Affordable Space Adventures

Affordable Space Adventures is a puzzle-adventure game that manages to make better use of the Wii U gamepad than any of Nintendo’s own titles on the system. Telling a story that confronts the exploitative practices of large corporations while offering innovative mechanics that create unique puzzles, the game only falters when it comes to its difficulty curve, which falls sharply during the climax.

The game aptly opens with a commercial: Uexplore invites people to participate in its exploration program to the planet Spectaculon, showing lush green landscapes, magnificent waterfalls under a striking rainbow, and dolphins jumping out of the water at sunset. The video promises unimaginable riches, appealing to the imperialist mindset of its target audience: “If you map an area first you can claims it as yours,” it promises.

These ads are the soul of Affordable Space Adventures’ narrative. Just the first one, for example, offers several contradictions and ironies that set the cynical tone of the story. The dazzling, inviting environments the first commercial proudly displays are accompanied by the guarantee that they are absolutely safe to explore, for example. But to make the concept of conquering foreign lands more tempting to the audience, the company also claims that 99% of the planet’s surface has not yet been mapped, which puts the validity of its previous claim into question. Uexplore goes on to state that there have been zero reported accidents since 1995, but the emphasis should go to the word “reported” and the countless fatalities it can subtly hide. Later on, that date even changes, warning the player of the company’s dishonesty: “0 accidents since 1993,” says the company booklet displayed on the loading screen. Meanwhile, the man in charge of security who appears in another ad with a smile, Alex Bonody, has in his last name an acronym for “nobody” and his face clearly photoshopped in another man’s body.

It’s not a surprise, then, when the reality in Spectaculon is revealed to be different from Uexplore’s marketing. As soon as the protagonist’s ship (the character isn’t named nor described, leading us to put ourselves in their place) appears on the screen, its operating system is rebooting after experiencing undisclosed problems. The ship itself is tiny, with its flashlight illuminating a sinister area bathed in menacing purple light. And as soon as the ship is able to move, its frailty is reinforced: its engine makes it bump slightly, turning its movement unstable, almost as if the ship itself were shivering, while a dense black smoke comes out of the exhaust vent. Outside, a fierce lightning storm blocks part of the view and a wreckage made of Uexplore’s equipment works as the finishing touch in building the hostile environment.

We move this feeble ship in a 2D plane, but the point of the game actually lies in controlling the ship’s operating system, which is displayed on the Wii U’s gamepad touchscreen. This operating system is the game’s core mechanic: by touching the screen we activate and deactivate several mechanisms and systems that are gradually made available during the adventure, as the ship’s OS recovers its core functions.

There are two engines, for example. One uses fuel and allows the ship to push heavy objects, but makes it shake violently if its stabilizer is not working. The other one is electric, which makes the ship perfectly stable, although weak, and offers more complex options, such as control over how it is affected by inertia or gravity. There are other particularities inherent to these two engines – only the electric one allows submerged movement, for instance – but the complexity comes mainly from the need to adapt these options to the puzzles involving enemies and the environment.

The first puzzle of the game is a basic one, being part of the universal language of the genre: we need to push blocks and press switches. After mixing these two elements for a while, however, Affordable Space Adventures begins to present its unique ingredients: the constant shaking of the ship, for example, becomes a problem when we need to cross a corridor full of laser beams. Diminishing the shaking with the stabilizer, however, increases the pressure on the reactor, and may cause it to explode if we take too long to cross the room.

Enemies complicate the situation even further. We usually come across alien artifacts that attack and destroy our ship if we are not careful. The ship itself is not equipped with any weapons – Spectaculon is completely safe, after all –, so the only two options are either running away or trying to pass by them unnoticed. This is done by controlling the ship’s many systems: each engine and equipment affects the level of heat, noise, and electricity generated by us and picked up by enemies.

The general logic behind the puzzles, then, becomes clear. It’s necessary to activate the necessary mechanisms to overcome an obstacle, but in such a way that the ship is not perceived by the hostile artifacts that surround it: we must try to discover what is the specific combination of the ship’s systems that will allow us to safely traverse each area. The difficulty keeps rising with the constant addition of new equipment to our ship – each one usually comes with a significant drawback –, which increases the number of things to consider and deal with: we must discover not only which engines and mechanisms to activate but also figure out what’s the best time and order to do so, sometimes switching between them on the fly when passing through a certain obstacle or enemy. Later on, the game also begins to ask us to think outside the box, such as considering turning the ship off completely so that it simply falls down to the ground like a rock, but unnoticed by the hostile artifacts, and turning everything back on at the last moment to avoid impact.

The game’s difficulty curve, however, falls flat precisely when it should reach its peak: the last levels are as simple as the first ones because the game takes away the ship’s main functions. This may create a circular journey, taking us back to how we were at the beginning, but since the difficulty comes from the complexity of options, it turns the last moments anticlimactic. There was a later update that added new levels with much more challenging puzzles that take full advantage of the game’s core mechanics, but they are accessed separately from the story.

The game’s presentation, on the other hand, is flawless. Environments are always huge and imposing, constantly reinforcing the fragility and insignificance of our ship before that mysterious and hostile planet. The interface of the escape capsules found on the planet is also great, emulating the aesthetic of Windows 95: a thematically appropriate surprise since it points to Uexplore’s false advertising regarding their cutting-edge technology. The sound design, in turn, is composed mainly of diegetic sounds, which come from the environment, adding to the planet’s oppressive atmosphere, while the few instrumental tracks are subtle when they appear, just complementing the sounds of the planet.

Another positive aspect of the game, and unfortunately unavailable after November 2017, was its excellent use of the now-extinct Miiverse during the epilogue, when messages written by other players contributed to the important final punchline: (spoilers) we see their messages of help being printed in an empty office.

Affordable Space Adventures is a game that manages to rival Nintendo’s biggest ones on the Wii U when it comes to creativity. Its cynical story is skillfully told and its mechanics prove to be unique, offering a good number of challenging puzzles.

July 16, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on October 27, 2017.