Void Bastards

Developer Blue Manchu Publisher Humble Bundle Format PC (tested), Xbox One Release Out now

PC, Xbox One

The Krell fuel tanker Winsome Pugilist is a squat vessel, with corridor-sized tubes protruding from each flank. The floor is splatted with puddles of radioactive materials and – health and safety be damned – stacks of cheese and onion sandwiches. Above all, the entire ship’s security systems are switched permanently off. No Gunpoints, no Peepers, no Secbots to worry about. It emboldens us to scour every corner for fuel cans, machine parts and snacks until we’ve got enough supplies to jump to the far side of the Nebula.

Every game of Void Bastards plays out on two scales: firstperson looting runs on spaceships, and an FTL- style galaxy map where you chart a course between these ships. As in a dual-layered game like XCOM, resources link the two. Fuel and food collected on ships decide the number of hops you can make on the map before being forced to board another for supplies. Looted parts can be used to build or upgrade weapons and tools.

This means each half is constantly feeding into the other. Your thirst for a better pistol might send you to a far corner of the galaxy in search of a pneumatic tube, while discovering a torpedo in a ship’s locker will allow you to beat back pirates, opening new routes on the star map. There’s a main path to follow, travelling to certain ships and raiding them for parts to build story-relevant items, but you’re encouraged to scribble your own goals in the margins. So you weigh up the map, with its summary of each ship, the loot and enemies within, and consider: is it worth docking or should you just zoom by?

If you do decide to explore, there’s a chance to assemble your current arsenal of guns and gadgets into a three-part loadout before you’re pushed through the airlock onto hostile ground and into a firstperson shooter. Except, before a single bullet can be fired, you’re presented with another map and invited to sketch out a plan: helm first, then loop around through the generator, into the engine room, and back to the exit.

Then you watch those plans fall apart. Either because a fight didn’t go your way – combat is a little clumsy and unsatisfying, especially with the early-game weapons – or, more often, because you allowed yourself to get comfortable, wondered if you could extend the planned route to take in just one more room, one more locker of loot, and then turned the next corner to something horribly unexpected. Being good at Void Bastards is less about aiming a gun than it is estimating how long you can balance enemies, environmental hazards and an ever-dwindling oxygen supply before fleeing to the airlock – an option that’s always open to you. Well, almost always.

Aboard the Otori warp craft Yatate, the power is out, drenching the interior in red backup lighting. More importantly, it seals the airlock, barring escape until we can reactivate power. In the dark, we slip on some oil, giving movement all the grace and precision of socks on

laminate. Nevertheless, we skid our way to the generator and pull the switch, restoring power to all systems – including the Gunpoint turret on the far side of the room, its mounted machine gun suddenly roaring to life.

Death in Void Bastards is just another resource to manage. And life is pretty cheap. Your robot managers fill out a P45 and rehydrate the next lucky prisoner, stored as powder on the mothership. You lose all fuel, food and ammo, but get to keep the parts you’ve collected and any gadgets built with them. The game rolls a new character, with their own name, mugshot and special attributes, and an all-new constellation of ships is laid out in front of them.

Like your character, every ship is procedurally generated. And though the level layouts don’t change – each class has a fixed floorplan – they summon more personality than the succession of prisoners you chew through as you play. The PAC dinghy Quantum Unicorn is a cosy two-room, rich with loot but crammed with swarms of floating heads. The Lux cruise ship Pure Fromage, with its ballroom looking out into space, has all the faded glory of a seafront hotel. On the Buzz frigate Winter’s Anvil, half the inhabitants fight on our side, the mutant janitors turning against their oppressors.

Every game plays out on two scales: firstperson looting runs on spaceships, and an FTL- style galaxy map

A whole galaxy of procedurally generated levels. It takes a little while for Void Bastards to gets its hooks into you – the basic pistol feels stodgy, ship layouts can be a little baffling, the feedback loop between the two layers isn’t immediately obvious – but once it does, the thrill of seeing what the game will generate next becomes hard to refuse.

It’s around this point that the range of available tools opens up, offering new ways to probe at the contents of each ship. A zapper to temporarily deactivate security measures, and a hacking tool to make them target enemies. A rifle that can shoot through glass and cluster bombs designed to be thrown through a doorway, before locking it until the sound effects have died down. And the game’s crowning glory, the Rifter, which sucks its target out of reality then dumps them back wherever you point – perhaps on exposed electrical wiring, or in front of a hacked Gunpoint turret, or inside an ejector chute that empties out into space.

It makes for an excellent toybox, and the game’s structure forces you to play with every last thing inside, because the next ship has thrown up a new combination of threats or because you failed to pick up ammunition on the last one. The joy of Void Bastards, once it reveals itself, is that no action, no decision, is standalone. Right now, you might be aboard the Oklahoma Creek, but everything you do is informed by what you did on the Kind Herald, is feeding into what you’ll do next on the St Theodora. Provided, of course, you just don’t die out in the void.

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