Let's Sperg The Long Journey Home - Star Control meets Roguelike

[Ginger Piglet]

I got this because it was reduced to half price on Steam. I've had a bit of a go at it and failed miserably every time, so I thought I'd Lets Sperg it for you lot so you can all laugh at my ineptitude.

The setup is this - at some time in the future, possibly after Elon Musk's Tesla has reached Mars but before we've wiped ourself out with nuclear war, the International Aeronautic and Space Administration develops a faster than light drive and plans a mission for four bold adventurers to take humanity's first giant leap into interstellar space by jumping to Alpha Centauri for science. Unfortunately it all goes a little tiny bit tits up...

It's therefore up to you to bring them home, braving uncharted planets, resource shortages, weird cosmic phenomena, hostile and/or amorous aliens, and almost certain death from running out of oxygen.

So, are we all strapped in? Let's lift off!

The first stage is to pick your team. You can choose from a theoretical physicist, a test pilot, an archaeologist, an eccentric billionaire, a botanist, a veteran astronaut, a mechanical engineer, an electronic engineer, a secret government researcher, and a blogger. Because I'm genre savvy enough to know that the obvious joke character turns out to be surprisingly useful, the blogger is my first pick. I then pick the botanist, the test pilot, and the veteran astronaut.

(Yes, the blogger is the one with blue hair. She's called Zoe, and is Australian.)

Next, we have to pick our ship and lander type. I choose the Endurance because it's got a deep fuel tank and is tough as nails and the Serenity because it looks like the Apollo 11 lander.

It's a bit, well, unfortunate, that there's only three different ships and three different landers to choose from and you can't customise it, but it seems that you can find extra modules to bolt onto both.

Now, the seed from which the procedurally generated galaxy will be constructed. There's only one choice really. If you enter the same seed you can "replay" the same game over and over. It's referred to in the game statistics proper as the launch code.

And with that, all aboard, because it's time to lift off!

And this brings us to the main game screen proper. Navigation and encounters play very much like Star Control with having to thrust and navigate and avoid / encounter other ships or things albeit with additional gravity wells to contend with. You can't crash into planets, though, you simply scoot around them on autopilot but this emergency evasion hurts your hull, and doing the same around stars is a good way to give your crew cancer or radiation poisoning. For now, though, we have to go to Mars and pick up the jump drive and some fuel.

Once we've got into orbit about Mars, I send Malcolm, the pilot, down in the lander to retrieve the things. Going down onto planets is sort of reminiscent of the classic Lunar Lander arcade game though here there's also hazards such as wind, varying gravity, heat, atmospheric pressure, earthquakes, lightning, and other things that might hurt it.

Conversation is fairly similar to Star Control, if you're familiar with that. Picking dialogue options and suchlike. The music's not as cool though.

Now all that remains is to jump to Alpha Centauri. What could possibly go wrong? After all, we're only driving a coach and horses through every law of physics ever...

...Fuck.

So, where are our intrepid heroes? Find out next post!

 

[RadicalCentrist]

Is this early access? Looks breddy gud

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Is this early access? Looks breddy gud

Nope, been out for a year already. Got iffy reviews for being too hard with the lunar lander sequences and Star Control style combat. But it is half price on Steam.

Anyhow. The journey continues. When we last left our heroes they were trying to jump into Alpha Centauri and things went a little bit, how you say, tits up. They ended up in the middle of nowhere in a starship graveyard which doesn't look like Alpha Centauri.

Navigating the debris field, we come to a big glowing sphere that we can dock with. With no other options, we dock with it.

There's... something in there. Malcolm Winters, intrepid test pilot, gets into a space suit and goes for a wander around, finding a glowing thing called a Keystone that must have been interfering with our jump and lets us leave the area.

We leave the Sphere and get our bearings. There's a nearby planet called Sweelinck. It has carbon deposits, which we need. Basically there are three types of resource to dig for or gather. Metals are used to repair your ship and lander. Gases are used for fuel in normal space. Nonmetals are used to activate the warp drive and travel between star systems. Carbon is, of course, a nonmetal, and I want it. Moreover, the planetary conditions are pretty congenial. Malcolm gets into the lander and earns his pay some more.

This shows you how the drilling works. Drilling uses fuel as well as risking damage. Wear and tear is real and it's a tough universe out there, and subsystem damage can't be repaired right now. Full of lovely carbon, we lift off again.

So, where the bloody hell are we? I fire up the Galaxy Map to find out...

...Fuck.

37,847 parsecs? That is not a small distance. That is a very large distance. In fact, the Kaus Media system, our location, is so far away that the physical edge of the map is within our jump range.

(Wild Duck, incidentally, is the name of the star cluster we're in. Star clusters are named after actual nebulae that the Hubble telescope discovered, allegedly.)

Oh well, best get on with it then. We dig up the metal, and then scoop some hydrogen gas for normal space fuel. Gases can be scooped in two ways usually, either going into the upper layers of a gas giant and trying to catch pockets of the gas as they waft around in the wind towards you, or, for planetary gas deposits, hovering in the plume while scooping. The latter is a lot harder than it sounds. Bloody wind.

