I realized now that I should have put the name of the game in the strip title, maybe. If you got super cranked up looking at the power board in the comic, and you were like “surely they aren’t doing a Tetris-inspired block puzzle to manage their ship, just like I saw in that dream I had. A dream I’ve held so close” well I got real good news for you, space cowboy. The game is called Jump Ship and that’s exactly how it fucking works.
We thought that we had gotten the board set up during a quiet moment, and set up correctly, but something got goosed with it. Gabriel the Younger had messed around with it more than me, so I kicked him out of the pilot’s seat in the hopes he could get it running again. Gabriel the Elder was on the turrets at this time thank God, and as the board was getting worked on, I would lose the individual systems in real time while he swapped in the little pieces manually. I told him that I couldn’t fly the ship anymore, and he said that shouldn’t be happening. “I’ve got terrible news, then,” I said.
They do the parts of the ship that are high status. I do literally everything else: I’m up to my elbow in this ship’s ass. I’m putting out a fire that got into a Jefferies Tube and then spread. They run out of bullets and I have to make those bullets and install them in the magazine. Mines got deployed and I have to go out and remove them, manually, while the ship is in a space battle. I don’t want any other job! I want to be the agar in which heroism may grow unfettered.
Shipsims aren’t new, of course. Because many of the same people who want to fly in a spaceship are engineers of some stripe, many have tried to put one together. Artemis and EmptyEpsilon are more elemental in their presentation than Bridge Crew, but they’re all predicated around the fantasy of operating your station in concert with others and they ball.
Indeed, the desire to crew ships is so strong that we have a bunch of newish games trying to offer space perverts their most twisted fantasies on a copper-tungsten substrate. Dreamhaven’s Moonshot Games studio is making Wildgate, which looks quite Blizzardy for obvious reasons, and their take on the genre is a kind of PvPvE extraction thingy. Void Crew is the most similar to Jump Ship, but I think they’re trying to do slightly different things – I bought Void Crew back in Early Access, and I had to return it because it kept crashing my computer to the BIOS, which I guess is like a Black Hole. But it’s got crazy reviews now, and cool updates on the way. Haven’t played PULSAR, seems like it’s well-liked too. But, I don’t know. I want to throw my lot in with these Jump Ship kids over at Keepsake. Their pedigree is crazy and I can’t wait to see where they go, especially if this is where they start.
(CW)TB out.