Last week, we played a game about moving through a heavenly space as quickly as possible, murdering all the demons we encounter along the way, catering to speedrunners looking to climb the leaderboards for the best possible times.
So now, it’s time for the complete opposite. Let’s enjoy a slower-paced, lo-fi experience about breaking down, and salvaging spaceships. This is Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
This game, at its core, is a celebration of manual labor and how joyous it can be in a vacuum. You might not think a manual labor job would make for compelling gameplay, but you would be wrong. There is a primitive joy in breaking down the individual components of each ship, watching it get reduced into parts for processing or resale. And as the player masters the discipline, teaching themselves how to expert and efficiently do the work, it feels good.
But more than that, the game is also about how the joy of these jobs can be sucked away by the oppressive systems that they exist under (read: capitalism). This is a world where legends of “labor unions” that existed hundreds of years ago are spoken in hushed tones, lest the company begin to crack down even further. As the player, we’re insulated from these forces, able to focus on the task at hand, but the characters in the plot are constantly brought low by circumstances outside of their control, which cause stress that bleeds into the work.
It’s an intensely empathetic experience unlike any I’ve played before, and I look forward to finishing it.
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