Video games love space. It’s easy to see why – the setting allows for impossible vistas and a sense of wonder. It facilitates so many childhood dreams of having our own spaceships to take us on cosmic adventures, filled with fantastic creatures and laser beams. It usually goes hand-in-hand with a general air of optimism and hope, influenced by the vaguely utopian visions of the future of Star Trek and other foundational works of popular science-fiction.
It’s something that used to be endlessly appealing in childhood, but lately it’s been ringing increasingly hollow the further into the future we get. Hardspace: Shipbreaker is refreshingly aware of this, bringing the fantasy of life in space crashing back down to Earth.
Hardspace casts you as an indentured mechanic, living alone in a gigantic garage in high Earth orbit and saddled with a billion dollar debt to the LYNX megacorporation – the price of gainful employment away from the now toxic surface. This is the only chance you’ll ever have of seeing the stars, the slim hope that you’ll one day pay off your debt and jet off to the bourgeois outer colonies.
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