Taking Flight
A hands-on exclusive with Jett: The Far Shore, Superbrothers’ mysterious spacefaring adventure
The pull of the unknown is powerful indeed. But the excitement of setting off on a new adventure is often tinged with sadness: every departure means leaving something, or someone, behind. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where that could be more pronounced than a journey into space, not least when it’s clear the goodbye is going to be permanent. The new game from Sword & Sworcery creator Superbrothers, made in collaboration with Pine Scented Software, hits you with that just a minute or two in. Looking through the eyes of protagonist Mei, you step out of a yurt to a sea of faces, at once sombre yet expectant, all looking directly at you. Beyond mum, dad and older sister lies the low-altitude vehicle of the title, the one you will pilot for much of your journey. The urge to start your journey is strong. But you’re also made to feel the wrench of leaving.
Then you clamber up a ladder into the cockpit and it feels as if a weight has been lifted. Your diminutive Jett is an incredibly nippy and agile craft, as you soon discover during a training exercise which lets you get to grips with its handling before you head for the cosmodrome from where you leave your cradle world behind.
On screen the vehicle looks tiny, the camera pulled back to offer a thrilling widescreen view of your surroundings: an appetite whetter for the landscapes you’ll discover in the hours to come. But before you arrive, there’s a truly electrifying launch sequence, set to a piece of music by Jim Guthrie (his sole contribution to the soundtrack) in which the roar of rockets and soaring synths build to a Hans Zimmer-beating crescendo that all but lifts us out of our seat. Deftly establishing the game’s heady blend of the expansive and the intimate, it’s an intro for the ages – a spine-tingling moment that feels more suited to an IMAX screen than our modest PC monitor.
But then Craig D Adams and Patrick McAllister – the two-person team that first conceived and has since developed much of the game – have had plenty of time to think about that opening. Jett: The Far Shore has taken a long while to get off the ground. In its embryonic form, in fact, it existed before Sword & Sworcery took over Adams’ life and put his pseudonym Superbrothers on the map. The two previously worked together at Koei Canada, where McAllister was a programmer and Adams a CG designer on the interestingly flawed futuristic racer Fatal Inertia. Which, perhaps surprisingly, provided the initial spark of inspiration.
“The idea of a pulled-back shot with a jet leaving a trail was there from 2007, probably,” Adams tells us. “While I was developing the camera style for trailers and things, I [imagined] another type of videogame that doesn’t exist that I would really like to play.” Looking at the footage from that more distant viewpoint, he began to imagine a snowboarding game or some alternative racer viewed from a similar perspective, and how those games could be taken in a more narrative-led direction. “There’s some variety in the racing genre, but you don’t often see a videogame with those kind of vehicular action chops going after a kind of Fumito Ueda type of action-adventure experience.”
It’s the second time in as many months we’ve had developers nod toward Shadow Of The Colossus, though its influence here is more on the mood than mechanics. As we speed across this new world to Andrew ‘Scntfc’ Rohrmann’s score – by turns evoking feelings of whimsical discovery and otherworldly awe – we’re reminded of those long, lonely rides between battles. Except here we’re not alone. Mei’s amiable co-pilot Isao is a constant companion, at least for these early hours, passing on instructions and chipping in with observations and the occasional earnest pronouncement. “A people reborn, in Ghoke’s dim glow,” he says grandly, referring to the vast pink-red planet looming ominously in the eastern sky.
He’s with us for all those crucial firsts, such as the initial descent to the planet, where we deploy chutes and jettison the shell with which we breach its atmosphere. And he’s with us as we limp along to solid ground, our ship’s scramjets disabled until we finally touch down and recharge them. Here we’re invited to alight, the camera pivoting to a top-down view as it rapidly drops to ground level; then we’re back inside Mei’s suit, feeling gravity’s tug once more in the weight of her movement. Even with the ability to sprint by holding the right trigger, her feet feel heavy, each footstep communicated through rumble feedback and the gentle jog of the camera.
As we gaze out at a distant peak (known simply as Tor), beneath a pinkblue sky and purple clouds, we don’t quite feel the same sense of awe that Mei might – we’ve already grown used to the view from an external camera. But it does capture that feeling of being back on terra firma, of finding your feet once again in the dirt. Not exactly home, but
EVEN WITH THE ABILITY TO SPRINT, MEI’S FEET FEEL HEAVY, EACH FOOTSTEP COMMUNICATED THROUGH RUMBLE FEEDBACK
OUR FIRST CONTACT IS WITH A BRINE WISP.AND WHAT FOLLOWS FEELS LESS A CHASE AND MORE A CURIOUS, MAGICAL DANCE
somewhere enough like it. Somewhere that feels safe – at least for now.
