Following on from their debut game, Developer Robot Gentleman’s space set 60 Parsecs! challenges you to see how long you can survive in space after being given just 60 seconds to escape your space station. You must also grab crew members, tools, and supplies, which will hopefully allow you to overcome the numerous problems that you’ll soon face. Needless to say the choices you make in these opening moments will soon play an important role in determining what happens to you and the crew members you supposedly rescued.
Once you’re cast into space, the game settles into a routine of forcing you to make a decision each day regarding an issue that will more often than not be less of a good vs bad choice but more the lesser of two evils which depending on the resources and skills you have can either help or hinder your chances of survival. You can also craft items and later send out crew members on missions once you find a planet to crash land on. However, the general gameplay for each day is generally around four clicks of the mouse, combined with the general downward spiral that the game descends into as you’re forced to start recycling equipment to buy your crew a couple of extra days and strive off your inevitable demise.
One of the key resources of the game is soup, which makes up your sole food supply and a large portion of your survival rests on being able to generate or locate more soup. As the captain though it’s down to you to decide how the soup is dished out. Are you giving everyone a fair amount or do you choose to just cut off the soup for that injured crewman who might up dying the next day? It’s certainly one of the tougher choices your forced to make, while the skeleton remains of your dead crew mates litter the pod as you’re forced to live with your choices. Before you ask, no, you can’t just turn to cannibalism or even just water down the soup to scratch out a couple of extra days.
This sort of battling against an oppressive tide of bleakness of course will be a familiar experience to anyone who has played the likes of Papers Please and to the credit of Robot Gentleman they do try to balance out the bleakness with some genuinely funny as well as truly bizarre scenarios to play through. These include things like cockroaches, who if you choose not to wipe them out, will turn out to be super intelligent insects. Depending on the choices you make, you can even turn them into the neighbours from hell as they start stealing power so that they can work on their hotrod. Unquestionably, these random little moments help to alleviate the gloom that their counterparts seem to revel in.
While the game usually lasts around 45 mins depending on the choices you make, and with the 100+ scenarios randomised much like the items available for pick up when you start, it does add some variety to gameplay so your not just playing through the same game each time. Of course knowing there really is no way to win the game bar trying to last as long as possible can make it kind of a deflating experience, especially combined with the lack of things to actually do outside of trying to find the least horrible way to screw up your survival each day.
An experience that is as fun as it is frequently frustrating, especially once it enters into its downward spiral that never seems to offer a way out of, the idea of replaying the game becomes less of an appealing prospect. However, the moments of humour and interesting concept makes it a challenge worth playing through at least once.