A two-dimensional odyssey in outer space – a review of the game “Shortest Trip to Earth”

Shortest Trip to Earth  is an exploration and tactical game belonging to the roguelike player that is back in tastes. In line with my comparison to the Odyssey, the  main driving force behind the plot is directing the actions of the lone ship’s crew awakened from cryogenic sleep in their attempts to return to their home planet, Earth. Our little ones are generated randomly at the beginning of the game – randomly at least to a certain extent, because at the beginning we can influence it by choosing the type of ship or buying additional crew members with specific specializations – and then we accompany them on a journey through several space sectors.

Randomness but not chaos

Like most roguelikes , Shortest Trip to Earth  relies on randomness on many levels, thanks to which each of our approach to the interstellar adventure will be unique, because the title is to be repeatedly played “from scratch”. Consequently, the members of our crew, the number and nature of planets, stations and other curiosities in individual star systems, or the results of our interactions with the environment, will remain a matter of chance. This does not mean, however, that the presented universe is in complete chaos. Some elements that form the backbone of the gameplay remain predetermined and unchanged – so the number of sectors to be covered on the way to the desired Earth will be constant, as well as the nature of each of them: many of them have, for example, a dominant faction, for example, the Empire Rat or the Insectoid Alliance, which will warn us in advance about the type of opponents with which we will face there.

Pretty soon we will start to notice that also the aspects governed by randomization are not completely left alone, but stick to more or less restrictive patterns. On the one hand, we can benefit from it, because after a few hours we will be able to quite efficiently predict what projects we can benefit from, risking at most getting hit by a stray asteroid (i.e. losing a handful of HP of the hull), and what is simply better left alone. On the other hand, however, some events they seem to draw on a very limited pool of available options, which results in the immersion-distorting repetition of certain events (how many more times will an “random” trader of exactly the same race come to me, proposing exactly the same offers of exchange of goods at the same prices?). As the creators are still developing their masterpiece, hopefully they will provide us with more content over time, so that these types of “reruns” will not be bothersome.

The permadeath is not as  terrible as it is painted

Shortest Trip to Earth,  both on game distribution platforms and inside, i.e. from the menu level and the advice displayed to us, is advertised as a game with a very high level of difficulty, in which you die often and eventually (i.e. when you lose, you go back to the title screen, where we can only start a new game – there is no return to this “loss”), and in which it is impossible to go without saving, and thus avoid the negative consequences of our decisions. This solution is quite typical for roguelikes  and many other titles aspiring to be “heavy nuts” that only real hardcore gamers will eat.

Although I’m not really a fan of this type of challenge, I spent my time with Interactive Fate’s child quite well. Although the game interface initially feels overwhelming and “cluttered” and the tutorial floods the freshly baked star captain with a lot of information that is difficult to follow, the basic mechanics sufficient to make it through the first few sectors relatively smoothly can be understood fairly quickly – at worst using trial and error method. As a result – our adventures in outer space will not be overly frustrating. We will be allowed to make a few mistakes and come out of them unscathed. Even when we are driven into a corner, we will know what went wrong and at what point, and not helplessly wonder what this stupid game was expecting from us.

You’re cool … but you will dance anyway if we play for you!

The only objection I have to the solutions that directly regulate the difficulty level is as follows: the developers will not let us complete the game on the first try, no matter how well we do. They do not hide it at all – when browsing the available models of ships before starting the next approach, we will see a message that “not all types of ships can complete the game”. This is due not only to the basic statistics of each of them, but above all, the possibility of improving them as you progress – which in the case of the earliest available options are very limited.

The entire expansion system of our cosmic gem is based on the so-called modules, i.e. devices that can be installed in dedicated square windows representing individual rooms. Unfortunately, if we want our vehicle to be able to fulfill its most basic functions at all, we will have to accept the loss of most of the free space on board. In the end, we can’t dismantle the engines because we’re not going anywhere. We cannot dismantle the radar because our exploration capacity will drastically decrease. We can’t get rid of the food tank or the crew will starve … and so on. We will quickly realize that during the first attempts we only have two or three rooms that we can actually arrange ourselves – and this, unfortunately, is not enough,

This mechanics leaves the player some wickets that can be used to minimize this inconvenience – for example, in a relatively short time I came up with the idea of ​​”juggling” modules. They can be installed and uninstalled over and over again without any obstacles. This process does not take too long, and only a few of them have to remain active all the time so that we can benefit from them – for example, we can safely install a medical station only for the time needed to heal all injured crew members, and then replace it with something else ; meanwhile, the station will wait in the hold until we want to make use of it again. Relying on this trick quickly gets tedious though,

Ultimately, therefore, no combining or efficient handling of gameplay  will allow us to significantly exceed the limitations imposed on us when choosing a ship – in the end, we will encounter an opponent that we simply will not be able to defeat with our current equipment. In the case of my first longer game, it was a boss guarding the transition between the fourth and fifth sectors – the enemy ship regenerated its shields faster than my Tigerfish (the most basic unit in the game, the only one available immediately after its first launch) was able to weaken them at full strength fire. As you can guess, it made any serious damage to the opponent virtually impossible and thus ended my journey to Earth.

We are gadu-gadu here … but what about the “climate”?

We could write about the mechanics and solutions that determine the gameplay for a long time, but that’s not all. Each title that would like to be remembered by us and keep us in front of the screen for long hours, also needs a mythical atmosphere – that “something” that will distinguish it from others and create an attractive envelope for good anchoring us in the presented world. How is Shortest Trip to Earth doing ?

As a game largely random and without cutscenes or with the large walls of the text, she does not have many opportunities to directly mark her character and engage in a kind of “dialogue” with the player. However, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t – it just uses slightly more subtle methods. On the one hand, the narrative can take the exploratory aspect quite seriously, sometimes offering us, for example, simple moral dilemmas typical of science fiction works about discovering the cosmos – we must, for example, determine whether, when looking for supplies on a foreign planet, we will choose non-invasive research and local ecosystem, devoting extra time and resources, or we will bluntly strip it of anything that is not nailed down and carelessly move on.

On the other hand, we will experience a lot of pop culture easter eggs here and examples of absurd humor – from this point I would like to greet the Cthulhufant civilization, that is, the suspected cousins ​​of the Hephalumpa with equally purple skin … but equipped with the tentacle heads of the Great Ancient One. The jokes will also stick to us in a much smaller form, for example among the descriptions of the crew members – this way we will find out that our scientist likes to tell his colleagues very different stories that, oddly enough, always involve robots and end up dirty, and a cybernetically improved cat as he carries out his duties, he “thinks of disobedience” almost constantly. Some will like this kind of laughs, others will not, but the creators certainly made sure that their work was not bland – and this fact alone will undoubtedly help in distancing the title from other little-known indie productions.

An opportunity to move your head on long winter evenings

Shortest Trip to Earth  is a position just in time for a few or a dozen evening meetings with hot tea… or whatever. The gameplay is complex and demanding enough to involve our gray cells, but not as deadly ruthless as you might expect from the descriptions – people like me, who are not very familiar with roguelikes , will also manage to find their way in it. The randomization mechanics does a good job of keeping the curiosity of discovery at a satisfactory level, despite the need to repeat certain steps, and specific jokes are a nice addition, thanks to which we often smile under our breath during our cosmic adventures.