Space Engineers

There’s two types of people: those who follow the instructions that come in the Lego box and those who’d rather do their own thing. Space Engineers is a game intended expressly for the latter group, to the extent that it’s hardly a game at all. Really, it’s more of a construction set, a jumbled pile of bricks strewn at the player’s feet which offers little in the way of guidance. Each of these bricks serves a specific purpose and is crying out to be played with, but it’s up to player to figure out how they work and what they’re for. This process of discovery is what defines Space Engineers, at least until the player has spent a considerable amount of time with the game (we’re talking tens of hours). For better and for worse, it’s a game that keeps the player in the dark not only about it’s basic functions but about the value of playing in first place: it just hands them the clay and says “get on with it”.

It’s a premise that’s instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Mojang’s genre-defining Minecraft, and certainly not by accident. Minecraft’s influence is felt throughout Space Engineers, from the way that construction works to its user-interface and randomly generated environments. Though the building blocks in Space Engineers are slightly more sophisticated than Minecraft’s, often several cube-width’s long and fully rotatable in 90 degree increments, they adhere to the same kind of internal consistency that makes building in Mojang’s game so approachable, affording players the confidence to look upon any structure, no matter how big or complicated, and reasonably think “I can build that”.

Also like Minecraft, Space Engineers shines most brightly in its Survival Mode. While building a spaceship might not be rocket science, procuring the right parts can be tricky: in Survival Mode, players have to fabricate these components themselves, which turns out to be a complex and time-consuming process. Players must mine and refine the requisite raw materials, combining these in an assembly machine and then manually welding them into place, all the while contending with asteroid showers and their spacesuit’s dwindling life support systems. Oh, and they’ll also need to find fuel to run the aforementioned refinery and assembly machine.

So if building ships is such an ordeal, why bother? The beauty of Survival Mode is that the player’s livelihood is dependant on building and the game’s intricate, interconnected systems necessitate lots of it. Amenities taken for granted in other games must be built from scratch in Space Engineers, holding the player responsible for much the game’s basic functionality. Ships must be equipped with an antenna before they can appear on the HUD for instance, and they’ll need gravity generators before the player can freely walk aboard them. Players are even charged with adjusting depth, strength and direction of gravity fields in order to render asteroids traversable on foot.

In fact, settings of every object in the game can be tinkered with, from the output of a ship’s thrusters right down to the RGB values of its light fixtures. This absurd degree of control certainly sets Space Engineers apart from other world-building games, but the result isn’t as desirable as it first sounds. For starters, there’s no in-game tutorial explaining how any of this stuff works, which combined with volume of information to digest sets the entry barrier fairly high. What's more, dealing in such minutiae affords more opportunities for error and creates a sort of stacking effect whereby small mistakes have much wider reaching consequences. The upshot of all this is that The Skinny had a tough time building pretty much anything before turning to fan wikis and YouTube for help, and even then it was a bumpy road to success: an accidental nudge, for example, sent one of our early creations tumbling into the far reaches of space before we had a chance to install inertia stabilising equipment, never to be seen again.

Upon completing a project though, the appeal of Space Engineers becomes clear. Mastering the building process is greatly satisfying and it guarantees that the player is emotionally invested in their creations, having participated in every stage of their transformation from humble ore-lodged-in-asteroid to a fully functioning spacecraft. As players grow more competent however, and gathering resources becomes trivial, this novelty begins to wear off, exposing the existential question upon which Space Engineers actually hinges: after you’ve settled into a domesticated life in your little space world, what’s the incentive to keep building? Granted, The Skinny only skirted this quandary in the reasonable amount of time we spent with the game, but the point remains that a tool is nothing without intent and Space Engineers is a means to an end rather than an end in of itself.

Essentially then, the lego analogy holds true. For the kid who saw lego as a means of expression, Space Engineers has a lot to offer and its initial unwieldiness is unlikely to hinder their enthusiasm to create. But for this scribe, who was happy just building Hogwarts over and over as a child, Space Engineers’ pedantic (though admirably ambitious) level of complexity was able to sustain interest for only so long.