You and your team are orbiting Earth on a space station when nuclear war breaks out. As you watch life being wiped off the surface of your home, one missile starts heading towards the station. There is no stopping it, and the only way out is a small escape pod…
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60 Parsecs! is a silly, comedic, and light-hearted game created by Robot Gentleman. It is a sequel to 60 Seconds!, in which you play as a family surviving in a bomb shelter after a nuclear holocaust. It is a darkly humorous space adventure where you play the last survivors of humanity.
The basic premise is simple: you have 60 seconds to gather any supplies (and crew) you can from the space station, before leaping into the escape pod and launching into the stars. After this the real game begins.
The main game loop is that a series of events happen each day, and you have to choose how to respond to them. It reminds me of Sort the Court, where you need to make a series of yes/no choices based on what each character asks of you.
60 Parsecs! has a bit more depth than this, however. The decisions you can make for each event depend on your attributes as a captain, the attributes of your crew, and the equipment you have available. Events can destroy equipment, give you new items or resources, hurt your crew, and/or change their abilities.
In addition to this you need to look after your crew. Over time they will become hungry, and eventually be starving. Maintaining a good soup supply is essential. Certain events will cause your crew to get hurt, and you’ll need first aid kits to heal them. You and your crew can even go insane, but there is the trusty sock puppet to help them back to the real world.
What I love about this is that you can see the status of your crew as the game progresses. They will grow stubble, start to look thinner, get hurt, and/or start acting crazy. The machines and items will appear in the background depending on what they are doing. It’s a nice diegetic way of delivering information.
There is also a crafting module that is unlocked early on. Using this you can recycle items for resources, upgrade items, or create new items. You will be using this to create first aid kits and a lot of soup. Managing resources in this game is extremely important as it will unlock new choices as the game progresses.
Later, after you land on a planet, you will also be able to send your crew on expeditions. This can yield useful resources for crafting, as well as new items, but comes at the risk of hurting, or even killing your crew members.
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This game is challenging. It is what I would call a roguelite (though you may prefer roguelite-lite). Most of your runs through this game will fail after your captain dies. I’ve yet to manage a run through where I get to the end. The more you play, the more intuitive the mechanics will become, and you’ll start to get further each time.
In my first run I went through the crew’s soup rations too quickly. We met an alien race of cats, before my crew went insane and we starved to death in space. There is a mechanic to share your runs in this game, which creates a nice gif showing each day that the crew experienced until death.
The game can get quite crazy. In one of my longer runs, my entire crew died, then the captain went insane, started engaging in diplomacy with intelligent cockroaches that infested the ship, before she was killed by space communists.
You start to recognise some of the major events as you play more runs. You have to survive in space for a while, then you get a call from aliens, then you crash on a planet, then you need to fix communications, then you need to translate a message. That’s as far as I have gotten so far.
But there is still enough depth in this game to make each run unique. In my current run I have managed many expeditions, but also need to somehow find a guide book to translate an alien message. I haven’t died in this run. At least not yet.
I’m going to continue playing this one. I’m for at least one run of the game where I get to the end before I move on to my next game in my Steam library.
