![]() When things go well, though, completing missions feels so very good. Get reconstituted from mysterious goo, they said! Work to reduce your sentence, they said! It’ll be a great time, they said! You can have runs go incredibly well and avoid most detection you can also have runs go extremely, comically sideways, like finding yourself dealing with failing power generators, malfunctioning security systems hostile toward anything that moves, and a slew of nasty baddies nipping at your heels all at once. ![]() There are also some enemies that are truly formidable and who will pursue you aggressively, who you’ll be forced to take out, outrun, or come up with creative solutions to keep them at bay. ![]() There are some easily dispatch-able baddies in Void Bastards, and in many cases you’ll find you’re better off avoiding combat and sneaking around instead, or even turning a ship’s security systems against its crew. Sometimes you need rare parts and have to raid a pirate frigate and pray you get a good roll on the randomized map and the enemy list waiting for you inside. Sometimes all you really want is to get some fuel and food and keep moving, so a smaller, easier ship can be enough. Some situations are rated more difficult than others, but their yields will be greater. The game unfolds on a star map reminiscent of FTL’s, and you burn fuel units to move between nodes to find ships or stations to dock with and begin raiding. There’s a real depth of creativity available within the trait pool and I’d rather not spoil the best ones, but suffice to say that there’s some excellent built-in potential for each character to feel more unique than others. I’ve even had a prisoner with a penchant for screaming “YAHOO!” every time he looted a container, which was hilarious and had serious implications for how I’d approach some situations. I’ve had prisoners with chronic coughing conditions that make stealthy game play significantly more difficult, I’ve had prisoners with slight perks to health or aim accuracy, I’ve had prisoners who can carry extra weapons and prisoners who will periodically drop items because they have butterfingers. To make things even more interesting, each new prisoner has at least one randomized trait that can either help or hurt your progress, or just provide a slight twist on things. That means if you had scored some precious fuel or rare parts before expiring, those items are lost, and you’ll have to go out on a new mission with a new prisoner to try and make up some lost ground. There’s an overall level of persistence in terms of what you’ve brought back to the Void Ark over time and improvements made to the ship, but any items or progression on your prisoner is lost upon death. When you inevitably get your prisoner vaporized, the ship’s AI gleefully, uh, re-hydrates a new prisoner to take their place and send out on the next mission. Hypothetically there’s incentive for prisoners (cheekily referred to by the AI as “Clients”) to cooperate as success helps reduce their sentences, but the more likely scenario for them is an untimely death at the hands of a hostile environment. You play as those prisoners, and your goal is to gather materials, fuel, and plans needed to repair and propel the Void Ark so it can make its way to its intended destination to deliver its massive haul of galactic miscreants. In order to get unstuck, and for lack of any other sentient life on board, the ship’s cordial and vaguely sadistic AI sends prisoners out on reconnaissance and gathering missions to other ships encountered in the system. You play the game as a series of prisoners conscripted out of cold storage on a massive prison barge called the Void Ark, which is currently stranded in the Sargasso Nebula. If you’re not familiar with Void Bastards, here’s what you need to know. After all, this is a game where immersion is essential to the experience and any compromise to its critical components will break that experience, and undermine a lot of what makes Void Bastards such a fun game to play. I also shared in that enthusiasm for the game at launch, and have been curious to see how it would fare when brought to a portable platform. Scott loved Void Bastards when it debuted last year, and I’m personally very excited to see it make its way onto the Switch, as its game play feels extremely well-suited for shorter sessions on the go. The world is detailed, saturated in creepy desolate sci-fi atmosphere sprinkled with healthy amounts of dark humor, and sports loads of smart design choices that give the game a unique feel in a crowded genre. Void Bastards is an exciting spin on the rogue like formula, blending elements of FTL, System Shock, and run-based game play, dressed up in a fantastically realized art style inspired by graphic novels.
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