Duskers

I love this game. Graphics are beautifully retro and while some people state this is not a game about graphics, I would say it's all about the right kind of graphics. This is a game that is all about gameplay and atmosphere which are enhanced by the limited graphics provided here. What you see are the images created by the sensors of your drones and what you hear is transmitted by the microphones installed on your drones. You can see only what they can see and you have to deal with whatever limited equipment you have in that specific moment. The rest of the images is being created by the best storytelling engine there is: you own mind. And you don't have to work hard on it - the game makes sure you imagine xenomorphic horrors behind a closed door whenever you hear echoes of constant, wild hammering coming from the depth of the abandoned hulk that you are exploring, all the while your on-board computer informs that a door is about to collapse. And you will imagine floating rocks around your spaceship, passing you by at high speed whenever your flight computer informs that a portion of the hulk is about to be hit by an asteroid. You will have to act accordinly: scramble your drones to safe locations, close all doors leading to the endangered sector... or maybe you will try to use the impending catastrophe to your own end and lure there the lethal menace that is stalking you. Once the asteroid hits the ship, structures will collapse, doors will be destroyed, decompression will suck out everything that is not clamped magnetically to the floor and radiation will fill the exposed compartments, possibily finding its way deeper into the ship through broken pipes, damaging electronic equipment and lowering even further your already meagre chances of getting away with enough resources to survive another day. But maybe, just maybe, if you play your cards right and with a bit of luck, the same collision's devastating effects will kill whatever is on board and buy you space and time to explore a little bit more and win the day with an additional container of scrap or fuel. You can never know. There is depth in this game that will take time to discover fully. Every obstacle creates a problem that you may be or may not be equipped to deal with. Sometimes you will have to think creatively. The same problem doesn't need to be solved every time in the same way. You might start the game equipped with motion sensors that will allow you to detect movement behind closed doors. Opening the wrong door at the wrong time may spell doom on your expedition. But you can also start the game without such equipment - that will force you to find alternative ways of dealing with the problem. Maybe you will be equipped with stealth technology, installed on your drone - that will allow you to enter the room and give it a quick glance, relatively safe, at least as long as the stealth module works correctly. New events will constantly change the situation you are in and force you to change tactics. These events are caused mainly by the unreliable equipment that can glitch or even break, or structural damage encountered on older ships. Other times the dangerous situation will be caused by a chain reaction of events that maybe you started yourself: maybe you decided to open an airlock in order to flush an alien menace into space along with all the other contents of that room. Entering void and radiation might damage systems or an adjacent door leading there might get stuck, or maybe even you simply flushed out into space an important module that might have saved you later and you didn't know it. Doesn't matter: you will create a potentially dangerous situation that might cause you trouble later - or not. Most of the time you have no time limits and the game progresses at a slow, but tense, pace similar to a turn-based game which is influenced by your own caution, but other times you will have to hurry and trying to explore a dying hulk can be a thrilling experience. You will never have a countdown till the mission end, but sometimes you will have a countdown till the collapse of a certain section of the ship. You will have to decide if you want to keep exploring or evacuate that sector. A ship dies one compartment at a time which creates an interesting scenario where you have to weight out potential gains vs potential risks. You can control your drones with arrow keys, which allows you a direct control and the video & audio feed, but more complex operations require the use of the console. This is done at the "schematic's view" you can see from your operation room inside your own ship. Like a real-world operator you will issue commands by typing them in by yourself. "Navigate 1 d12 r4" will prompt your Drone "1" to go to the room labelled "R4" through the doors labelled "d12". "Navigate all r1" will order all of your drones to evacuate the hulk and run towards the airlock and the safety of your own ship - as long as there is no closed doors blocking their way. You can issue all kind of commands (everything is explained in the game), moving the drones as a team and perform chains of actions. Things will become tense when you're under a pressure and have to save multiple drones from an imminent danger and open / close doors at the same time, issuing all commands through the console. The game might force you into a situation where you will have to think fast and type even faster and every typo will result in a "Unknown command. Please retry" kind of answer. The best thing about the game is that no matter what kind of catastrophe depletes your already dwindling resources - the game-over will not be due to a bad luck, but it will be your own fault. The bad luck will only be the final nail to your coffin. You will be provided with all the information required to make an informed decision. You will know that the ship you just docked to is a collapsing wreck, a +200 years old hulk. You will know there are potential dangers on board - be it structural ones or moving entities. You will know how much potential resources you might be able to find. You will have to assess the situation based on the equipment you have in that moment and it will be your decision to run those risks. If that turret mounted on one of your drones has a 29.43% of possibility of failure, and you will put that drone on overwatch regardless, and that turret will fail at the worst possible moment, it will be your own fault. As will be the consequences of that failure. But sometimes it will not be a matter of choice. There will be bad decisions, but there will also be desperate decisions. There will be a situation where you will be almost out of fuel and that collapsing hulk will be the only one you will be able to reach and that failing turret will be the only thing that could keep your weakened drones from a certain doom. That will be the good time to pray for a bit of good luck. And you will get attached to your little drones, your only means of exploring the abandoned ships. Everyone of them will be a hero in the end, and many of them might alo die a heroic death. I had a "Hanks' castaway moment" with one of the drones. I almost wept when my favourite, and the best equipped drone, with 10 successful salvage ops on its record, died heroicly while trying to escape a collapsing ship, ripped to shreds by an asteroid. The drone was racing through the corridors towards the safety, all doors kept wide open by the global malfunction, and an advancing radiation that was eating up all the electronic circuits. The drone' sensors started to malfunction, image transmission started to blur and I was rapidly loosing video feed from it. It became mute and blind seconds later, but I could still see the moving dot that marked its location on the general map provided by my own ship, docked to the damaged hulk. It never made it, the dot stopped not far from the airlock leading to safety, which I closed immediately to shield my other drones from the radiation. "Drone disabled" appeared on my control panel. The only thing I could do was to cut out my losses and leave its metallic corpse behind, and detach my ship from that floating tomb. There are also logs that you can find. Those are well written and make you wonder what happened to the human race, why are you alone and force you to board just one another hulk, in the hope that you can find another uncorrupted log that you can read and shine some more light on the (desperate) situation. The storytelling is based on these small pieces of information - logs from the ships, some dating back from them moment when all the hell broke loose, or was about to, or those dating back to a time when things were still relatively quiet. I feel there is still much to discover in this game, so I'm getting back to it. This review was supposed to be a short one and turned out to be an essay instead ;)