Episode 125 - Strawberry Laser - Everspace

You’re a podcast? Then why didn’t you attack on sight? Welcome
back! This month is Fanbruary, which means that we are playing
games suggested to us by our audience, and the very first we’ve
chosen to cover is Everspace. This is a space combat game with a
rougelite framework, seeing you making runs through six different
“Sectors” to explore and collect resources and starting from the
beginning each time you die. The “lite” part of the genre title
comes in the form of credits, the game’s metacurrency which you can
spend to upgrade either yourself or your ship, making subsequent
runs a little bit easier. And I really can’t stress “a little bit”
enough. This is a difficult game, particularly if you don’t have a
lot of experience with this type of combat, but it is helped
immensely by the shocking amount of fine control you have over your
movement, making the actual experience of playing pretty smooth and
the fights feel more strategic. Once the game has its hooks in you,
it actually is a really compelling experience and it had us
engaging with its narrative mysteries as well as its mechanical
ones once we got the hang of it. We’re going to be talking about
the many layers of systems in the game and how it might be better
off explaining more of them a little earlier, the surprisingly
solid presentation in the form of audio and visuals all the way up
through writing and voice acting, and all the good, flavorful
lasers. This is the first episode to come out for “Fanbruary” but
we’re pretty deep into the games already and I gotta say I haven’t
been this excited about doing some episodes in a while. We were
both kind of expecting to get left in the dust by this game and
were pleasantly surprised at how captivating we ended up finding
it. Have you played this game? Are you a space games kind of person
or someone constantly searching for that new roguelike that’s going
to grab you? In either case, this is one to at least give a shot
to. Let us know on our Discord or down in the comments if it worked
as well for you as it did for us. Next time, we’re going to be
talking about Arkane’s Prey, a reboot in the loosest sense of the
term that puts the Dishonored developer’s immersive sim trademark
back on the genre in which it started, the sci-fi FPS, so check it
out then.