Indie Game of the Week 429: The Station

One of my favorite subsubgenres in the increasingly broad Adventure space is what I call the "aftermath purveyor"—no pithy portmanteaus from me this time—which typically sees you introduced to a crime scene or a mystery after its players have already departed (either the area or from this mortal coil) and it's your task to decipher what happened when, why, and to whom. Many of these have a sci-fi angle to them also, compounding the mystery and dangers of space and interstellar travel with what are often human emotions and ulterior motives behind whatever skullduggery conspired in this place. I've played and reviewed a few of these as part of IGotW and elsewhere, including Tacoma, J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars, Adr1ft, Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock, Mission Critical, SOMA (to some extent), Prey (likewise in an incidental context, since there's monsters chasing you), and the more recently covered Mouthwashing. This week's game, The Station by... The Station, sees you visiting an observation facility named The Espial that is orbiting around a planet inhabited by a sapient species in permanent violent conflict, with the idea being to silently and stealthily observe this species without arousing their curiosity or ire. However, the titular station went dark a few weeks into its mission and—among other systems—the stealth system has been disabled, allowing it to be observed by any of these alien creatures were they to point a telescope at it. Your task is to determine what happened and, if needed, destroy the station, its technology, and all evidence of its presence before it falls into the hands of these primitive, warlike beings.

We're very much playing in the space created by Gone Home and games of that nature: one where exploration and observation of an eerily deserted location play key roles in the moment-to-moment gameplay while a slowly unfolding overarching narrative chugs along in the background in a manner almost parenthetical to your inspections. You discover that the three-man crew were in loggerheads for most of their time here: the captain Mila was overworked and overstressed trying to live up to her celebrated military hero father while dealing with the dangers of the mission; the science officer Silas is generally displeased with the mission and its corporate-mandated parameters, preferring the honesty of first contact over this surreptitious espionage; and the engineer/mechanic Aiden finds himself struggling to pay for his estranged family's well-being and is tempted by offers to sabotage the mission for a payout. As you discover more about these unseen characters, including where they eventually ended up, the game starts spinning its webs of potential chicanery as you piece together how the station ended up the way it did and why.

Like its inspirational antecedents much has been put into making the game's setting feel like a lived-in space, with many inessential items that can be picked up and turned around to observe at the player's leisure as well as several audio and written correspondence to help fill in backstory as well as contribute to the enigma of what happened immediately before the station went dark. The game has a handful of puzzles relating to finding a pertinent piece of information to open doors or other locked containers, such as the requirement to fix a maintenance robot to open the way to the bridge or finding a keycard inside a locker with a specific line-drawing-based locking mechanism. Most just require a little bit of observation of your surroundings rather than anything too mentally or physically taxing, owing to the game's focus to be the type of narrative-central game accessible to audiences of any skill level or familiarity with gaming. This also means the game has a roughly linear structure despite having access to half the station the moment you arrive: this is due to how the game rolls out its story one morsel of information at a time, letting you learn important data (and potentially some hints) when you're ready to hear it. Overall the game's about the length of a movie, which is probably about right since you might start piecing together where the conclusion is going if there's too much puzzle-solving busywork to contend with.

Visually the game is sharp with some realistic environments combined with more sci-fi flair like symbols used in place of normal text—necessary for some of the puzzles, it turns out—as well as some acceptable voice acting for the audio logs and writing for the musings of the crew in their private logs. The game does go for a bit of uneasy atmosphere by having random explosions and power fluctuations while exploring, some of which feel like they underline your feeling of progress somewhat—it only makes sense for some random event to happen if you triggered some kind of flag by finding the next breadcrumb along the trail, after all. It has some dumb stings for the more jumpscary type of moments, one of which the game itself admits to being a goof (since it was set-up as a prank by one of the NPCs), which feels like another Gone Home callback. Generally, though, this isn't the kind of game where you're expected to run for your life even if the informative pop-up that tells you which controller prompt is the sprint happens to appear just after a confidence-shaking tremor. For all its serious themes about legacies and interpersonal miscommunication and concerns about the dangers posed by us one day encountering a violent yet intelligent alien species, the game does have something of a sense of humor to it.

On the whole I quite enjoyed this little potboiler of a game, and it's another where I wish it was longer so I could spend more time immersed in its world picking over the detritus of a mission gone horribly awry. The set design of these types of games, even if 90% of it proves entirely superfluous, always makes them appealing to rummage through looking for narrative clues and other incidental details about the setting and the lore. It's definitely the sort of mid-tier budget, short-length adventure game that the Indie sector has become artful in weaving together and I'll forever be a sucker for a good aftermath purveyor game whether the gameplay emphasis is on elaborate logical deduction puzzles or just some plain ol' picking up a mug and turning it around and going "huh" and putting it back down again. (And, not to focus too much for fear of spoilers, but I quite liked how the game concluded too. Had my suspicions, but they only came late enough to make me feel smart without making the game feel too obvious about it either.)

Rating: 4 out of 5.