PEGBRJE: From Orbit and KIDS
Space in 2 forms
From Orbit is an action RTS made by Tentacle Head Games, a solo indie team run by Brook Miles. Players take control of a spaceship stuck in space, hopping from planet to planet in the hopes of collecting resources to upgrade the crew and ship so they all survive the voyage home. With only a starting crew of two, players need to safely scour the randomly generated planets for the two resources necessary to progress and avoid getting murdered by aliens as replenishing your crew members can only be done after leaving a planet. To compensate for this limitation, players must utilize the ability for all crew members to change professions on the fly.
This core mechanic of switching professions is the focal point of From Orbit and is what brings the strategy and challenge. Each profession has a roll to play, between the defender’s ability to shoot, the engineer’s ability to build autonomous turrets/harvesters, the medic’s healing and the harvester’s self-harvesting of nodes. Searching for resources becomes a constant process of checking whether or not the coast is clear, and then switching crew members to the necessary job to get it done quickly. There is a slight delay, meaning that scouting with a harvester can be fatal if a profession switch is required last second. To add to the challenge, waves of enemies begin to rush your ship on a set timer, indicated at the top of the screen, that you must stop from destroying the ship. In a way, From Orbit feels like half ‘tower defense’, as the spawn point of the units attacking in waves is fixed to set locations found on the map, and killing them off as fast as possible gives more time to complete other objectives. There are turrets as well to place, but these cost precious resources that you need to take when you leave, so it becomes a choicie of when to use defenders and when to have turrets placed instead. Unfortunately I don’t believe RTS stands for Real Tower Strategy, so for now the similarities are all that drives the comparison.
The hiccup that I came across while playing was that the new player experience was somewhat weak. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on at first, but thankfully the pace of the game allowed me to get into it at a fairly quickly after I’d beaten the first planet. Unfortunately, once I had gotten into the game, before I realized what was going on it was nearly finished. I understood that each level was procedurally generated, technically giving hours of multiple playthroughs, but I was still a little sad that there wasn’t more: more turret types, more unit types, more planet types.
For what From Orbit sets out to do, it’s clear that it has achieved the goals of creating a space RTS with rogue-lite tendencies. It plays really well in short bursts or when you are itching for a tower defense RTS hybrid style to sink a few hours into. If this sounds like your game, From Orbit has you covered.
KIDS is a different take on the meaning of space. Published by Playables and created by the Playables Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach, KIDS is a visual experience about spaces and crowds. The entirety of the game is spent clicking on the proper figures and watching them enact what they need to do — whether that be highlighting bottlenecks in crowds, crowd mentality, reverse magnetism when running through around, and many many more.
I didn’t really understand what was going on at first with KIDS — all I knew was the company’s reputation for making bizarre visual experiences, such as their previous title Plug & Play which featured outlet headed people plugging into each other. As the game continued, however, it became more clear of its visual interpretations for how people interact when put into crowded spaces. Many of us who have had to commute or venture onto the highway during rush hour can understand the symbolism of being funneled slowly into a tiny opening, pushed along at a snail’s pace, only to be thrust out once the congestion has finished. There’s moments of frustration when trying to get an entire crowd of people to do the same thing at the same time, or the terrifying feeling that the people never end as you attempt to escape them all.
These are just a few of the set pieces that KIDS sets up for you to experience. It is extremely bizarre, but its understanding of how people coordinate when they are no longer a singular entity and the visual adaptations to convey these scenarios are all brilliant in their own way. There isn’t much else to say about KIDS — I can’t even really spoil it as I’m not entirely sure what story would be getting spoiled. If you are a fan of their previous abstract works, or are looking for something that could be described as a ’30 minute trip’, I recommend giving KIDS a try.
Links to both are below!
