In space, no one can hear you make catastrophic decisions – and in Void Bastards, you will make plenty. This is a first-person shooter where shooting is often a last resort. Mostly, you’re weighing up the possibilities: can you make it to that alluring loot before your oxygen runs out? Do you have enough food to see you through the next two scavenging missions? What should you take with you: a Clusterfrak grenade launcher or a cute Kittybot to distract foes? One lesson you learn very quickly is that the universe is cruel. And also hilarious.
What hits you immediately is the cel-shaded visual style and twisted humour. The grungy spaceship interiors and bizarre enemies all call to mind the 80s comic-book pomp of 2000AD, while the weird items and your plummy-voiced AI advisor owe a great debt to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You’ve broken down in the middle of the Sargasso nebula and you need to board a series of derelict spacecraft to steal equipment and repair your starship. Except every craft you visit is populated by a range of hostile crew members, from the swarming “juves” who swear at you as they blast at you with lasers, to the hovering “screws”, highly armoured prison guards who hunt you like the Terminator and absolutely will not stop until you’re splattered all over the walls of the medical theatre.
The interiors of these hulking ships are filled with useful items as well as seemingly useless junk that you can hoover up and recycle later. You can use it to craft and upgrade a variety of weapons, from staple guns to toxic darts, as well as armour and radiation protection. All the while you have three major concerns taking up your brainspace: oxygen, food and fuel. Laid over it all is an intriguing meta-game in which you use a map screen to plot your way through the vast junkyard of battered ships, avoiding pirates and deadly space whales and weighing your remaining fuel and food reserves against making longer journeys for better loot.
With an emphasis on stealth and hacking (you can download ship schematics and learn how to disable security droids), Void Bastards owes a debt to the 90s strategy shooter series System Shock and its spiritual successor BioShock – no surprise given that developer Blue Manchu was set up by members of the BioShock team. There are also elements of the “roguelike” genre: the ships are procedurally generated so that every playthrough is different, and when your character is killed, they’re gone for ever. You have to recruit another prisoner from your ship’s hold to carry on. Anything they find and craft during their short lives is retained after their death, a brilliant design decision that ensures you’re always making progress.
Void Bastards is incredibly tense and challenging. When you board a craft, your time is limited by oxygen, you’re under threat from enemies, and you may only have a fraction of your health left. Every move is a calculated gamble, and every blind corner and closed door prompts a tense negotiation with your own cowardice. Shootouts are fast, messy and deadly. You can’t aim down the barrel, so you’re often blasting wildly in retreat across the floors littered with radiation pools and oil slicks, adding calamitous potential to every tactical withdrawal. It can get frustrating and unfair, and amid the chaos it can be impossible to take a thoughtful, stealthy approach.
But this game is an idiosyncratic joy – a brash, clever, juvenile head-trip, messy at the edges but all the more likable for it. It is loaded with brilliant pop-culture references, channeling not just Adams, 2000AD and Tank Girl, but also anime and 90s industrial dance music. Void Bastards is Cowboy Bebop meets Trainspotting, on a night out, in a galaxy of death.
