“And yet, against all odds, I am still playing it.”
I have a love-hate relationship with strategy video games. I love getting invested in a world or a set of characters that I feel like I’ve had a substantial hand in developing. I love feeling like I’m using my brain more than my reflexes, and that mastery comes not through random chance or quick button presses but careful planning and lateral thinking. And when I do well, I love steamrolling the other team in a blaze of glory, or finally seeing my magnificent machine balance itself and walk upright—speaking metaphorically, of course. These are games like Creeper World, Cities: Skylines, Civilization V (which I’ve written about before!), Factorio, Opus Magnum, and the like.
What I hate is being handed a random bad roll from digital dice that absolutely demolishes my plans with no hope for recovery, and suddenly all my well-laid plans are up in smoke and that empire, city, complex machine, whatever I had hoped to nurture into success is gone. And I feel like I’ve just wasted a lot of my time (sometimes hours or even days depending on the kind of game) for nothing. Of course, I had fun during the build-up, that’s the point of the game, but seeing it all just fizzle out, especially at the hands of things I can’t control, is immensely disappointing. And when that happens, I usually call it quits and leave strategy games behind for a few months. Games like XCOM, Risk, or multiplayer matches of Civilization are especially nasty about this, where you can whip yourself up into a fail state without even realizing it, and the mistake you made might have been dumb chance or occurred hours ago.
A great way for games to alleviate this is to encourage players to play through their mistakes, or their bad rolls, or whatever disaster has befallen your well-planned strategy. There’s a lot of writing and talking about this already, where game designers can add elements to their games to encourage players to roll with the punches instead of getting frustrated and giving up (like I usually do, because I have little tolerance for failure both in games and real life. It’s unhealthy!). I think that Heat Signature, Streets of Rogue, and oddly enough, Sekiro are games that are all really good at encouraging this kind of more… inventive playstyle, perhaps? A more organic approach to failure that forces you to deal with the consequences and, in the end, maybe have more fun with it?
And yet, over the last few weeks, the game that I keep coming back to to let me relax in the evenings, the game I play to wind down at night, the game I willingly sink my free time into to quiet down my brain, is full of stupidly punishing bullshit entirely controlled by random numbers and a final encounter so monumentally difficult compared to the rest of the game that even small mistakes right at the very start can largely determine whether you will win or lose this game. What’s worse, those random numbers play just as much of a role in whether you can even win or not as any actual strategy. And the penalty for failure is starting over from scratch. But I keep trying again anyway, for fuck’s sake.
This game is FTL: Faster Than Light.
FTL: Faster Than Light is brutal. I have been playing this game on and off since it came out in 2012 (that makes me feel really old), and I’ve never once actually beaten the game. You play as a single spaceship trying to cross the galaxy, fighting other ships and firing weapons with the goal of eventually destroying one giant ship right at the end, but the real strategy of the game lies not in the battles themselves, but in everything in between. Plotting your course, choosing upgrades for your ship, knowing when to take risks and when to run away, these are the choices that make the game interesting. When things are going well, it’s immensely rewarding. When you’ve been struggling across the galaxy and kit out your ship and suddenly realize that you’re nearly unstoppable, that’s a beautiful feeling. It is, I suppose, why I keep coming back to it. As the game cheekily reminds you, dying is part of the fun.
But the game is so woefully reliant on luck and luck alone to hand you the tools you need. Get to a store but they don’t have the weapon you need? Sorry, better luck next time. Crossed the whole galaxy to find the end of that quest only to realize you’ve run out of time before the rebels catch you? Well, best just fuck right off to the main menu. Make a small miscalculation in timing your weapon and that narrow opening of victory suddenly slips away? Oops, I hope you weren’t planning on winning this game. It is absolutely maddening.
I hate the fact that I can spent forty-five minutes on a run, get a good ship set up, and then have a string of bad luck that craters any chance I had of success. That’s the one upside of it, I guess, one “round” of a game is only about an hour long at the most. But still! To go through all that and feel like I’ve made no progress? Perhaps this says more about me than about the game that I value making “progress” above “having fun,” but that’s a story for another day. And yet, I must be having some kind of fun because I still want to try again later. I want to try some of the new weapons I saw in the last playthrough, or maybe make a ship with a boarding party, or maybe try to catch that stupid motherfucker that escaped last time.
Somewhere along the line in developing this game, I think the team working on it realized that it’s really kind of luck-heavy beause their next game, Into the Breach, removes almost any kind of “luck” from the equation. Into the Breach is, for my money, a much more balanced gameplay experience, but maybe I feel that way because I’ve actually “won” Into the Breach. I described this game to my family one time as “Chess with Huge Robots and Giant Bugs,” and I really do stand by that description, because, much like chess, the game falls apart once you start pissing on it. But more importantly, it pits you against an opponent that’s just as strong as you are, and the only unknown variable is what move they’re gonna make. But what makes Into the Breach even better than chess is you know what your opponent’s move is gonna be!
That might not sound like it would be a very difficult game, but I assure you, it’s still tough. It is not an easier game than FTL, but it is a fairer one. And yet, for whatever reason, I keep coming back to FTL. Why? Why? I don’t get it! Is it a sense of gambling, that maybe next time I’ll pull through? Is it that sense of the unconquered mountain, that there’s this game I’ve been playing for ten years and I still haven’t beaten it? Is it because I keep trying to unlock new ships and I want to fuck around with the boarding party feature? Probably something like that, yeah. But I still don’t get it! I was… let me count… thirteen when this game came out? Fuck, that feels like a lifetime ago. I hadn’t even thought about depression or college or Spectral Crown or GIS or COVID yet! I was still eating carnations at junior high dances when I first played this game. I was still learning algebra and reading Deltora Quest when this game came out. I was still wearing hooded sweatshirts and watching Adventure Time when this thing came into existence. That’s weird! And yet, after all this time, I still can’t fucking catch a break. Hot damn.
Someday I will beat FTL. I don’t know if this will be soon, or frankly if it will be ever, but someday I will beat it. And maybe then I’ll finally have gotten a good roll of the dice.
But, at any rate, thanks for reading this shorter post! I guess I really just wanted to complain about all the stupid bullshit that my stupid spaceship keeps getting stuck with in stupid space. And also I’ve been working at my new job pretty regularly, and I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down and write a more complete piece on, well, anything! But maybe next week I’ll tell you about that new job, hmm? That might be something I can talk about…
