In Space, No One Can Hear Your Sweatshop

As common with labor-intensive tyrannical government bodies, I don’t ask my minions to be brilliant, only able-bodied and without any personal desires outside of servitude. I came to the far reaches of space to be free of the hands that require me to hinder my own potential to lift the unliftable. I keep summoning more of these pixelated peons to free them from any requirement to reach far beyond their capabilities, only to fail at grasping that brass ring that they were never entitled to. With everyone in their place, Space Rapture can flourish.

But boy did I miscalculate the value of brain cells. As my last minion runs hopelessly for the weapons room, flying bloodhounds on it's trail, I can only sigh when he is finally returned to the empty void from which he came. Such is life in rymdkapsel.

As far as real time strategy goes, the genre’s representation on mobile devices is somewhat shallow. But even beside Starfront: Collision and the Anomaly series, this Swedish base builder is in its own league. Even though it channels characteristics from it’s contemporaries, rymdkapsel is without much of the features games of it’s ilk are known for. In their absence is a new frontier for exploring both ludo-mechanical interactions with mostly passive objects, and your own inner Marxism.

Matte, Patijnov terominos are both factories and products in space. Diminutive, white pixels pick up resources - minerals, food, and power - and bring them to construction sites to build more factories (or roads to them). These factories then produce or refine more of these resources, in order to create more of the these factories, etc. The Great Chain is remarkable, if not a little redundant.

As you industrialize and spread your influence, mysterious, immobile, TARS-shaped monoliths begin to come into view. Fold them into your galactic transit plans and you can research them, extracting long lost secrets like how to make minions move faster, or to make resources more abundant.

The vacuum of space may provide the metaphorical land upon which you build this industrial civilization in your image, but it doesn’t insulate you from usurpers. This is where weapons rooms come in that, to Mary J Blige’s delight, help make sure there’s no hateration or holleration in your dancery.

It’s also where you start to see the fault rymdkapsel’s labor-cratic stars. Minions are the grease that lubes the cogs, and the water that turns the wheel. But the specific things they do are completely up to them. I can only suggest that they help refine raw garden materials into edible food, or to batten down the hatches for the incoming waves of interlopers. But here, the slave chooses AND the slave obeys.

Who and how they go about doing that is often completely up to them. This could include taking the longest route possible to a location, choosing to pick up and move a resource that someone else closer is already delivering, or half filling weapons stations, making them half as efficient and twice as likely to die at later, more difficult waves. In an interview with Pocket Gamer, sole developer Martin Jonasson said that he finds this erratic behavior “a bit adorable.” Clearly, we have different opinions on the topic.

Your interstellar autocracy will rise and fall, on average, across maybe an hour at a time. It isn’t something you can do reliably in the back of an Uber, but cutting out a chunk of time to take in its visual and sonic minimalism will probably put you in something more zen-like than whatever pithy pop punk band your driver wants to educate you on.

The trance-inducing nature of the experience it’s what will bring you back every time. As you gradually work to outsmart your subordinates’ aggressive stupid, it’s easy to be hypnotized by their single-mindedness. In what amounts to trying to direct an ant farm, you’ll find that umami of gratification that is usually reserved for YouTube videos of things being crushed by hydraulic presses.

#rymdkapsel #RTS #Jonasson #grapefrukt