HEAVENLY BODIES
Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space
Aboard this space station, taking even one small step is far from easy. There’s no gravity, after all, leaving your character bobbing uselessly in their orange spacesuit. To reach the next room, you need to steer each arm independently using the thumbsticks, grab hold of something solid with the triggers, then pull and release to launch yourself forward. In theory, anyway. More often than not, you will be rewarded instead with the sound of your helmet clonking softly against the doorframe, or the sight of your entire body crumpling into a wall.
“A slapstick space sim” is how lead programmer Alexander Perrin describes Heavenly Bodies. “You’re given this cosmonaut who has been training ten years for this, and now they’ve been launched into space, and given hundreds of millions of dollars of space equipment to assemble and maintain. But ultimately they’re at the mercy of someone who can’t even comprehend what it’s like to be weightless.” And that, as Perrin says, is inherently funny.
Like QWOP or Octodad before it, Heavenly Bodies mines humour from the friction between intent and outcome. Getting a leg trapped in the airlock, or pulling a lever only for it to snap off – well, you have to laugh, don’t you? But, as lead artist Joshua Tatangelo clarifies: “We’re not making a comedy game.” It isn’t that we’re not supposed to giggle when things go wrong (“If you find it funny,” Tatangelo adds, “then that’s great, it’s just another reason to enjoy it”), just that there’s something else at work here.
There’s a quiet dignity to the visuals that couldn’t be further from the lo-fi wackiness of most physical comedy games. The same goes for the audio, a wash of minimalist synth sounds. And then there’s the setting, which contextualises your escapades with the knowledge that, just one flimsy door away, space waits for its chance to gobble you up. When we raise the inevitable cinematic comparison, Perrin laughs: “Everyone knows it’s Sandra Bullock under the helmet.” If Gravity’s spacewalk sequences left you with any residual fear, Heavenly Bodies is happy to tap into it. By the second mission, we’re sent out of the airlock to bring the station’s data tower back online – a reminder that a single nudge in the wrong direction can send you spiralling out into the void.
Like Cuarón’s movie, Heavenly Bodies is interested in the almost mundane realities of space exploration. At least early on, your tasks – unfolding a solar panel, calibrating antennae, repairing broken equipment – are what we might call grounded, if only our astronaut weren’t floating in zero-G. It all speaks to the developers’ fascination with the stars. “It runs in the family,” Perrin says; his dad is “an amazing space nerd”, while Tatangelo’s brother works as an aerospace engineer.
Most of the game’s scenarios are based on historical occurrences, Perrin says – “just expanded to make them a little bit more playful, a little grander.” Even when they’ve dreamed up situations themselves, the developers have later discovered they’re closer to the truth than they realised. “Last year, when NASA landed their drone on that meteor to mine it? Months before that, we’d made the level Minerals, which is taking a mining pod out to find an asteroid,” Perrin explains. As the duo have dug through the histories of Mir, Skylab and the ISS, similar coincidences have occurred – a result of being so deeply steeped in the subject matter, they reckon. “And through that reference and research, you do find things that are kind of absurd,” Tatangelo says. “There’s this nice human element to it, where they were doing the best they could with what they had.” So the ridiculous, scrambling situations the game’s controls put us in? Perhaps they’re not such a giant leap after all.
A single nudge in the wrong direction can send you spiralling out into the void