But wait, what's this? Looks like some unusual lifeforms on planet Serpieri. Floating forests. Malcolm Winters goes and investigates again.

We take the berries and think what to do with them. To the lab!

As you can see here, our crew members each have different ideas as to what to do with the things we find. Malcolm and Kirsten fancy eating them, which sounds really smart, guys. And Kirsten is supposed to be like a super veteran astronaut. (Her personal background is that she was retired due to being diagnosed with cancer but now it's turned terminal she's been brought out for one last hurrah as a gesture of respect to her massive spacefaring experience). Yes, eat rainbow berries you found on an alien planet full of living helium balloons. By the time you've shat your guts out, we'll be back home. I consider giving them to Ash, our botanist, to distill, but I get the impression he just wants to get wasted. So I give them to Zoe the blogger to see if she can find something out about them with the sensor suite.

Success! We get a lead on another interesting location. Unfortunately this ends their use; the game won't let me give them to Ash to distill because I would quite fancy getting wasted right now.

There's an asteroid cluster in this system also, we fire up the shields and go looking through it.

Blasting certain glowing asteroids yields platinum, a rare metal. Materials come in three grades, common, uncommon and rare and the rarity value determines how much the appropriate meter is refilled. It also determines how much they're worth but more on that later. I hold onto these.

We jump out to the Horsnebara system, this being the only other star in range right now. Almost immediately we arrive, an unidentified vessel interdicts us, this fulfilling the last part of the mission, us having already boldly gone and explored strange new worlds. Whoops, sorry, wrong franchise. Ignore that bit.

Okay, that's a rather large and ominous looking ship. I hope they're friendly.

Dark Mistress Zacherraza, an Ilitza. I think that's a name to run away from very fast. The interesting flesh? Hmmm. I'm not sure I like the sound of that. Or of her with her tentacles and snakey bits. A moral quandary is presented. Do we accept the mission so we might get some money and be able to trade with other beings for things we need and thus decrease our odds of a cold, lonely death in uncharted space by a smidgen? On the one hand, we need whatever help we can get. On the other hand, it's slavery and that is morally reprehensible on every level.

We take the mission. A man lost in the desert must accept whatever water he is offered regardless of the source. The Mistress pays us 50 credits as an advance for our expenses, and the Wolphax slave is loaded onto our ship. We have to go to Davidesmith (the system) to offload it.

One of the best bits of this game is the party banter which pops up from time to time while flying around between planets and so forth. Your crew pass comment on things they've seen and encountered and it acts as both character development and sometimes a hint system. Here, Ash considers introducing the aliens to that Earth thing called "sexual harassment."

And so the journey continues. Will Kirsten make it back to Earth before dying of cancer? Will Ash ever do or say something useful? Find out next time, in The Longest Journey Home.

 

[RadicalCentrist]

Bought it. Great little game, though alot of the ingame documentation is bare bones as fuck. Thankfully the ironman style of each play through lends itself to trial and error and experimentation. Great example is scanning the plants like you did before, you get a "biotope" in the database but what the fuck does that mean? Clicking on it in the database does nothing. Still have no idea what it does.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Bought it. Great little game, though alot of the ingame documentation is bare bones as fuck. Thankfully the ironman style of each play through lends itself to trial and error and experimentation. Great example is scanning the plants like you did before, you get a "biotope" in the database but what the fuck does that mean? Clicking on it in the database does nothing. Still have no idea what it does.

It's basically a lead on some other lifeforms that may be of note.

 

[RadicalCentrist]

It's basically a lead on some other lifeforms that may be of note.

But where is the lead? It just vanishes after scanning

 

[Ginger Piglet]

But where is the lead? It just vanishes after scanning

Try under Database, Locations.

It's not all that well documented, I know.

 

[Wallace]

This looks interesting, though the mini-games to collect resources are a non-starter. Reminds me of Out There, if you're looking for something in the same vein, though much simpler.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Star trekking, across the universe. Always going forwards, cuz we can't find reverse.

Ahem.

So, having taken our Wolphax slave on board on behalf of a tentacular dominatrix, we see if we can communicate with it. Zoe draws a blank, Ash threatens to double the noise nuisance aboard ship, but Kirsten gets it pointing at the galaxy map. A lead on something is discovered. Planet Brewster, apparently.

We file that under "list of places to investigate" and head onwards ever onwards. We come to another planet, thanks to Zoe's scanning of the plums, called Tomatic, with some interesting life, allegedly.

High gravity, and searing temperatures. Eech. Searing or Inferno temperatures do damage over time to your lander and can give your pilot burns. But it's worth it for the life. There may be something useful there.

Malcolm bounces off the ground and hurts himself, but the probe is down.

We find some more life, but this is unintelligent. We blow the system and move onto to the next one. We consider going to the Carsenty system because that's where the planet Brewster is. Unfortunately it is about a pulsar. These stellar remnants give off radiation pulses every so often that can hurt your ship and give your crew illnesses. Kirsten already has terminal cancer, though, so what does she care.

