60 Parsecs!, much like its predecessor 60 Seconds!, is a game of tough calls, both small and large, impulsive and measured. In a marketplace saturated with resource management survival games, it certainly manages to separate itself from the crowd with some truly zany random events and presentation, but it wasn’t quite able to make up for the distance imposed by its ability to make the simple, confusing.
Each game of the main mode in 60 Parsecs! puts you in the shoes of one of the game’s five playable characters as they frantically ransack their space station before it’s vaporized by a nuclear blast. You have 60 seconds to gather as many cans of soup, allies, items, and materials as you can while negotiating carry limits and messy map layouts. You can ensure you’re well stocked in soup for a long time to come, or go for more heavy items that may help with particular problems down the line. Each run is shaped drastically by what you decide to pick up, both in terms of what you have to work with throughout your run as well as what shortcomings you’ll need to cover for quickly.
Of course, this mad scramble tests a completely different set of skills than the rest of the game, which is focused on untimed, careful decisions. I wish there were more opportunities to interact with this kind of gameplay over the course of a given run, because it’s quite fun but feels strangely out of place in the context of the overall experience.
The main meat of 60 Parsecs! comes in the decisions you make each day. The game will prompt you with a scenario and you must choose from one of several options, some testing your crew’s stats or using various items you might have collected during the 60 second rush or crafted during your time in space. As the days progress, each day brings a slew of additional decisions. Your captain needs to ration out soup, sock puppets, and medkits carefully to keep your crew full, sane, and healthy, respectively. A crafting machine allows you to break down items for materials, or spend your materials to craft new items or upgrade existing ones. And, once your ship encounters a planet, you can send crew members out to the great unknown on dangerous multi-day expeditions in search of new materials and items. The different systems are introduced one at a time in intuitive ways, and there are never too many decisions to make at one time because the day’s tasks are well-chunked through a simple and memorable menuing system.
Unfortunately, the simplicity of the systems at play also left me feeling a little lack of depth and player choice in my time with the game, with the randomness playing too large a part in every playthrough. Doing well on a particular day’s event meant just having the right item at the right time, since there was no time to prepare for the requirements by crafting, and even then there was still some chance to fail. Too much of the game was random and arcane, and left me feeling like I needed some hidden information to succeed. Even as I played more iterations and began to learn a few of the game’s tricks, I could never quite shake the feeling that things were out of my hands. Multiple crew members could get hurt at a time, which would have been fine if it didn’t feel as unfair or wasn’t as hard to fix. Too often I found the game starting to play itself, as my items and options dwindled later into a run.
What salvaged my experience with 60 Parsecs!, then, was its commitment to a goofy Space Age aesthetic. Even in a grim setting with the crew dying, the game was full of moments of levity, from the little bleeps and hums that would emanate from clicked objects around the ship to the puny achievements that seemed to appear at my greatest moments of plight. The random events that popped up each day were entertaining, and I could almost imagine the banter between my crew and the ship’s snarky computer. Over the course of one of my favorite runs I developed a relationship with the Robinsons, my next-door neighbors who also just happened to be giant irradiated cockroaches. Even the main menu was laden with little bells and whistles that brought me into this absurd, improbable game world. And the immediately recognizable synth sounds of early sci-fi movies evoked an entire age of dogged American hope, adventure, and Red Scare sentiment that really helped to place the game in a fictional historical moment. Days after playing the game, I’m still thinking about some of my experiences with it, if not the gameplay itself.
Ultimately, you will probably know before going in whether 60 Parsecs! is the right game for you or not. While I found the obscure item usage and gameplay loops left me frustrated overall, I still had many enjoyable moments interacting with the game’s zany events and basic systems. If you are willing to hold the game’s hand for longer than I was, I am confident that the end experience would be pretty rewarding, but I still think your time—and money—would be better spent elsewhere.
Score: 6/10
Check Out the 60 Parsecs Trailer:
60 Parsecs is available for PC and Mac via Steam.
Steam Review
The queer SJW gamer your parents warned you about, probably. I'll play anything once, but have a specific penchant for roguelikes, artsy puzzlers, and rhythm games.
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