The choice wasn’t easy for me because of the excellent pentiment, but in the end it was actually Hardspace: Shipbreaker that drew me most into its unassuming spell this year. On the one hand, that’s because I like to sink into science fiction worlds anyway, and on the other hand, because it’s made so pleasantly easy for me here. After all, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is not an epic where you have to think your way into a multi-layered plot and a complex combat system.
It is an everyday simulation that reenacts the job of a shipwrecker who scraps disused spaceships in a distant future. So while the radio is playing country music, you’re handling the futuristic welding torch and laser lasso to dismantle the sometimes huge pots piece by piece and dispose of the remaining scrap properly.
The good thing about it: This imitation of normal work has not much in common with the rather… simple everyday simulation of our reality, but is a great game in itself. You don’t just click your way through tightly prescribed processes, you also manipulate the tools freely while keeping an eye on the statics of the physically complex ship constructions and thinking up a few tricks to make the work more effective or just fun.
Despite the relaxed disassembly, you have to leave many of the individual parts intact and sort them correctly in order to make enough money out of the wrecks. After all, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is also a subtle pointer to real ship wreckers who dismantle real ocean liners under disastrous security conditions and at absurdly low prices. The game succeeds with a tongue-in-cheek story about low wages and the formation of a union.
While even indie developers almost exclusively recreate well-known ideas these days, Hardspace: Shipbreaker shows once again that there are still ideas in video games that have never been implemented in one form or another. Bonus bee gets it for doing that with a top notch game set in a fancy sci-fi!
