Void Sails - Review (PC)
An interesting combination of text adventure and ship combat is let down by one half of the game design
Void Sails is space combat/text adventure game created by the indie developer Ticking Clock Games.
Void Sails begins by having you make some decisions about your backstory, whether you went to University, what you did there, that kind of thing. These decisions influence your character traits, of which contain intelligence, resolve, and perception. After you’ve clicked through your decisions and read the story, the game just starts.
You find yourself in a floating wooden ship, with some glowing sails, big energy jets and a load of cannons. The immediate scenery is a bunch of small floating islands, and you start drifting off towards them. The game explains the controls, and you head towards your first objective.
In this area, you head towards various piers where you can dock, and the text adventure side of the game comes out to play. You are presented with choices, make decisions, and depending on how high your traits are and the result of a spin, receive different outcomes. These outcomes can have effects on story or are just flavour text for that particular area. They can also grant gold or artifacts, items which can increase your traits in various situations.
Gold can be used to upgrade your ship, but it is quite a limited upgrade. Your ship consists of cannons on both sides, a laser gun at the front, and some shields. You can upgrade either of these three things, and that’s about it. There’s no real customisability here.
Eventually, you’ll come across some enemies. To fight them, you right click on the mouse and enter a close-up aiming position. Shooting from the front activates your laser, and from either of the sides activates your cannon. Combat is okay, but it lacks a certain edge. You can destroy set parts of enemy ships, but the fun part of ship combat is seeing the cannonballs rip apart an opponents deck. Too often combat feels spongey and a little monotonous, a slugging match that takes too long.
After you leave this area, the game opens up a bit. You’re presented with a view of a galaxy, and a path through it. Navigating these paths costs supplies, and along the way to the next major area there are various optional events that pop up. You’ll get ambushed, or come across civilians needing help, and the choices you make in the text sections influence how these events play out.
I like the text adventure side of the game, and I think the developers probably did too - it feels like this is where a lot of the effort was spent, and I think if the game was entirely a text adventure it may work out better. There are some neat little stories here with some interesting decisions to make and some differing outcomes, but getting between them in the big lumbering ship isn’t really that much fun. I would have much preferred the game just telling me the ship went from point A to point B.
Actually moving the ship is a bit of a chore too, it’s quite slow and cumbersome, and often you are just moving to various points in the map with nothing to do in-between but push forward and look at the scenery. Although the game is set in space - there isn’t any vertical movement. It’s all flat, so really this could have been at sea and the ship would have controlled exactly the same. It was a curious decision, which again makes me feel like the narrative side and the gameplay side were made separately.
I don’t want to be overly negative - it’s clear the developers had some good instincts and a vision with this game. The art style and music are nice, and like I said, I really enjoy the text adventure side. It’s just the 3D ship battling side of the game that doesn’t work. It Ticking Clock Games makes another game - my suggestion to them would be to focus on the text adventure genre. They are clearly good writers and have a knack for making up fun stories with interesting decisions - if they focus on that, they might have a winner.
The game is also really short, only a few hours long. I don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing - not every game has to be a marathon - but at that length, the price point has to be compelling. At the time of writing, the game is £13.15 on the Steam store. That is too much considering the length of the game and the content on offer, which isn’t much.
If the price ever came down to around £5.99, I would recommend it as an okay afternoon play. Increase my score below by .5 if that ever happens.
Rating - 2.5/5