Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Roleplaying Game

"We're setting off with soft explosion"

The Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years From Home

 

After the Skyrim open-world craze and with randomizers improving to the point developers are universally leaning toward letting ChatGPT generate their content, Colony Ship stands out as the most recalcitrant of a dying cRPG breed: handcrafted encounters from start to finish, mature setting, fixed skill checks and do-or-die choices. Inspiration from one of SF's golden age big three helps. Nice piece of work overall, but its frustration makes it playable more as unique experience than an engrossing pastime. Holy Hell, I am not doing this again any time soon!

Call Ismael a bitch.

Fifty or so failed attempts had me ready to give up on the game altogether, not to mention I had to restart the entire Heart zone three times over due to continually failing this one damn combat! True to my snarly nature I used Charisma as a dump stat, limiting me to only one NPC companion, but given I hadn't optimized for combat, latter fights turned out to be flat-out impossible without a third gun. Problem: in order to recruit Knurl I had to kill his enemy in The Heart (the ship's engines) but my existing goon Jed refuses to leave The Heart once reached unless you do the fight above. I ended up forced to scrape just enough XP up to Lvl 8 so I could buy the "personal magnetism" feat to recruit Garret the commie pistolero, who ended up dying in that fight for Jed so I could finally recruit Knurl. After that, the fight with Ol' Bub only took 2 tries despite being technically more difficult.

 

Which is to say Iron Tower's design philosophy retains the same upside and downside from its previous title The Age of Decadence: it is highly satisfying to work out a skill gain sequence which will see you through the story's climax, but most often it simply cannot be worked out given the information at hand, forcing you to restart each chapter or cheat off online guides. And the combat's "difficulty" resolves too often to grinding the same fight dozens of times until RNGesus smiles upon ye, in the most annoying "roll to miss" D&D tradition. Worse that you're forced to bounce between maps to skill up, but some zones like the Shuttle Bay or the Heart come with surprise lock-outs or lock-ins.

 

But while the margin of error can seem razor-thin at times, there are just enough options built into the system to let you compensate. I could not manage for the life of me to raise my lockpicking past 7, but vendoring enough junk for another implant overclock to 12 INT let me tag the extra skill at the last second and open the last few containers up to fully max out my gear... after which my route landed me in an entirely anticlimactic finale devoid of combat. But hey: at least I finally got that dual-requirement laser pistol I mistakenly assumed would show up in Wasteland 3.

My usual chaotic neutral elf wizard setup here translated into technocratic overkill, including siding with bitcrafted monks over bickering monkeys. Weirdly though, despite all the cyborg implants and decaying environments, the very reasonableness of the factions' presentation makes Colony Ship register less as antiestablishment cyberpunk than the likes of C77 or Shadowrun. It's not normally a genre given to equanimity or practical argumentation. Plus, populating a place called The Habitat with degenerate hicks makes me wanna tell them to getcher own habatayat! Throwing gratuitous psychic mumbo-jumbo into the mix further dilutes an otherwise relatively hard SF setting. But overall characters act and speak refreshingly... sane, with none of the universal fairytale theatrics we're normally made to swallow - except for those knowingly employing such theatricality in-universe to foment fanaticism. (The Mother's throne is... pure badass.) Every gunrunner you meet is all too aware of both the cut-throat necessities imposed by dwindling resources and thereby the increased value of basic decency. Every leader great and small balances idealism of one brand or another with concessions to necessity. The arguments your character can make during diplomacy checks are based not in arbitrary pies in various skies but the shifting political situation and reasonable expectations of human nature.

 

If only that saner writing did not come bundled with psychic frogs and enforced save-scumming.

 

Too much of the campaign revolves around skill books and foreknowledge of which skill you'll be able to raise in the next chapter. Too many encounters were designed as "bonus bosses" the player need not fight, but with few hints as to which are necessary and which only serve toward bragging rights. Social skills overlap until they may as well have been conflated, and cannot be maintained unless you specialize in them early, in contrast to stealth skills which can be raised from nothing via skill book abuse.

 

On the plus side again, the tactical element is better developed than AoD's single-character setup. You don't strictly need to min-max. I used Jed as a frontline tank and made liberal use of his thunkin' skill, but with cover and flanking being so important and enemies frequently rushing you, my own Johnny Reb dagger saw frequent use throughout the campaign despite specializing in pistols. (It's been knife-work up here, Gimli.) Consumables are highly useful and just scarce enough to make you keep count, in contrast to every other cRPG where they're thrown at you as freebies of modest utility. Best of all, enemies' composition shows little to no redundancy, with every new encounter shuffling the mix of melee and ranged, status effects and defenses, always keeping you on your toes, pretty openly snubbing the likes of Wasteland 2's "not another freakin' badger" tedium. Here and there, when your teeth unclench, when you open a new door only to find your past five hours' painstaking build-up of a particular skill enables you to rescue a trapped scout or effortlessly shoo away a pack of murderous mutations from the bowels of spaceborne hell, when your diligently economized supplies give you just the right power boost to remain standing over your foes' remnants one step away from death, now and then you must admit something beautiful has been achieved.

 

So there's a lot to love and hate here. I somehow doubt Iron Tower's approach could ever have become the mainstream of cRPGs. Ironically it's worth playing precisely as a change of pace, precisely because nobody else is crazy enough to make something this frustrating and creative at the same time. Unsurprisingly, it tends to put many players off, if achievement completion is any indication.

Just under 30% have installed an implant, meaning they gave at least a few missions a chance.

Only 20% have made it to Act 2.

Only 12.4% finish the game... though interestingly, 7.8% of that proportion do so on "underdog" difficulty, well above half, indicating high retention rate for die-hard genre fans.

 

There is some market for intriguing frustration, after all.