Super Nerd Sundays Presents: FTL's Unique Take on the Rogue-Alike!

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!

Congratulations on Proving the Liberal Media Conspiracy Exists!

 Today you’re going to step into a boardroom where all of the liberal media figureheads (you know the ones!) are seated around a table talking about how to make Comrade Obama president for another semester or whatever the fuck they call it here.

You’ll turn your phone on and record the whole thing, sending it to the one organization that can get the truth out: the website Brazzers.

Two weeks later a porn parody detailing the events of your shakily taken cell phone video will be out and Brazzers will have again changed the face of journalism forever by giving Americans something interesting to masturbate to.

Kudos to you, Brazzers, for not making your porn excessively rapey most of the time.

Congratulations on Proving the Liberal Media Conspiracy Exists!

Congratulations Brisket Phil!

 You, sir, are a local hero.  You make brisket, damn good brisket, and you do it with a smile.

Unfortunately, it’s all you do.  You love making brisket so much that you’ve destroyed two and a half marriages, essentially abandoned four kids and spend most of your non-brisket related time staring out of windows and weeping softly to yourself.

Oh, and murdering drifters, which is actually what makes your brisket so good.

See, it turns out the secret to a good brisket is coating it in a sauce made primarily from drifter blood, and you’ve kept a steady supply going for a long time.  No one’s caught on, but tomorrow, at the big brisket fair James Steakfrites (of the Parisian Streakfrites, long standing adversaries of brisketlovers in the meat world) is going to stand up and reveal your secret to the world.

Turns out he hired a private eye to dig up dirt on you and he photographed you murdering a bunch of people.  The sheriff, confronted with the evidence, will dejectedly take you to jail while the town boos James Steakfrites and his private eye.  A few people will ask why the private eye and James Steakfrites didn’t do something to stop you sooner, before you fed people brisket they knew to be from a person.

Notably, no one eating your brisket will pause or stop once they see you’ve been arrested.  In fact, a few people will steal some from your booth after you’re gone, though they’ll look a little guilty.

Later on that night the townspeople will rise up and murder James Steakfrites and his private eye.  Then they’ll storm the jail and, as the sheriff stands to the side and watches, release you from your cell, returning you to your shop where you’ll once again be embroiled in the lonely hellscape of your life making brisket, though now you’ll go about your work knowing that the townsfolk don’t care that you murder drifters and that they would literally kill to eat your brisket.  It is that delicious.

Congratulations Brisket Phil!

Congratulations Bacteria!

The pole where you live is constantly being invaded by hands.  Dozens upon dozens of hands, hundreds really, groping it and grappling it and fucking with you and your family and your land.  Today’s the day you strike back.

Today you’re going to, through several generations of meiosis, evolve a reflex that allows you and your offspring to aggressively overcome white blood cells and essentially attack key organs in the human body, effectively consuming them through an internal transmission within the vascular system of your victims.  All they’ll need to do is touch their mouth, nose or eyes after touching your pole and then BAM!  Disease will become a thing.

Within a week, half of new York will be infected.  Within two weeks, a quarter of those infected will be dead.  Within a month, the media will begin telling everyone in the world that New York is under the thrall of “pole fever.”  People will chuckle, but a significant portion of the city that never sleeps will, by this point, be dead because of you and your offspring.

You’ll be more or less dealt within in about three months when a cocktail of antibiotics finally cracks your unique code and annihilates you completely, but by that time you’ll have killed well over four million people in a matter of months.  And yet you still won’t have been the least pleasant thing about riding the subway in New York.

Congratulations Bacteria!

Congratulations Overly Energetic Kangaroo!

Across the outback you’ll be hopping – hip hop – hip hop – galoomphing paw after galoomphing paw upon the earth carving out tiny pockets of dry soil with each surge forward.  The rush of wind upon your face – the glorious moments of half-flight as you leave the earth – the perfect shock as you slam into the ground.  With each leap you’ll wish that you could stay in the air forever in that instant of anticipation before the ground strikes your paws but then the shock wouldn’t be there and that would be a god damn tragedy.

The rhythm will hum in your bones and muscles as you tromp by strides across the outback.  It’ll just be a series of perfectly ordinary moments of movement, glorious in their simplicity and holy in their ephemerality.  They’ll be moderate and mild and so well spaced and paced that the rhythm and hum will overtake you until you see her: flank delicately curving towards tale, pouch hanging just a little, still tight, snout buried in a watering hole.  The moment you see her your whole brain will shut down and you’ll just stop.  Thump your foot.  And hop in a new direction.   Towards her.

You’ll arrive in a stumbling mass of dust, swirling cloud inches from her, sprinkling her with dust and tiny stones.  She’ll shudder up and shake the dust and rocks off her coat and fix you with a look like what the fuck are you doing?

You’ll give her a look like exactly what you want and she won’t know what to make of that because most female kangaroos don’t hit on other female kangaroos that blatantly.  She’ll thump her foot defensively and look back at the watering hole.  You’ll know that if you want to get any pouch action today, you’re going to have to step it up, so you’ll thump your tail on the ground and start hop hop hopping all around the watering hole in broad, rapid circles.   You’ll pick up speed, making shorter hops than before, more intense, more jarring, more violent as if to say look what I can do.

You’ll accumulate velocity until your momentum becomes so tremendous that you cannot alter direction: you can only struggle to slow, to stop yourself sliding in dust, generating a rut in the earth until your shoulder slams into her shoulder and you become one glorious whole for a moment tumbling away from the water, one on top of the other.  When it ends the two of you will both be baffled, but you’ll be on top.  You’ll draw yourself up on your haunches and let your tail drag so that it catches on hers.  You’ll sit there, straddling her, eyes locked with hers, covered in dust for what feels like an eternity until your tongue flits out to clear the dust off your snout.

Then you’ll wait, staring at her, to see what she’ll do next.

Congratulations Overly Energetic Kangaroo!