The 2019 Goaties: #9 - VOID BASTARDS
This year’s Game of the Year endeavour is a little more involved. Instead of collapsing them into one interminable list, we’ll look at one game with a little more detail every day until the proper Game of 2019 has been decreed.
#9 is one of those games that just captivated me for a solid week, and when I was done with it, I felt like I’d had a complete arc of an experience.
The Roguelike Affliction has contaminated scores of genres over the last decade or so, finding new ways to inject the “run-based, permadeath, procedural level generation” ooze into each and every facet of The Video Game. The breakout example of this in 2019 is none other than Void Bastards, borrowing liberally from immersive sims like System Shock and Dishonored. It takes these core elements - enemies that clash with each other and can be lured or converted to your whims, slight stealth abilities, and dense, interconnected spaces - and wraps them up in a delightfully sardonic sheen.
“VOID BASTARDS
(Steam, Xbox One)”
As one of a million freeze-dried prisoners aboard the Void Ark, you are reconstituted solely because your prison ship has run into a disastrous snag deep within the Sargasso Nebula. A pleasant, dismissive AI (voiced by the Narrator from the Stanley Parable) instructs you in finding the various components and key items needed to repair the ship and escape the Nebula, but it’s on you to delve deep into the husks of cruisers, freighters, and other police vessels to scrounge them up.
Void Bastards is such a prime example of bite-sized session gaming, with every avenue of play wrapping neatly within the next. You have a tech tree full of extra guns, equipment and armor to be filled out alongside your meta-campaign goals: find an ID printer, restore the card reader, escape the nebula, and so on. Those are completed across the lives of multiple prisoners, each with their own innate traits and drawbacks (that can be swapped out on certain ships): some have a smoker’s cough that alerts robots, while another may be able to run silently. At the fundamental level, however, the lives of these prisoners are built upon, refined, and ultimately discarded within the bowels of Sargassan detritus.
The world of Void Bastards is outlined well enough in the comic interstitials between runs and successfully completed objectives, but there’s so much character in the actual factions and ships themselves. The different brands and corporations of this universe are incredibly distinct, offering more than just visual change of pace: XON ships are laden with medical supplies, while Otori cruisers hold strange robotic companions and LUX frigates host fanciful casinos and buffets of...nothing but sandwiches? The upshot of this is that patrolling the world map of the Nebula to pick your next level is extremely easy, as you often know at a glance both what you need and what you’re likely to find.
At the outset, traversing these ships can be genuinely harrowing. Like your prisoners, they will also roll with a set of random traits and random enemies, ranging from extra ammo caches and friendly enemies to hazardous oxygen conditions. Having to sneak around an irradiated nightmare or make a mad dash past some security turrets makes for beautiful punctuation to a trip through the Nebula. By the eighth or ninth hour, you've leveled up your guns and armor to the point where very few things can actually pose a threat, but that doesn't invalidate the genuine tension of the ramp-up to that point.
Every year, there's usually one roguelike that gets its hooks in me, pushing me to refine each run and figure out brutally efficient approaches to navigating whatever profound hellscape they've conjured up. With a delightful, Chex Quest aesthetic and a well-tuned difficulty curve, Void Bastards nails the highs and lows of a madcap tour through the dread wastes of space.
