Food from the torpedo chambers
Aboard the salvaged ship Antigone, Lieutenant Essex, Pilot Suzae, and Doctor Bathory share a cup of tea. They are well into their mission to disarm a long list of settlements following the end of an intergalactic war, and yet have not so much as left the system. They are not unique in this or even privileged among their peers. It’s a job they‘re qualified to do and in newly allied space each works according to their means. They finish their tea, this small comfort still afforded, and return to their duties, floating through space as a crew of three somehow meant to help restabalize a war torn galaxy.
This is Episode 1 of SUPERLUNARY (Freya Campbell, 2019), a slow work of interaction science fiction about space communism and the weight of history. It comprises a collection of vignettes (some being other games in their entirety) as the player navigates between planets cataloging survivors and munitions. It is a game interested in tiny moments of human interaction set against the boundless emptiness of space, politics not as policy but personal history; relationships caught between alliances, lingering resentment, and the continued disillusionment of the working class.
The obvious points of comparison would be Star Trek or Mass Effect or any of their forgotten offspring still languishing on Steam and SyFy. But those are stories of space imperialism and military superheroics. Commander Sheppard is never lacking in resources or authority; nobody orders Kirk to survey rocks for edible lichen. No, the closer analogue to SUPERLUNARY is Alien (Scott, 1979), a fragile working class ship with capital “W” Work to be done. The Antigone’s crew are not leading a fleet or discovering new worlds, they’re on post-war cleanup duty. It’s a material difference with material consequences, conveyed everywhere from scenes of Suzae repairing her salvaged ship by hand, to Bathory repurposing torpedo chambers as hydroponic gardens, to the rudimentary interface housing the game proper. There is little distance between SUPERLUNARY’S text and its form. Both are preoccupied with the physical, imperfect reality of technology and its material politics. This is not yet utopian science fiction, it has to be built and maintained.
In that building rests the lingering trauma of a war still in living memory. Five years is hardly enough to repair what was already there let alone something that might withstand the impulses which led to its destruction. These tensions are fresh and the newly constructed alliance yet to fully set in. There is no explicit violence in SUPERLUNARY but there are echoes of it: the impulsive correction of a name, trials for crimes still outstanding, rescues of soldiers frozen in time. These characters live not as victors but as survivors, the formalities of war yet to fully fall away. But like all survivors, they must also go on living, putting distance between themselves and their past so as to find some way of making peace with it. SUPERLUNARY triumphs in these moments between pain and reconciliation, characters reaching out to one another as the only thing keeping them from falling inwards. It is not a sad game, not exactly, but its stability comes at a premium. Every pocket of intimacy exists inside a ship built for war, and even with the torpedos removed that fact is hard to ignore.
SUPERLUNARY’S most striking element is its composition. A hybrid Twine/Bitsy/Flicksy game, its different engines do not so much congeal as emphasize their differences. It’s not uncommon for games to be built using a collection of technologies, but it is unusual for them to grind against each other so boldly. One scene may disguise Bitsy as a sidescroller, the next be little more than text, others still impressionistic landscapes meant only to imply an idea of what a planet may look like. SUPERLUNARY weaves all of these together in a way which embraces their strange engine-within-an-engine, game-within-a-game aesthetic to emphasize the alien nature of each environment. Games like No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016) and Elite Dangerous (Frontier Development, 2014) pride themselves on a limitless universe, but how rarely it is that those hundreds of worlds actually feel different. SUPERLUNARY is nowhere near as large as these games but uses its form in ways far more surprising than hue sliders and procedural fauna can accomplish.
SUPERLUNARY doesn’t need extravagant visuals or dense planetary encyclopedias to convey the vastness of space. The emptiness between planets – mere outlined blips on a starchart – is all it takes to reflect back the impenetrable darkness between these floating rocks. How impossible it seems that anyone could encounter each other out here. How incredible that we could find our way through these distances too vast to conceptualize, coming out the other side as if only having made a trip to the store. I’m sure people felt the same with the advent of trains and cars and airplanes, but just as each of those exponentially increased the distance travelable, space travel multiplies it beyond anything we could reasonably comprehend. SUPERLUNARY does not dwell on these specifics but they are captured in its quiet isolation, the familiar mundanity of life aboard the Antigone, months and years spent in close quarters with only the vacuum of space for company. Its characters embrace this with somber acceptance, the reality of a life no longer confined to a planet or even galaxy. But they are still human. Even floating through space, life is not so different.
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