60 Parsecs!

60 Seconds! is a game about preparing for the apocalypse, with the caveat that you've only got one minute to do it. In the wake of that game's considerable success, developer Robot Gentlemen has returned with another take on the same concept, except while the first game was set in an underground bunker, the sequel has players blast off into space in a bid for survival.

Each run - and there will be many - starts with a big boom. In the run-up to that world-ending explosion, players have 60 seconds to grab up supplies from a series of connected rooms. These resources include crafting materials, medical kits, colleagues, and cans of soup. Lots and lots of nourishing, life-giving soup.

Once the minute is up, assuming you get to the escape hatch in time, the base explodes and you're left stranded in your escape pod with any supplies that you managed to grab, as well as up to three colleagues who you can rescue during the countdown. And that's really the hands-on part of the game done and dusted. After that you're lost in space and reacting to events as they happen, all the while clicking on menus as your crew sits around looking confused.

There are two main computer terminals in the pod. The first is wall-mounted and it tells you what has happened the day before. The second is located in the middle of the pod, and it's here that ongoing events are explained. You can click on yourself and your crew, giving them rations or health packs, craft items at a terminal, or when you land on a planet you can send them on adventures.

A typical day in 60 Parsecs! involves reading what happened in the wake of the decisions you made the day before, and then finding out what's currently happening and possibly making a decision about how to proceed. You might have to feed a crewmate or craft some supplies, potentially send someone on an assignment, before ending the turn and letting the computer calculate what happens overnight based on the decisions you just made.

You don't just get feedback from the computer terminal on the wall; the crew and ship also reflect your choices. It won't be long before empty cans of soup litter the floor, and if you've run out food your team will thin out until they eventually turn skeletal and die. In fact, we'd go so far as saying that the soup is an overpowering part of the game and could do with rebalancing - if you've got a pod full of survivors you'll often burn through your supplies too fast and the resultant deaths aren't much fun.

Most of the visual feedback comes in the wake of calamity. Accidents happen pretty regularly, roughing up your team with scrapes and scratches, madness is always just a bad decision or two away, and your once well-kept escape pod will start looking rather worse for wear after just a few days. The art that communicates all of this information is actually quite charming, it must be said, and while the scene is largely static, the whole game looks and feels pleasingly distinctive, like something out of an old Beano comic.

The storytelling mainly takes place via the pages of text you have to read through over the course of each game. It's here that the game stumbles a little, and the light-hearted tone of the writing doesn't always hit the mark thanks to some lines of text that we thought lacked subtlety. Similarly, some of the events don't really marry up to the experience your crew is having, and we've had bonkers-looking crewmembers who were otherwise perfectly functional. The script is constantly trying to be funny, too, but we never really laughed, and that was perhaps the biggest disappointment of all. The computer makes wise-cracks about the Soviets and your crew, remarking on what is happening to you all throughout the game, but after a while, especially when certain scenarios started to repeat, we began to get a little... bored.

There seems to be a fair amount of variation in terms of how a game might play out, and different crew members have different attributes that open up new possibilities and scenarios, but even then the variety on offer didn't stave off a lot of the repetition the dampened the experience, especially during the opening part of each run which is often very samey and dominated by soup rationing. The longer you can keep your crew alive and pushing forward the more the narrative will diverge and open up new events, but to get to these fresh story beats you're going to have to retread some well-worn narrative paths.

60 Parsecs! is a solid narrative-driven survival game that has been built around a great concept and decorated with some distinctive art. We have no doubt that there are plenty of sci-fi fans out there looking for a bit of parody, and if you gel with the humour we think you'll probably enjoy your time spent drifting through space in this cramped, soup-filled escape pod. The storytelling and tone didn't really do it for us, but that's a taste thing, and we can certainly respect the strength of the concept and the quality of its delivery, even if we didn't enjoy it enough to stick around for the long haul.