![]() If you can make it past those first few days and stack your storage vaults a little bit, you get a bit more breathing room to be a little bit more exploratory with your travel choices. You died and there was nothing you could do about it. If you don’t-which is the case more often than not-then that’s it, game over. When you start each new game with just a couple of days’ worth of food and water, and each new destination is at least six hours away from the previous one, a lot rides on being lucky enough to pull some good supply nodes from the destination list. There’s nothing you can do to influence potential destinations, and the option of burning fuel less efficiently in order to travel faster makes a negligible difference. If you’re in dire need of one of those critical resources-which is almost always the case, especially early in the game-whether you can find what you need to stay alive depends entirely on the whims of a random number generator. For each new jump, you’re given four randomly-selected destinations to choose from, with different distances and potential discoveries. The problem is that Derelict Void almost never lets you get anywhere close to that sweet spot, not through any failure of your own, but through pure bad luck. There’s nothing quite like running a huge ship that’s been kitted out with all sorts of different factories, micromanaging a whole bunch of different tools that convert resources from one type to another, maintaining a perfect balance among all your ship and crew’s needs, and seeing what each new destination adds to the mix. And when all the cards fall in the right place, Derelict Void shows glimpses of that potential. That lays the groundwork for what should be a fascinating game of juggling different priorities, all of which are essential but are in constant conflict with one another. You also need space to fit all these things, which means periodically adding salvaged hulls to your ship-but also making it heavier in the process, which in turn drives up the fuel you need to spend to travel and/or the time it takes to get to your destination, which in turn means you’re consuming more critical resources, relatively speaking, for the same journey with a lighter ship… Food, water, and oxygen are the highest priority, since running out of any one of them is an instant game over, but the bigger picture is one of trying to gradually build out your ship, adding new resource production facilities, storage buildings, and housing area for a growing crew.īut you can’t just build these things you have to salvage them from other wrecks you encounter on your travels. To that end, the game revolves primarily around travelling from place to place-wreckages of old ships, asteroids, maybe an emergency supply vessel if you’re really lucky-in search of resources to keep your crew alive. Survive long enough, and you might be able to get to the bottom of what happened, but with limited resources, just keeping your boat flying and your crew alive is the first priority. You’re in charge of a spaceship left drifting in the wake of a strange incident that dropped a whole star system’s worth of ships into unfamiliar space. That’s not to say Derelict Void doesn’t have great ideas and intriguing concept, but they tend to get lost in an over-reliance on RNG-driven game design and a limited array of options for making the most of whatever hand you’re dealt.ĭerelict Void is, in essence, a resource management game. Roll a six and your journey continues for one more turn roll one to five and it’s game over, thanks for playing. Then you get games like Derelict Void, where the difficulty is so arbitrary and tied to random events that, most of the time, it feels like a glorified dice game. Related: Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate is a classic roguelike, in all its brutal, retro charm. ![]() You’ll die lots, sometimes unfairly, but usually in a way that would have been avoidable if you’d done something differently-making each failure a chance to learn what that “something” might be. They usually are, but that’s a consequence of the things that make them interesting: the interaction between different systems, items, upgrades, weapons, and what-have-you, and the way learning the nuances of all those interactions gives you the tools to carve out a victory with whatever you come across. Good roguelikes aren’t designed to be difficult or unforgiving.
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