixtures, furnishings, and other important (and, more importantly, intact) ship gubbins. As you progress through the game, your job rank increases and so too does the "hazard level" of vehicles you have access to: this might include removing reactors before they go into meltdown, disconnecting fuel tanks before they explode, depressurizing ships in a controlled manner so they don't fling themselves out into open space, and so on. Likewise, the vehicles you tackle get ever bigger: I've just unlocked the Gecko-class, which are massive multi-purpose ships that take several hours to carefully cut down to manageable pieces. Framing the game is a story about how apathetic and penny-pinching the LYNX Corporation continues to be about everyone's safety and job satisfaction alike: you're given a debt in excess of a billion dollars as soon as you begin—between renting your orbital habitat and gear as well as a mandatory sign-up to the company's "spares" program that will clone you after every premature demise—and even after some twenty hours with the game I've barely made a dent in it. You meet and converse with other breakers in the region, such as the amiable and diplomatic Weaver and the compassionate if hotheaded Lou, and there's various whispers regarding the formation of a union (thoroughly demonized by the corporate class by the near-future setting of the game), so I'm guessing the conclusion of this story is as close to an end-point as the game has.

However, much like the ships themselves, Hardspace: Shipbreaker feels very modular due in part to having been in early access for over two years. The game has plenty going on besides the ship-breaking grind and the story happening in the background over the comms channel, including a side-quest where you're given a fixer-upper spaceship for your eventual retirement that you can continue to work on by salvaging spare parts from the ships you're dismantling (as long as you're quiet about it, that is). There's also data discs you can find that contain random audio logs and emails that help fill in more about this vaguely The Expanse-like sci-fi setting, posters and stuffed toys that will start filling up your habitat between missions, and a robust upgrade system that throws more nodes at you than you can afford early on in order to let you prioritize the tools and skills you value most followed by a long late-game buffer to earn all the points you need to buy the rest: the upgrades stop unlocking at Certification Rank 20, but you can continue getting promoted for another ten levels after that. Naturally, to earn these upgrade points along with the experience required to level up, you need to perform well on each task: there are multiple milestones based on the percentage successfully salvaged, though you can lose out on the higher targets if you cause too much damage, drop too many valuable components in the wrong deposit, or leave too much unprocessed at the end of the day. I tend to clock out once the last salvage milestone has been met, though if you're fastidious enough you can try to clear every scrap still floating around your work area.

You can also see where the game has benefitted from player feedback during its long tenure in early access. When starting, you can choose the regular story mode or an alternative "Open Shift" mode: the only difference is that the latter doesn't impose a "daily" fifteen minute time limit for shifts that makes paying off the debt (which is added to every day) that much tougher, and instead lets you cut apart ships at your own pace: say, in twenty or thirty minute chunks when you only have a lunch break to work with, or much longer sessions when you have a whole afternoon or evening free. Given the larger ships can take upwards of 90 minutes to two hours, that fifteen minute time limit is both restrictive and really gets in the way of the game's Zen-like flow. The Open Shift mode also lets you decide to skip the oxygen draining aspect, which is an ever-persistent nag to drop everything (or let it float there, I guess) and hit the vendor back at your habitat for an extra tank of that sweet, sweet air before you asphyxiate—and, yes, the company expects you to pay for it, along with thruster fuel, medpacks, suit patch kits, extra tethers for moving larger components, and everything else; the servitude is both the indentured and the indebted kind. Fortunately, achievements aren't voided if you go the Open Shift route, so you better believe I jumped on it.

With a game like this, what really sells the idea when you try to win others around to its charms are the many stories you naturally accrue like an asteroid gathers space moss (there's issues with this analogy, but let's press on). I've had no shortage of unexpected mishaps and close-shaves while working on ever tougher ships, and I'm already starting to reach a point where the complexity of the larger craft along with the higher level of danger is making for some real nail-biting moments. Here's a few examples:

