The eighth episode of a short series on games I discovered at EGX Rezzed 2018.
I visited the Lake Ridden area multiple times hoping for a seat to free up because it always seemed to be busy. Opposite Lake Ridden was Landinar: Into the Void and I wasn’t sure if it was really for me. I’m not usually down with a game where the UI is stuffed full of technical readouts and players are expected to become well-versed in intricate in-world systems nonsense, thematically-appropriate words papering over numbers and groups. Landinar gave off that sort of vibe. But if there’s one valuable piece of expo advice I have for you: take the opportunity to try everything, not just the low-hanging brain fruit.
A Landinar seat emptied and put my butt on it. The tutorial started inside my ship and I did a quick circuit. It took about ten seconds; it was a diminuitive vessel, the kind of place where you probably wouldn’t swing a cat, not even for big bucks. My first goal was to find the cockpit. Not the hardest thing in the world but as soon that was done, the the view zoomed out and I assumed the role of the ship, rather than its captain. A tiny grey brick travelling through the depths of space.
I had a job to hunt down some guy and destruct him to tiny bits. It wasn’t too difficult but my handle on the controls was weak verging on non-existent so it took a lot of shooting. Was I some sort of bounty hunter? After bad guy bit space dust, I was summoned to a space station. With the ship in cruise mode, this also didn’t take too long. The worst bit was docking because I couldn’t figure out where to dock (until the hand of your friendly neighbourhood developer pointed it out).
The space station seemed, well, pretty big. The developers talked to me a little about the game being an open world, and they showed me the universe map, but I couldn’t quite comprehend how much structure there was to that map. How many stations? How many star systems? The mode of the game had shifted from space combat sim to something that felt more like a point-and-click adventure. And I wasn’t a bounty hunter; seemed I was gettin’ in with an underground resistance that was fighting against an all-powerful empire. They wanted to flip this station as a first strike but that was going to take some effort…
I built a new ship and tried but failed to talk someone into giving me access to a higher-up. I walked away at that point, realising this was a lot bigger then I’d expected, unsure when I would ever feel like I’d “fully explored” the station. One day, maybe. One day.
Landinar: Into the Void is the next game from Convoy Games who previous game was Convoy, a post-apocalyptic truck game based in the FTL mould. Launch date currently unknown.
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Interestingly, the one and only Potter was at Rezzed this year and Landinar was one of the few games he specifically mentioned! It sounded like he was most interested in the exploration he thought the game promised (we subsequently went off into a discursive tangent into how many top-down “space exploration and combat” games are really just about combat, and don’t give you anything interesting to explore).
I thought Convoy was so-so; I liked the combat quite a lot, but the map and upgrade elements felt clunky and the narrative never really nailed its theme as FTL did. I thought it could enough that I’m going to keep an eye on Landinar’s progress, however. 🙂
Sigh. The “could” in that last sentence should of course be “good”. 🙁
Potter? *The* Potter?!
I’ve had a peek at what Convoy was like and I’m guessing they learnt a lot of from their first game – and it might be best to look upon it as just they, a learning exercise. They gave me a free Steam key for Convoy and maybe I check it out. But Landinar felt like a very different beast.
As with all these previews, I am trying not to speculate, but at least capture a bit of that Honeymoon Hours magic you get with that expo sessions.
I like their naming style. “We’re Convoy games. Our first game is called Convoy. It’s about a convoy.”
There’s a rumour they might change their company name. To Landinar Games.