Death in Out There is usually cold: you’ve exhausted your resources and your options, there’s nothing more to do. Death in FTL is usually hot, a shitstorm of whiffed missile strikes and shipboard fires that leaves you with the sense that it could have been avoided with a little more luck or presence of mind. But it’s also fairly common for events to teleport you to new star-systems – and sometimes they’re systems which your ship just isn’t powerful enough to get out of. In FTL, there’s always a jump you can make and even with no time and no fuel, you can theoretically fight your way out, getting fuel off the Rebel fleet. More powerful engines can make bigger jumps. For instance: because jumps are analogue rather than binary, every one takes a slightly different amount of fuel. Almost everything you do costs resources you’re constantly struggling against attrition, and even major success doesn’t buy you much breathing room.Īnother feature is that it’s possible for random events to just totally screw you.
#OUT THERE OMEGA EDITION ALIEN LANGUAGE UPGRADE#
To build an upgrade you need the right technology (mostly granted by random events), and the right set of resources (mostly found by mining planets, which requires you to gamble fuel on the chance that the resources you need are present). Your ship has limited cargo slots, which can be taken up by either upgrades or resources building an upgrade always means that you have less room for resources. Out There Ω has roguelike death, and makes survival tough a lot of the things that make it difficult can rarely be controlled, and others are subject to severe trade-offs. Like FTL, however, most of the immediate plot is random encounters in space, with multiple-choice responses that you mostly answer based on guesswork. (It completely doesn’t jive with the brief voice-acting in the intro the VO sounds like a generic stubblygruff bromerican protagonist, while the writing’s modes are existential angst and flippant humour.) It’s more mobile-friendly – less fiddly simultaeneous detail to manage. It’s got a bit more of a narrative slant than FTL the writer and designer is JB / FibreTigre, best-known in the IF world for Ekphrasis and Works of Fiction. The protagonist has a distinctive voice, an odd mix of perky and dour. You gather resources and technology, upgrade your ship or trade it in for a better one, encounter weird aliens and piece together their language, gather hints about how the universe has changed while you’ve been away. Out There Ω is a resource-management space-exploration game. A more straightforward way to describe it – the influence is fairly obvious – is as FTL without combat.Ī lone astronaut, displaced by mysterious forces, has to make the long trek home.