RymdResa

RymdResa is a game about floating in space.  That space is mostly empty.  I’ve been trying to come up with a blanket term for games that try this – like Sunless Sea, Kentucky Route 0, or Voyageur, and to an extent FTL.  These are games where mechanics are usually simple but interact well, the focus is on the exploration of an other-worldly place, there’s typically a lot more text or audio clips than NPCs, and the music (if it exists) is solidly in the “ambient” category.  I’ve settled on the term “sublime-like”, but it doesn’t quite have the ring to it that I’d like.  In any event, being a sublime-like is a tough mood to pull off.  RymdResa tries, but doesn’t quite make it, I think.

At first, RymdResa had potential.  You float through mostly empty space looking for a new home – avoiding asteroids and suns.  You can explore planets and locations you come across for a chance at resources.  This is a solid start, but there just isn’t enough variety in the random generation to make things interesting.  Worse, when you die, it’s usually out of your control: when an asteroid comes flying at you ten times faster than you could ever hope to fly, there’s little you can do.  What really rubbed me the wrong way was the lack of a real sense of space.  Asteroids with WWII-era planes ten times larger than you embedded in them float by right after you flew over a galaxy only twenty times larger than you.  But worst of all is that there are immovable walls in space – an unforgivable sin in a space game.

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