As I perused the many trailers that appeared at last night’s Game Awards, I had a fair few moments of, “Ooh, yes!” and “Oh wow, that looks fun!” but it wasn’t until the reveal for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet that I sat up and said, “I need to play this now please.” Given I absolutely did not like The Last of Us at all, this took me by surprise.
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I love movies and games about space. I love movies and games about isolation. I think, in my ideal reality, I’d be aimlessly floating in a little space station, with excellent wifi and perhaps a module for my wife and kid. When I see such circumstances represented in games, I’m always absolutely intrigued. From No Man’s Sky to Subnautica to Raft to 2008's Minecraft even, I’m so drawn into the serenity of solitude. And despite having a name I cannot remember thirteen seconds after last typing it, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet immediately gave me those same vibes.
It’s not a genre vibe, I should add. Clearly this looks like a fighty-fighty game that sees you battling evil robots, rather than some sort of survival sim. It’s just about being someone who’s content with their own company. A misanthrope? No, not quite. Let’s go with “introvert.”
I also just instantly liked the character. Apparently she’s called Jordan A. Mun, a bounty hunter, clearly pursuing an obsession that her agent wishes she’d leave alone. The newspaper clippings on her ship show that she used to be part of a legendary band of criminals called the Five Aces, and among their number was the person she’s now chasing: Colin Graves, played by actor Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick, The Eternals). We can extrapolate that the gang broke up, and now she’s hunting them all down.
Mun, played by Tati Gabrielle, is just so immediately personable. She’s twinkle-eyed, gleeful in her refusal to follow her agent’s advice, and thanks to some stunning motion capture and art, conveys vast amounts about her character through the smallest expressions. I want to hang, except neither of us would actually want to hang. We’d nod at one another, then sit at separate ends of the ship.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
And while the hitting a robot with a sword element of the trailer didn’t exactly make me leap out of my chair in delight, I’m finding myself in the weird position of being delighted that this is a Naughty Dog game, despite my, er, not exactly enthusiastic history with the studio’s output.
In fact, when it comes to Naughty Dog’s games, I’m quite the downer. I absolutely cannot stand Crash Bandicoot—it seems like the anathema of gaming to me, a game in which you can’t see where you’re going and have to fail to progress: bleurgh. It’s Rick Dangerous 3D. Then, due to my being pretty much PC-only during the PS2/3 era, I totally missed out on the first releases in the Uncharted series. When The Last of Us came out I was intrigued, but then I instantly absolutely detested it. I hated it! Like, in a way I would normally characterize as somewhat problematic in a person!
I hated the way it so callously killed a child purely as a means to give motivation to some dullard bloke (I wrote about this in more detail a while back), and I hated that it was a cover shooter at a time when everything was a cover shooter. I found it arrogant and irritating in the extreme!
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Now, I’m not defending any of this as some sort of critical position. It’s pure emotion, a visceral reaction that is quite unlike me, and given so many people whose opinions and intelligence I love and respect enjoy the game so much, I feel sure I am missing out. (I’ll still argue that it was a grotesque, awful “fridging” though, and probably fold my arms.)
But I did eventually catch up on Uncharted, and big news: those games are great! I really enjoyed them! I had issues, and bloody hell, crates. But yeah, really lovely games, with—and here’s the key—fantastic, personable storytelling.
And it’s this that makes me think, “Actually, maybe I’ll bother to grind through yet more hitting robots with swords, if it means I get to experience acting as good as I saw in this trailer and a story deserving of that character, I’m in. (Shout-out to whoever is playing the agent as well—I loved her delivery so much too!) I’m ready to go. I have such good vibes! I want to be the cool space criminal bounty hunter who thrives on her own!
Of course, it could end up being be stinky-poops (a critical term you likely aren’t familiar with). I don’t know! No one does. Forming conclusions on this game after a single trailer would be perhaps deeply stupid. But if I’m going to allow myself a moment of vibes-based enthusiasm, of all the games in that teetering pile of commercials, this is the game that got me. I’m excited.
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