I have a sneaking suspicion that if I were ever put in charge of something highly technical, mechanical, and complicated — like a spaceship — it would end disastrously. There would be films about the great tragedy of my existence, focusing primarily on the other crew members that had their lives taken by such a foolish, clumsy idiot. I’d be the villain of my own biopic.
Failspace is a wacky VR game that, if only for a brief few moments, brought those fears to life and made me laugh about it.
In Failspace you (and ideally some friends) are aboard a spaceship that’s doing normal, everyday spaceship things like flying around and not blowing up. But eventually things start to go wrong. Maybe there’s a fire that breaks out in the engine room, or one of the roters or power couplers or other fancy sounding engineering thing isn’t working so you’ve got to go attend to it.
For games like Star Trek: Bridge Crew that just means clicking a few buttons on a screen in front of you to handle repairs and issues, but in Failspace you’ve got to get your big, white Job Simulator-style mittens dirty to fix things up.
When the sirens sound and a computerized voice tells me what’s wrong it’s up to me to scurry across the ship, locate the issue, and fix it up as fast as possible.
During my demo I tried to do it all by myself. This meant I spent more time running between issues than actually solving them — which is sort of like a metaphor for adult life, am I right? But when you throw in a few friends it really helps streamline everything.
Instead of spending 20 seconds searching for the ladder to get downstairs to the engine room, I can just tell my friend that’s already down there what to do if it isn’t already clear. But that being said, the more cooks in the space kitchen you have the more room for human error there is, which once again, is a big part of the chaotic fun.
Since my demo was a single player only affair I feel like I only got a small tease of what this game has to offer. In the full release there will be multiple people onboard ships, procedurally generated missions and emergencies, and further down the line, different ships to fly and upgrade with new parts.
All we know is that it’s still slated to come in 2018 and we tested it out on an HTC Vive. Once we know more definitive info about platforms and release timing, we’ll let you know! In the meantime, let us know what you think down in the comments below!
