Blue Manchu tries a whole new kind of bastardry
Don’t let the Bastards trip you up. Blue Manchu’s latest game might be another firstperson shooter-strategy hybrid with a smattering of Roguelike elements and sharp-edged cartoon visuals, but it’s far from a simple cowboys-and-aliens reskin of Void Bastards. Not that we’d baulk at such an idea.
As creative director Ben Lee tells it, though, that’s just not in the studio’s nature.
“Historically, our first game was Card Hunter, our second game was Void Bastards,” he says.
“There was almost nothing in common with those, apart from the people working on them.”
For the third game, a similarly huge leap was considered, Lee adds: “A lot of team members had different ideas. I don’t remember what I wanted to do at the time – probably something completely different.” Eventually, though, they agreed that this was a niche worth exploring further, while keeping the Bastards banner. (Studio founder Jonathan Chey has form in that regard, of course, with System Shock 2 and BioShock likewise sharing a suffix.) Still, Lee says, “there wasn’t a lot of interest in a literal sequel. We all had affection for Void Bastards, but it was like, well, what else would we even do there?”
At first, jetting around the first star system, we wonder if these differences might be overstated. Once again, you pick a route through the branches of an FTL-style map, choosing between encounters that offer different types of enemy and loot, and a variety of story events: an asteroid-field shortcut that risks damaging your crew; a trading post where things will go easier if you send down the right Bastard to negotiate. This star map wasn’t even part of the game in its initial design, Lee explains – rather, the plan was that you’d explore a single planet. It’s when our spacecraft first touches down on terra firma that we realise quite how much has changed.
The planetary map is laid out almost like a boardgame, with a procedural sprawl of paths and landmarks explored using a limited number of moves per turn. Only one objective is essential – the ‘Stairway’ exit that beams you up to safety – but the game has plenty of ways to tempt you off the path, in spite of the ever-present timer ticking down at the top of the screen. Let this hit zero and an enemy ‘Prince’ will touch down on the planet, followed on each subsequent turn by a full royal flush of increasingly deadly bosses.
It is, essentially, a turn-based abstraction of Void Bastards’ ship exploration, where you’d sneak around grabbing goodies before making a break for the airlock. “You can be halfway through a run,” Lee says, “and decide: my guys are too hurt; I don’t really want this loot compared to how much damage I’m taking.”
