I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Star Trek fan. But I do love the idea of the Starship Enterprise, a spaceship big enough to hold hundreds of crew members including officers, scientists, soldiers, and even civilians. The Enterprise is basically a small city flying through space, and as spaceships go that’s more interesting to me than a ship like the Millenium Falcon or Serenity.
Jumplight Odyssey, which just announced it’s launching into Steam early access on August 21, puts you in charge of a starship not unlike the Enterprise, in a game developer League of Geeks describe as “FTL meets Two Point Hospital, with a little RimWorld thrown in.”
Well gosh, I like all of those games, and I also like what I’ve seen so far of Jumplight Odyssey. The FTL part comes from the predicament your ship is in: with your homeworld destroyed, you’re searching the galaxy for a new system to call home, but you’re being pursued every step of the way by a powerful enemy fleet. That gives you a limited time in each star system to explore with shuttlecraft and gather resources needed to increase the capabilities of your ship.
The Two Point Hospital and RimWorld stuff comes in as you build new rooms and modules onto your ship and manage your dozens of crew members, all of whom have different moods, interests, relationships, and psychological profiles. There’s plenty of potential for drama as your officers and engineers form bonds and develop crushes, which can impact them in positive or negative ways.
I played the demo of Jumplight Odyssey when it was available during Steam Next Fest, and my only problem with it was that it was just too darn short. I barely had time to start building new rooms on my ship, like a greenhouse and a manufacturing plant, and send out some away teams for salvage missions before the demo had ended.
One thing I really loved was the slick interface for looking around inside the starship. Using the number keys you can sort of peel through the different layers of the ship, from the jumplight drive to the hangar bay to the crew levels and finally the command deck. It’s just so cool:
I keep hearing about this other big space game coming out in the near future called “Starfield,” but if I’m being honest I’m looking forward to Jumplight Odyssey nearly as much.
clivingston@pcgamer.com (Christopher Livingston)
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