But we can’t stay: we do, after all, have to rendezvous with our fellow anchorites at a place called Scout’s Prospect in 24 hours. Time, then, to reboard the Jett and cut loose. Switching on our scramjets enables us to move much faster by default, but now a squeeze of the trigger causes us to surge forward at breakneck speed. We learnt the technique during the earlier training, but it’s another opportunity to tap A and pull off a concussive ‘pop’, a brisk jump of sorts. Pull back on the stick at the same time, meanwhile, and you’ve got a ‘hop’ that lets you grab more air. And you can skid with the left trigger to take sharp turns, though that’s hardly necessary as we scud along the surface of this storm-tossed sea.
With those already memorised, it’s time to try out some new toys: a resonator that sends out a ping to highlight distant objectives or organic signals nearby. There’s something in the water with us, but this inquisitive little creature seems friendly. Our first contact, then, is with a brine wisp, and what follows feels less a chase and more a curious, magical dance as it darts around. Handily, it also produces a vapour which stabilises our scramjets – meaning we don’t have to let go of the accelerator. “I’m a huge fan of MotorStorm: Pacific Rift and that series has some concept of engine heat, which is sort of where our instability comes from,” Adams says. “In Pacific Rift, you can drive through rivers to cool down your engine and that kind of thing.”
Here, however, the water doesn’t have the side-effect of slowing us down. Instead, we hurtle across a narrow sandbank, following a trail of tiny fissures to sustain top speed. It’s a mechanic that promises to become more significant in high-pressure situations, and so it proves. And there’s another bit of foreshadowing when Isao talks us through the ship’s dash-roll move. “Good way to snap to one side and shake something off,” he chimes. Shake what off? We find out soon enough.
But with the squall closing in, we have to postpone our objective, at least until it moves on. Which gives us time to explore a nearby archipelago from above, a timer appearing in the top-right of the screen to tell us we’ve got 20 minutes of realtime to do as we please.
There’s organic life below, which means it’s unsafe to go aground, but the fauna seems harmless enough. Our ship’s computer tells us the creatures below us are Hoppas: at first, they bring to mind antelopes or springboks, but upon closer inspection they’re actually more like emus crossed with llamas. We accidentally stun a group of them as we deploy another pop above something we’re told is a Ghokebloom. This triggers a surprising reaction, the bloom releasing an explosion of colour that spreads outwards. Suddenly the area around it is flourishing with new, tiny growths: a moment akin to those sequences in Okami when a sudden rush of flowers brings vibrant life back to an area. As in Hideki Kamiya’s sumi-e epic, it’s impossible to resist seeking out more of these so you can repeat the trick. There’s more life here, too, prompting us to experiment with our Jett’s grapple – carrying heavy objects disables your scramjets, we discover, until you punt them away – and its beams, which we flash at just about everything to see if it responds, and how.
If, up to a point, there’s a little leeway in how you approach some objectives, this is the first time that the player gets to truly embody Mei’s role as a pioneer, discovering through experimentation rather than following instructions. In some ways, it mirrors the journey of McAllister and Adams, as they found themselves operating in “this unexplored genre space where there weren’t really crutches to lean on and help you through,” as Adams puts it.
“It’s funny, looking back,” he says. “There were so many bets that we had placed at the start that are still there: the Jetts are the same, the camera’s the same, a lot of the verbs are the same. It was never like we went in completely the wrong direction and now we’ve got to reset,” he says, alluding to how long it’s taken to get to this stage. “It just seemed like we were driving towards a thing, and it was hard to make gains on it quickly.”
Mei and Isao find their progress similarly stalled, too – first by that squall, and then when they realise with mounting anxiety that Ghoke’s glow isn’t quite as dim as Isao suggested. As dusk descends, its fierce radiance is enough to instantly deplete the Jett’s shield; now our job is to get out of its glare. Suddenly we find we’re playing a vehicular stealth game, albeit one where the spotlight is the size of a planet. Finding respite isn’t too tricky, with rocks and fauna providing temporary protection, but our objective demands we dart between pockets of shade, heading for a bright-blue ion pool to replenish our shield before hunkering down for the night.
“I guess this is a bit of a kitchensink game,” Adams laughs. “You can see that we had a lot of ideas. And we went after most of them, and now we’re
SUDDENLY WE FIND OURSELVES PLAYING A STEALTH GAME, ALBEIT ONE WHERE THE SPOTLIGHT IS THE SIZE OF A PLANET
delivering on those to some degree.” For him and McAllister, he says, it all goes back to his ideas for a snowboarding or racing game with a very different type of focus. “There’s just certain things that those genres will choose to never do,” Adams adds. “But there’s nothing to say that they couldn’t – like, the difference between a thirdperson skateboarding game and a thirdperson stealth game is just a vehicle, there’s nothing beyond that. You could introduce those kinds of elements and then explore these design spaces to figure out what the right mix could be for a videogame that isn’t going to rely on more usual mechanics.”
