Uutiset
Four games that show you the universe on minimum wage
J
Julian Benson
So if you want to see the universe, but you’d rather not do it from the varnished perspective of a ship’s captain, try out some of the games below. Sure, you’ll sacrifice a bit of comfort, but you’ll see a side of the future that Star Trek sure doesn’t show you.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Glittering, sleek spaceships are a hallmark of sci-fi, but what do you do with them when their sunniest days are behind them—when their hull panels are rusting, they creak whenever you travel near a gravity well, and your engineer feels sick if they spend too long in the reactor room? You could spend millions of credits repairing the rust bucket, but it will still be generations behind the newer models. Better to just scrap the thing entirely.
In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, you’re the poor sap in the corporate-issued boots whose job is tearing these old ships apart. Using a blowtorch, gravity tethers, and controlled explosives, you single-handedly disassemble starships into piles of scrap. Anything reusable you recycle—loading old computers, passenger seats, and thrusters onto the salvage bay’s equipment barge—and anything left over, like hull panels, metal joists, and glass canopies, goes into either the dry dock’s processor or furnace.
Shipbreaking is dangerous work. It’s easy to accidentally cut through coolant pipes and spark unvented fuel with your plasma cutter, and then there’s the risk of getting lost in the guts of a complex ship and running out of oxygen or, most likely of all, causing a reactor meltdown and getting vaporized in the blast. Luckily for you, as an employee of the Lynx Corporation with your DNA logged on file, should you die, you’ll simply have a new clone whipped up in time for your next shift. Though your line manager will dock the fee from your wages, of course.
In many ways, you are a poor schmuck trapped in a contract that has you working in dangerous conditions with little hope of ever earning a buck—the game’s story about unionized labor makes that clear. But shipbreaking is still absorbing work nonetheless. At the start of your shift, you face a hulking, procedurally generated spaceship that had a clear purpose and years of service under its belt; perhaps it was a mining rig, a passenger liner, or even a military vessel. But when the quitting bell rings, you’ve left nothing behind, like you’re a piranha that’s devoured a whale, bones and all.
Citizen Sleeper
If you’re looking for a more companionable line of work than floating in zero gravity dissecting derelict ships, you may want to consider Citizen Sleeper, a game where you try to make a home for yourself on an aging space station. It’s worth noting there are a few downsides to this life: As an escaped cyborg on the run from the corporation that built it, you are contending with a failing body that only a steady supply of hard-to-find serum can keep running. Still, on the other hand, you can access homemade mushroom stir fry, so it’s not all bad.
At the start of Citizen Sleeper, you wake up in a shipping container on the Eye, a trading hub on the edge of colonized space. You’re homeless, hungry, and penniless. But, while the Eye may have seen better days, there are plenty of opportunities for a cyborg like you. You can help unload ships at the docks, grow mushrooms and algae in the eco stacks, repair ships in the yard, or, if you have the stomach for it, do a little enforcer work for the gangs in the high rises.
Many people on the Eye need your help, but you can only perform a limited number of actions each day, and dice rolls control your success. Win or lose, the stories that unfurl as you try to aid the people around you draw you deeper into the workings of the Eye, revealing the communities that form on the edge of space, unseen by the government and corporations at the galaxy’s center.
System Shock
If Citizen Sleeper’s story of a life ruled by planned obsolescence has got you fired up to fight back against corporate greed, then you may want to take a lesson from the classic RPG System Shock. After getting caught trying to break into a TriOptimum Corporation computer, an executive at the company ropes you, a nameless cyber-whizz, into hacking SHODAN, the AI of Citadel Station, and removing its ethical constraints. Long story short, you wake up six months later, and cyborgs under the command of the AI have taken control of the station and killed everyone who got in their way. The lesson, well, is much the same as Citizen Sleeper and Hardspace: Shipbreaker: Don’t trust the corpos.
Now trapped on an overrun space station, you need to find a way to deactivate SHODAN—who is now threatening Earth with the station’s mining laser—and escape the place alive. As the name would suggest, System Shock is a spiritual predecessor to the Bioshock series. Search the station for weapons, equipment, and audio logs to gain the upper hand against SHODAN and its cyber-mutant army.
While the original System Shock is nearly 30 years old, the 2023 remake smartly updates the interface, graphics, and controls to highlight how well the original design and story hold up. If you want a sense of how grim the future could be for the people who live under corporate rule, you can’t do much better than System Shock.
Industries of Titan
If, after playing through all of the above, you’re growing tired of being a corporate tool, why not take a turn as the owner of a corporate toolbox? In Industries of Titan, you are building a pollution-belching mining town on a distant planet, staffing it with low-wage labor you've shipped in from the inner worlds. You can put them to work in the factories or just have them sit at a desk and click farm online ads to earn you some revenue. Grow your town enough, and you’ll draw the ire of local rebels, but it’s nothing a few automated flak cannons can’t put down.
In Industries of Titan, your land for city building isn’t exactly a blank slate. You’re constructing your town on the failed colony of the poor sod who came before you. Send your workers into the ruins to strip out any valuable resources before demolishing the rubble and putting a power generator in its place. As your operation grows and you’ve started taking the local resources and turning them into plastics and products on your factory floors, you’ll find that the air quality around your furnaces and smokestacks starts to get a little hazy. Left unattended, you will see your population choke on the fumes. It’s not the end of the world, as you can always find new workers desperate to get out to the colonies, but it will play havoc with your overhead costs, so, for the sake of your bottom line, it may be wise to build a token hospital or two.
So, yes, on the one hand, if you are to believe these games, the future will be a rotten place for anyone other than the top 1%. But on the other, have you considered doing a Bezos and starting a business in your garage with nothing but some pluck, grit, and $250,000 in seed capital from your parents? You, too, could be one of the 1% and avoid all this hard sci-fi labor business.