RymdResa Review — Going Not-So-Gently into The Night

Much has been said about space.

Much has been said about space. Heck, much has been said about space just by me . There’s a good reason though, and one I never tire of talking about: Space is intoxicating.

Let me paint a picture for you: Points of light, blurring past, but only the vaguest sense of motion. Through the lone window, a larger source of light, a half circle that burns your retinas before it vanishes again. More blurred lights, and then the half circle again. You realize, in a rather detached fashion, that your hands have begun to go numb, gripping the throttle as tightly as they are. The half circle is approaching three-quarters, a waxing gibbous star whose tides are far too strong. In your last moments, you wonder if your impact will make noise. It doesn’t.

We haven’t understood anything.

And all that is left to understand is dying.

We need another world, another world to call home.

we want to last, we want to survive

and we want to live.

I’m searching for a new chance.

A new way to stay alive.

And then you start again.

RymdResa bills itself as a rogue-like, and it very much is one; but for me, it was a vehicle to the stars, and to simple, sad poetry. The game puts players in control of a small vessel, really little more than an outline of a ship, and tells them to go die a lot. Well, technically it tells players that they need to find a new home for their beleaguered species (though the poetry makes it pretty clear that they screwed up their last world), and apparently that involves a lot of dying.

Each “launch,” or life, is pretty simple. There are a variety of ships to choose from, but everything other than the basic ship requires expending “Space points,” which are acquired simply by playing. None of the ships are particularly overpowered, they just allow players to choose a ship that might counter something they’re having issues with. If, hypothetically, someone was accidentally getting drawn into stars and burnt quickly to death, then a faster ship might be the answer. If they were — and again, purely an academic example — slamming into a ton of mines and rocks, then a more durable ship might be worth dropping some points on for that run. Space points are fairly easy to come by, thankfully, and none of the ships are essential; I primarily used the basic ship in my time with the game and rarely had problems.

The stated goal is to find and build a new home for your species, but what this involves is pretty varied. In the first chapter, players appear to be flying to opposite ends of an apparently endless space (which makes it difficult to find those ends, let me tell you) in an effort to find very strange places and objects, while the second chapter has players exploring aimlessly, avoiding death and hunting for the materials needed to upgrade their new home planet. I’ve already basically spoiled the whole story with just that sentence, so I won’t go further than that in terms of the story.

Gameplay is fascinating, and actually hews very close to being like Rogue . In the first chapter, dying means starting the main quest completely over — this gets old quickly, but is effective at teaching the necessary skills for survival. Health is represented by a “resource” bar, which is also the fuel bar for your ship. Every time you accelerate, you use some of those resources, and when you reach zero, you die. Luckily, exploring some of the odd, shadowy objects in the galaxy — basically anything that isn’t a mine, asteroid chunk, or star — can restore some resources. Keyword there being “can.” Being like Rogue , you don’t know what exploring a celestial object does until you explore it, and so they can also have negative side-effects… including draining resources, i.e. killing you. Thanks, black hole.

Time in RymdResa is measured in years, and each year brings experience, free Space Points, and for some years, poetry. Time passes as the player moves, meaning they’re being constantly rewarded simply for not exploding. Interestingly, there is no combat in the game, and the imminent danger of death is provided both by the environment and by the player’s own incompetence.

Really, what kept me playing even as I got frustrated with the first chapter was the poetry, both explicit and implicit. The poems scattered everywhere are enjoyable, and tell of a world that had not gone mad, but rather, died loudly and with fanfare. But of course, there is the subtle poetry of drifting among the stars and the children of stars, watching it all flow by like a virtual, cosmic river… which flows out into a star. RymdResa is a beautiful game, and I was very pleased to find that I was playing the game more for myself than for anything else.

RymdResa was developed by the Swedish team Morgondag, and it is available now for Windows and Mac.

Pros

Beautiful poetry Challenging Smart design

Cons

Chapter One is frustratingly difficult Deceptive, non-interactive background objects I’ve never hated stars this much