That, McAllister says, was part of the plan from day one: this was never going to be a game that aimed to follow in the footsteps of others, even if it aspired to live up to its many influences in less obvious ways. One significant idea was the concept of what he calls a “horizon break”, which he describes as “that feeling when a game turns out to be more than what you’re expecting it to be.” Adams nods. “Yeah, we had an interest in [ensuring] that every hour you go, ‘Oh, so that’s what the game is.’ And then an hour later, you go, ‘Oh, no. OK, now it’s that.’ Hopefully, we keep that up through most of the campaign. And so by the time you’re in that kind of back half, it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, this is a lot of distinct elements.”
Yet that ambition to take the game into uncharted territory led to problems. In 2015, Adams took it to Enhance Games’ Mark MacDonald (then executive director of localisation company 8-4) to playtest. “We told him, ‘It’s an ecosystem videogame where you’re going to use all these things to figure out how to deal with [threats]’, and we didn’t have any of this player direction in there, and hadn’t explained why anybody should care about these goings-on.” MacDonald’s response, fair to say, was hardly one of resounding approval. “Mark was like, ‘You should have one of the scouts crash-land, and you have to save them, so you have a whole bunch of action,’” he says. “And it was like, ‘All right, let’s start by doing exactly that’. And that started us thinking about the design
ADAMS GORGED ON SCI-FI AHEAD OF WRITING THE SCRIPT, BUT IT WAS AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD THAT HAD A MORE PROFOUND IMPACT
A ROHRMANN TRACK FEATURING VOICEOVER FROM ASTRONOMER CARL SAGAN BECAME WHAT ADAMS CALLS A “LODESTAR” FOR THE GAME
and the story to make sure that kind of scene gets earned.”
It was a pivotal moment that began a concerted push towards a more narrative-led approach for Jett. The following year, Adams took an early version of the game, featuring a prologue, an enemy encounter and a free-roaming explorative section, to “some of the wise people in the industry” for their input. It was the year of Firewatch and Below, he recalls, both of which share some DNA with Jett – the latter in both the importance of score to establish mood and the tiny size of the player-character. “There was this feeling that we had a little bit before, and then a lot more since, which was, ‘Oh, jeez, where’s Jett going to land? Where do we fit in the landscape?’” That uncertainty hadn’t always been the case, however: some time before, the two thought they’d found their niche. “Here’s a two-person team doing this videogame of large-seeming scope that relies on procedural world generation, because we had a bunch of that in there,”
Adams says with a wry smile. “And then, bless ’em, Hello Games pitched up with something that just sucked all the oxygen out of the room.”
No Man’s Sky might have had its ups and downs, he notes, but either way, “we couldn’t exactly walk in after that and say, ‘Hey, check it out – here’s another spacefaring videogame where you can get in and out of your ship and there’s procedural content.’” But Jett still had its own distinctive tone, with characters and a narrative that was already fairly fleshed out. The trick, he says, was to lean into that side more. In the years since, he and McAllister refocused, turning Jett into a more heavily authored game, still with some procedural tech but more bespoke elements besides, and with a story to attract a broader audience. “We had this fear: if you ship something that’s just a Jett and ecosystems, how many people do you lose who need a character and a story and a soul to pull them in?”
That story is possibly a little more serious-minded than you might expect from the man who wrote the wilfully irreverent Sword & Sworcery. That partly stemmed from a desire to move away from the game he calls “a time capsule to 2011”, having consciously shifted from pixels to polygons and from fantasy to science fiction. “I just thought, let’s button it all down, let’s be straightlaced,” he says. “It’s a headache on the Internet these days to try to make jokes, and then you don’t have the context and it all becomes kind of frayed. And so I thought, ‘Let’s do a straight shot here, [something] a little bit stoic, a little bit more straightforward science fiction. And let’s try to stick to our guns.”
To that end, Adams gorged on classic sci-fi such as Dune and Alien ahead of writing the script, but it was Aguirre, Wrath Of God – Werner Herzog’s 1972 film about a group of conquistadores who run into trouble as they search for El Dorado – that had a more profound impact on the game’s story. It shows in the way the scouts seem to lurch from crisis to crisis (Adams admits to initially having aspirations for a plot that
“EVERY HOUR YOU GO, ‘OH, SO THAT’S WHAT THE GAME IS.’ AND THEN AN HOUR LATER, YOU GO, ‘OH, NO. OK, NOW IT’S THAT’”