Hardspace: Shipbreaker from Canadian studio Black Bird Interactive (Homeworld) is a job simulator that puts players in the role of a space ship salvager. You begin as an entry-level Shipbreaker and, through earning upgrades and certifications, graduate to bigger, more valuable, and more complicated ships to cut apart and reclaim. The Hardspace experience begins with anxious, edge-of-your-seat gameplay as you learn to wield the tools of the trade, but slowly becomes a more mundane, almost meditative experience as you master the ins and outs of each ship.
The Hardspace Cycle
This process of shifting from overwhelming fear to calm control repeats with the acquisition of each new certification and the introduction of bigger and bigger classes of ship to dissect. Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game about efficiency, precision, learning skills, and gaining knowledge, but it is also a very personal experience about the banality of labor.
When I first played Hardspace: Shipbreaker at PAX earlier this year, I was mystified by the physics and freeform nature of the game. The gameplay loop is communicated to anyone that sees the game so clearly and effectively, almost instantly. Here is a ship, your job is to take it apart. You have a grapple tool, a cutting tool, and a supply of tethers to use. There are extremely valuable parts of the ship, and there are less valuable parts of the ship. There are volatile parts of the ship, like sparking power cells and exploding fuel lines. How you navigate through the ship and disassemble it is completely up to you, and the options for how you attack a ship increase as the size of the ships increase.
What I didn’t expect was how emotionally invested I would become. There’s not much of a story; a voice-over guide chimes in from time to time and there are some audio logs to gather, but most of the time, it’s just you and the job at hand. There was a lot of experimentation in the early hours as I discovered the best ways to cut, but once I figured out the best ways in, the micro-progression of perfecting my procedure took hold. There was a long stretch where I found myself salvaging small transport and cargo ships over and over without making any meaningful progress on my debt or upgrades. After 20 or so days of cutting practically the same ships, I felt I had perfected the task. At the time, I couldn’t understand why I needed to keep doing the same ship over and over again when I wasn’t learning anything new or progressing, I thought maybe there just wasn’t enough content in the game yet. The more I’ve thought about it, that meaningless grind has made a bigger impact on me than any wild explosion I caused or buzzer-beater contract finishes.
Work Is Man’s Reward, His Strength, And His Pleasure
Try as I might, I can’t seem to stop the stirring in my chest every time I see a powerful image of a blue-collar working man. He’s tough, he’s driven, he’s a provider, he’s usually narrated by Sam Elliot, and he connects with such deeply ingrained feelings of Americana, that one can almost be forgiven for forgetting he’s simply a mascot for the economic oppression of the working class.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker wears the exploitation of the proletariat on its sleeves, yet still somehow manages to deliver a blue-collar charm that makes you feel proud of a hard day’s work. Player’s begin the game with a billion-dollar debt that must be paid back over weeks, months, or possibly years of cutting ships. Profits made from extracted ship parts count against that debt, but not before additional rental and housing fees are added ontop every day.
The insurmountable debt quickly falls to the back of your mind (much like real-life insurmountable debt) as you focus on the job at hand. Your sense of personal value isn’t on your income, it’s on your skill as a Shipbreaker; your ability to efficiently and expertly cut and extract valuable parts from a ship. The simulation continues to deepen. Is this a job simulator, or a stunningly effective commentary on socioeconomic division? Should I be having this much fun roleplaying as a wage-slave? I’m questioning my privilege. This is a good game.
Sparking My Imagination
Hardspace launched in Early Access this week on Steam, and it already has more going for it than a lot of EA games. There are small, medium, and large ships to break, a full-upgrade path, and a free play and career mode. It’s fairly stable (I personally only experienced one crash) and impressively polished. Hardspace: Shipbreaker feels like a game that could expand infinitely, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here. Bigger ships and more tools would be great, of course. I would like to have a bigger variety of contracts that request specific components, which would vary how players approach a particular ship. The dream would be multiplayer obviously, more hands make less work, as they say. Until then, I’ll keep cutting, and grinding, and getting a little bit better every day. Someday, I’ll pay off this debt and buy a little piece of sky, all for myself. Someday.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is available now in Early Access on Steam.
