3 hours ago
8
I am simply tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote
I think I'm a pretty decent Space Whale Mayor, all told. A caring and responsible fellow traveler for Kewa, the astral cetacean on whose craggy, cloud-hung back every city in Beyond These Stars is founded. For each hexagon of whaledirt I transform into a mine or a smelter, I give back to the creature in some way – adding saplings to the forests that emit my city's bubble of breathable air, or spreading compost across the cracked stone of Kewa's neglected extremities. I have unblocked the river that runs along their spine, irrigating the badlands and rousing long-dormant seeds from the dust.
OK, so my progress hasn't been tidy. I did manage to poison half the river, after getting a bit extravagant with wood-fired power plants, but I'm swiftly repairing the damage, having built three automated tile cleaners on each bank, while pausing nearby steel production to avoid adding any more slag and soot to the water. Meanwhile, my hedge gardens gleam like jewels socketed in amongst the dull bronze wires of my roads. My foresters labour zealously to push back the grey. My people are full of good cheer, despite living on an exclusive diet of tea and potatoes. They don't much like the stinking, iridescent river, but they do like all the playgrounds and fountains I've set up near the major workplaces.
Some day, we will paint this whole whale green. Some day, we will unlock the secret of communicating with Kewa and doubtless, bask in their praise and gratitude, while gaining some insight on their movements through the cosmos - including how long we have to dispatch foraging expeditions to any planets in a given solar system. I am staying with the trouble, living the principle of mutual thriving. I am nothing like those assholes who play Factorio. Except… except sometimes I get Bad Thoughts. Sometimes, I wonder what it might be like to live on a really screwed-up Space Whale. I imagine letting the whole river turn purple. I imagine running the furnaces all night. I imagine desolating the orchards, shrinking the atmosphere to a reeking dome of industry, while my Peeps sicken and die or go on strike. Yes, hahaha, yes!
I'm not being entirely contrarian. I've played a few 'sustainably minded' builders or anti-builders – favourites include The Wandering Village, Generation Exile, and Terra Nil - and while I enjoy the antidote they offer to the dead-eyed capitalism of SimCity and so on, eco-friendly projects such as these are at permanent risk of becoming Cosy. Even Wholesome! You need some nastiness, if you want the Whole Earth vibe to feel meaningful rather than ornamental. As the saying goes: to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold. I'm not sure Beyond These Stars has that dog in it, though I've enjoyed the three hours I've played.
Space Whale element aside, Beyond These Stars is a sturdy metropolis-herder with a few rough edges. The bugbears may be familiar, if you've played many games like this. The interface is a little indigestible: while there are plenty of highlighted overlays, production graphs, and pop-up map icons, it can be a chore working out that, say, your foundry is refusing to output steel because the smelter supplying it with iron has no power, because the power plant has no wood shavings to burn… because you forgot you put all your lumberjacks on furlough 20 minutes ago, in order to free up workers for the potato patches.
The effort of finding bottlenecks feels like it will fade with practice, but I suspect I'm always going be slightly at odds with the construction interface, which sees you dragging out roads and plonking down sites alongside them. Buildings tend to fill 1-3 hexagons. I find these configurations hard to picture, partly because my spatial reasoning has been ravaged by 20 years of videogame journalism, and partly because the architecture itself doesn't always correspond visually to the hexagonal template. It can be a faff preserving gaps, so as not to block roads off, especially before you unlock power line technology - initially, buildings that require electricity must be stuffed together in a line. Fortunately, you can relocate buildings with minimal penalty.
More positively, Beyond These Stars does a fair job of making research feel organic by tethering unlocks to in-game accomplishments, such as knocking out five copper bars, rather than having some designated Science Huts cough up Science Points. It weaves the tech tree into the city's development in a pleasing way. Annoying templates aside, I also like the look and feel of the architecture. It's both rustic and futuristic, as though somebody had grafted warp nacelles to a chicken coop. And I'm enjoying the push-and-pull of meeting the needs of your Peeps and expanding toward resources, without ruining the humpback geography.
The game's ethic of looking after the 'living, breathing' (but literally!!!) world beneath manifests in lots of little ways. There's persistent pressure to keep noxious byproduct in check by turning buildings off, or setting them to only operate on demand. You have to decide where to hold off and spread the trees, however much you might need that land for farming. You have to keep hunting for pockets of ground you can rewild, such as cleared-out resource deposits, to counter the fallout from new factories on the perimeter.
How well you tend to the biosphere affects not just the air and soil quality but Kewa's health and mood. Sickly, morose Space Whales sprout thorny patches that make your citizens sad, while robust, life-loving leviathans are covered in flowers that do the opposite. There are larger impacts to explore in the course of the game's singleplayer campaign: apparently, Kewa is an amnesiac, recovering their past over the course of the story. The memories in question aren't necessarily great news for Kewa's human barnacle infestation.
If I play more, it'll be in vicious hope of things getting really bad. Campaign aside, Beyond These Stars has a sandbox mode and a set of themed scenarios. The scenarios include runs where you only get to build on planets, as in the developer's previous (and moderately well-received) Before We Leave. The sandbox lets you adjust resource availability and other factors so as to make life really punishing for yourself and Kewa. Perhaps given a sufficiently crappy sandbox, and just the right amount of neglect, I can drive Kewa to despair. What a treat that'd be, roaming the galaxy aboard a crazed and depressed Space Whale, at least until Kewa finds a sufficiently huge asteroid and manages to scrape me off. Read more about Beyond These Skies on Steam - it launches on 16th October.
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