In Carsenty, we scoop a gas giant because we need the fuel. Yes, the main tank is full but what about when it isn't. That's my thought anyhow. Malcolm limps into the lander and asks why we only brought one medical kit on board.

After this, we are accosted by an Ilitza Slaver. We sell her our Wolphax who the Dark Mistress gave us thinking that she won't know where she is and we need the money.

The Ilitza then challenges us to a game of Jassikan's Teeth. Unfortunately none of us know how to play Jassikan's Teeth. We get slaughtered at it. We decide we'd rather play Frungy instead. That, and having a game where one area of the board is called "Grundle" as in the slang term for taint, barse, scruttocks, bifkin, etc. is decidedly suspect.

After an incomprehensible round which involves us being put in Wunkle and then in Mundle several times, our opponent laughs her tentacles off, and offers to buy one of our crew as a slave.

Tempting as it is to dispense with Ash, whose contribution to the voyage so far has been to play the guitar badly and try to get wasted on alien prune wine, our moral compass kicks in, and we don't. Surely Ash will have some use in the future other than as an exotic sex toy ().

On to Brewster, where we encounter this ominous looking ruin.

Malcolm boldly goes into its depths and finds it appears to be haunted by ominous chanting voices.

We go in and although Malcolm is reduced to a gibbering wreck and begins to suffer from anxiety, he retrieves an artifact called the Totem of Pain. Which we take on board even though it's probably going to do something really horrid to us later on.

We then move on to the Ilitza starbase we'd heard about. There, a reclining tentaclenatrix refuses to be impressed by our collection of plants, so we consider showing her the Totem of Pain. Maybe if it is as evil as it was hyped to be by where we found it, we can palm it off on her. No such luck. She does tell us that the Tchansu were an extinct race who worshipped evil gods of death and famine and pain, though.

We move on. Banter is had. Then, while Ash is unpeeling himself from the ceiling, we are interdicted by a new alien species, the Raxact.

Who tell us about an Ilitza gambling den and try to sell us a lucky charm to cover their gambling debts. Since he's having to sell things to bail himself out, it can't be that lucky. We pass on the charm, but alas, there is no ability to give him a Gamblers Anonymous leaflet.

And so the trip continues. Will our intrepid heroes ever make it back to earth? Will Ash have an accident with the airlock release mechanism? Will Zoe finally get a million YouTube hits? Find out next time on The Long Journey Home.

 

[RadicalCentrist]

How do you keep so much fuel on hand? Also you don't seem to accrue defects like I am. Fuggg.

Also the Raxact always attacked me when I see them

 

[Ginger Piglet]

How do you keep so much fuel on hand? Also you don't seem to accrue defects like I am. Fuggg.

Also the Raxact always attacked me when I see them

I think it's partly because the Endurance has a fuckoffhuge fuel tank as well as a fuckoffhuge cargo hold. I try to be crazy prepared and have a little of each resource type on hand.

Yeah, the Raxact are usually hostile but I think that one was specifically programmed not to be for that particular quest. Still, could be worse. They could be Mizzurani.

As regards defects, well, I kept getting lander defects from overenthusiastic drilling. That drill has worn out brushes, low coolant, and suchlike.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

In the darkness of space, four adventurers, flung off course by an obnoxious cosmological anomaly, decide to go and have some "down time" at an Ilitza casino to take their minds off the fact that they're probably going to die alone and unmourned.

We bet on the Marritanka winning this one for our first free bet, thinking that the Raxact who tipped us off about this place (which looks a lot more like a fetish club than a casino) would probably bet constantly on his compatriots and is salty that he lost. Amazingly, we were right. A win, so we quit while we're ahead.

We are suitably sneered at by the Ilitza Mistress running this place, and find it also sells weapons. We invest our hard earned credits into a Plasma Harpoon in case we run into something more hostile, and make tracks.

We also pick up a passenger in the form of a Reeve, which is kind of a giant sentient kangaroo critter. Unfortunately he's not interested in Zoe's social media accounts.

He prefers to hang out in the engine room.

Anyhow. We are trucking along nicely when this very blingy ship with excessively sized solar sails interdicts us.

We find ourselves talking to a race of what appear to be small cabbage-like critters with excessively sized egos called the Meorcl. They ask tribute of us. We are unable to refuse. Seems the Meorcl are psychic somehow.

He gives us a mission to find something to eat. Something alive, natch.

I'm betting in the flesh they're literally about the size of a cabbage. I also find myself reading out their lines in Strong Bad's voice for some reason.

The Meorcl have a space station in the vicinity where we sell the Totem of Pain and Zoe's laptop. Hopefully the former will call down some sort of horrific evil upon them. We can but hope.

Kirsten thinks out loud.

We dig for iron underwater. I do like that you can do this. Indeed, in one of my earlier runs I actually found an underwater wreck which really should have had some unique interaction for dev-team-thinks-of-everything points. But it didn't.