Somehow over the last two weeks I managed to find time (by
abandoning all other pleasures and duties, really) to play a shitload of
FTL. FTL, to the uninitiated, is the
acronym cum name for Faster Than Light, a self-described rogue-alike that
centers around guiding a spaceship from one place to another and then beating
an unreasonably powerful boss. It’s a
rogue-alike in that failing is a central part of the game, and that it’s meant
to be played as many times as possible.
But it diverges from Rogue and Nethack in some key ways.
First and foremost, constant progression is considered
“important” by the game, to the extent that it gates off bits of content. See, the play is just one awesome aspect of
FTL. And it’s great, and fun and
failing has this epic “Oh fuck” feel, so that whenever you take a serious hit
and keep on going, whenever you pull off a fight but lose half your crew or
lose a treasured crew member to a dumb move or dumb luck it’s mystifying. You
become, in a sense, that person, this captain.
It’s best at the kind of storytelling only a Rogue-alike can manage, the
story about how you almost but didn’t make it.
It’s like creating a version of Sunshine without Cilean Murphy or Rose
Byrne that doesn’t have a shit third act.
Even if you don’t make it out of the first sector, there’s a great story
behind it all worthy of sharing with a friend who plays.
But there’s a problem with this. A lot of the depth of FTL relies on accessing
content that is initially locked off.
And all of this content requires some act of success in order to
unlock. That means that, in order to get
the Federation Cruiser, which sports a bitchin’ beam weapon and an impressively
diverse crew, you’re gonna have to beat the game. And in order to get the Engi ship you’ll have
to progress so far without being turned into atoms. Other ships have more
obtuse means of unlocking, some of them so obtuse that they require either
abandoning the main plot or min-maxing into a comfortable strategy so that you
can reliably pull out a win. All the fun
experimentation and failure loving play goes out the window when it comes to
unlocking these specialized ships, each of which represents a specific style of
play (which can be prohibitively difficult to test out before unlocking said
ship). There are exceptions: the Zoltan
ship is unlocked by playing to the Zoltan’s somewhat psychotically peaceful
ethos, for example. But mostly it’s a
matter of fighting the right ship (or ships) at the right time.
I’m not sure this is a problem, though. It is, in a sense, a chance for players to
have their cake and eat it too. If
rogue-alikes are about failure, and making failure fun, FTL totally does that. But when progression enters the equation, it
becomes frustrating, unduly so. You’ll
play through FTL multiple times, just hoping to get a chance at unlocking some
new glimmer of content, a cool ship you’ve been curious about for a while
now. And then, as you discover the event
that allows you to access that ship, you’ll find that your ship is too weak,
your crew too beaten down. Or worse,
your dialogue choices might keep you from even getting a chance to fight to
unlock the ship.
I’ve had this happen a few times, when quests I randomly
encountered late in the game informed me that I could no longer complete
them. It was like being told I’d won a
prize, and then immediately having that prize redacted. It sucked.
It’s a strange design choice, one that seems to fight the rogue-alike
ethos that guides most of FTL’s design.
But there are other glimmers of the designer abandoning rogue
staples. The addition of an impressively
generous Easy mode is one of them, a questionable choice in a game ostensibly
dedicated to making its players suffer. Another is the ability to Save and
Quit, which actually comes in handy given FTL’s impressively lengthy play
rounds.
But I wouldn’t be writing about FTL right now at all if it
wasn’t worth playing. It is. It really, really is. It has the wonderful feeling of actually
giving orders without any kind of supposition of realism or framing. It’s just a game about flying a spaceship,
and for that it is that much more effective at placing its players in the frame
of mind of a Star Trek commanding officer or a Star Wars capital ship commander
or a third really nerdy thing here. It’s good.
It’s chocolate good. But, like
chocolate, it can sometimes be cloying, and is best in small doses.
And like chocolate, it can sometimes be disappointing,
especially if you go into it with expectations.
If you want to unlock everything, you’re going to hate this game, or at
least be righteously frustrated by it.
It’s not going to let you unlock everything without putting in a good
thirty or forty hours of time. Just
won’t, sorry. Unless you’re insanely
lucky, at least. I’m about twenty four
hours in and I’ve only got four ships to play with, out of a possible
eight. This game is the bane of the
casual gamer, make no mistake.
It’s also the bane of your job. It will suck you in and insist that you spend
every minute of every day playing it.
And you’ll love doing it, lose track of time and eventually lose
yourself to it. You’ll find yourself
muttering tactics and strategies under your breath when you think youre’a lone,
visiting the grocery store and hoping that they have a teleporter upgrade and
two mantis crewmembers this time. You’ll be sucked in. And you won’t have a single unlocked ship to
show for it.
Sucks to be you!
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