• Depressurization is something the game doesn't spend nearly enough time explaining. The best means of ensuring the entire interior of the ship is voided is by using the Environmental Regulators found in many rooms to depressurize the ship from within, though this isn't always feasible. The second best is to deliberately open a hole to the outside at an angle where the explosive decompression won't cause the ship the careen off into one of the processors or furnaces. That is exactly what happened to me one of the first times I had to deal with pressurized interiors, and since I was inside the craft at the time I had no real way of telling that the ship was lurching ominously towards a fiery demise until I saw the corridor ahead of me start to slowly vaporize like it was flying into the sun. That led to me frantically cutting the ship in half where I was and multi-tethering every non-scorched surface to the opposite side of the work area to move it out of danger: I barely passed the goal target for that mission, as well as barely surviving my own early cremation.
• My second story concerns a Type-II Reactor. The deal with reactors is that the moment you pull them from their mooring (or something else jostles them out, see "explosive decompression" above) they go into meltdown mode. This is a timer, roughly thirty seconds long, to get that reactor into the barge where the meltdown is miraculously averted. Best practice is to carve the ship around it to pieces so you have a clear path through open space to yeet it into the barge's green forcefield ASAP. However, with the Type-IIs, the meltdown starts as soon as you disconnect it from the Environmental Control Unit (a whole other kettle of fish, and a good way of turning yourself into a popsicle from its coolant tanks) and the thrusters. I didn't realize this, and I don't think the game adequately explained what was going to happen: I was still under the assumption that I was then safe to remove it at my leisure at a later moment when more of the ship hull had been removed. So now I have a reactor going into meltdown with most of the ship still around it. Since removing hull pieces means cutting at various marked "cut points", I had to go into overdrive carving a path outwards (you can't cut into the hull directly with your tiny industrial cutter after all,: as they're built to withstand atmospheric re-entry, your cutter might as well be a laser pointer to it) and then finding out that the reactor also has a shield around it that you also have to remove. I had less than three seconds on the timer when the reactor finally touched down into the barge. (The best part about removing reactors? Your mostly mute character actually starts breathing harder once the meltdown sequence starts; they're panicking just as much as you are.)
• Last is a group of smaller stories concerning my nemesis: the fuel tank. No matter what I do, I can't seem to stop setting these things off. They're not worth a whole lot so it's not like the total salvage value drops if you miss out on them, but they do have this nasty habit of exploding in your face. That causes considerable damage to the surrounding ship and, well, to you as well. I found that you need to flush the pipes before you start cutting into them—obvious in retrospect, but the game didn't feel the need to tell me about these flush switches—and then be extremely careful when using the cutter to unmoor the tanks from the pipe system. Last time I ran afoul of one, it was because I had to use demolition charges to remove the ring that held the tank in place. I didn't exactly think that one through, granted, but the alternative was to drop the fuel tank with the ring intact in the barge and lose out on money either way (the ring was intended for the processor). I have since upgraded the demo charges to have smaller explosion ranges, so hopefully if I encounter that set-up again it might go a little more smoothly and a little less boom-ly. I've also started to take apart quasar thrusters, which have a very specific disassembly sequence I had to look up: since the thruster's container is too narrow to navigate through: you have to freeze the fuel pipes with coolant first, cut into all four of them to free the thruster and drop it into the barge, and then very quickly whizz through the gap it leaves behind and down the long thruster container tube to disconnect the fuel pipes at the bottom. I've yet to have this go tits-up on me, but given how close it's felt on every occasion—and there's not many places where you can escape a conflagration inside a narrow tube—I'm sure it's only a matter of time before one of those things cooks my goose.

Even as I wrap this up—I have other games I need to get to before GOTY is done around here, despite the site jumping the gun far too early—I've just unlocked "ghost ships" as a dismantling option and I have absolutely no idea what kind of Event Horizon "Libera Te Tutemet Ex Inferis" BS awaits me in one of those creepy things. The game definitely has legs to it, even if you've been playing so long that you spuriously believe you have the right process down pat, and even as repetitive as the work can be (especially once the fun, dangerous steps are taken care of early) I'm still finding myself fully invested in its loop. It's definitely one of my favorites so far this year, and I'm curious to see if it'll beat a certain other improbable job simulator from 2022 that may or may not involve high-pressure water hoses once I get around to that game and rank it also. For now, I'll probably continue to hop in a few times a week to carve a big ol' cargo hauler down to its constituent parts and rake in a pile of dough that those dang corporations won't let me keep. Curious to see also if the developers will continue to add new content this far removed from its full 1.0 release, since there's plenty more they can do. Personally, I'd like to take apart one of those there Corellian light freighters, or maybe a Martian frigate that's the spitting image of the Rocinante...

Current GOTY

1. Elden Ring
2. Tinykin
3. Hardspace: Shipbreaker
4. Tunic
5. Signalis
6. Return to Monkey Island
7. HoloCure
8. Ghost Song

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