60 Parsecs! [PC Review]
Hold on to your soup cans! No, really. You need those.
Visuals: 9/10 Planets and characters are beautifully illustrated in a cartoon-style, though the animation is very rare. For the most part, you’ll be staring at stationary pictures.
Audio: 7/10 60 Parsecs! Is a science fiction survival game, and it never lets you forget it. The music, while monotonous, is an earworm.
Controls/Movement: 6/10 You barely get to do anything other than clicking a button or two and pulling a lever. The only real action you’ll be seeing is at the very beginning of the game during your frantic rush to save crewmates and supplies, making for a pretty dull experience throughout.
Difficulty: 5/10 It’s hard to really rate the difficulty of 60 Parsecs! because so much of the gameplay relies on RNG. While you are given daily choices that will affect the outcome of your game, it feels unfair. You’ll spend a lot of time recycling and crafting items.
Replayability: 10/10 This game was obviously meant to be played several times over. You will definitely die, but hey — there’s a whole bunch of endings to unlock so keep at it!
Overall: 7
Five planets later, I was dead again. Deedee went out on a dangerous mission to bring back resources but never came back. Emmet kicked the bucket due to severe wounds, and Tom threatened to mutiny again. 60 Parsecs! is a dark comedy science fiction survival game by Robot Gentleman where you are the captain of a doomed space vessel. Save your comrades! Hurl through outer space with only cans of soup as sustenance! Make difficult choices! Encounter alien life!
You start the game in an exploding space station. If you played Robot Gentleman’s other game, 60 Seconds!, this should be familiar to you. Your goal: gather as many supplies and crew mates as you possibly can before the entire station is destroyed, taking you along with it. You scramble along as the captain (there are five to choose from) as the clock ticks down ominously. Once finished assembling your team and blasting off to safety, you have now completed the fun part of the game. Congratulations!
The rest of the game is spent inside your emergency spacecraft while you react to your ship’s AI prompts. Each day you’re given a new scenario reminiscent of tabletop RPGs, and you decide how to react to it. Each captain has different stats that can give an edge in decision making, but most of the time you’ll be busy crafting first aid packs and cans of soup to stave off starvation and disease. Because the game relegates you to being decision-maker only, you’re never going to go out on grand adventures on one of the three planets you can land on. That’s the job of one of your crewmates, assuming they haven’t died by the time you manage to land.
While the game play is lackluster and will probably only appeal to die-hard fans of the genre, I did find the writing interest. The short stories that were given on each new day sometimes made me chuckle. On one particular play through, I accidentally saved a family of space roaches called The Petersons who decided to keep me company. This was great, considering all my crew mates were deceased and I had no one left to talk to anyway.
The artwork is robust, colorful, and displayed in a vintage cartoony style. It’s eye-catching for sure, but I was disappointed to see that almost none of the scenes were animated. Most of the action takes place within the confines of your own imagination, though sometimes you’ll get to see something new displayed in your cabin (like space Soviets or roaches). Funny writing and bold art style just aren’t enough to place 60 Parsecs! high on my recommendation list, and after surviving for seventy-five days, I can honestly say I don’t feel compelled to see the story through to a good ending.
60 Parsecs! was provided to me by GirlStreamers, Inc. for the purposes of review.
