Timed Epic Store exclusive on PC.
looks great! :)
I don’t entirely understand what this game is going to be, but I’m super hyped for whatever it is. It could turn out to be a glorious whiff, of course.
Intriguing preview. I enjoyed reading it.
The game comes out soon. October 5th.
That looks really interesting and very much up my alley. Might have to spend some actual money on the Epic store.
The music from the latest trailer sounded directly out of the movie Interstellar and I’m all for it.
Not a positive review on Eurogamer.
They still made it sound pretty intriguing though.
That review may be intended to scare me away but it just left me a little more intrigued. I’m certain I will try this out someday.
I can’t even find a Steam page to wishlist this.
Epic Game Store, dude.
Releases on Steam and PS5 in 10 hours with an expansion (also a free update for existing owners) that brings the game closer to the dev’s vision for the project. I didn’t realize that Randy Smith of Looking Glass and Waking Mars fame worked on this.
So did anyone play this? I had a hard time getting a sense for what it’s like. I think I might love it, but…
They refer to a demo but it doesn’t seem to exist.
I picked this up last night so I’ll be back at some point with impressions!
Is it a changed game from the game released last year that got tepid reviews?
There is new content that sounds less on-rails:
“We’re thrilled to have another JETT campaign to offer. Given Time will continue and conclude Mei’s story, while progressing and resolving key story threads that were left intentionally dangling at the end of The Far Shore.” said co-creator Craig D. Adams from Superbrothers A/V. “This new campaign is much more free-roaming and player-driven, we’re getting more out of our distinct ecosystem-puzzling and light survival systems this time out, but not to worry, we aren’t shy about having some cosmic prog rock spectacle in unexpected places."
I must have missed this on release, i didn’t realize Superbrothers had made another game. Unlike the reviewer above at Eurogamer i’m constantly surprised at the pacing of the game which has a kind of filmic quality, where it doesn’t seem that you’re obviously retreading ground to burn time or pad the game, and i’m surprised at the sort of world building that’s being done. It does feel a bit like they played No Man’s Sky and were not thrilled by the gameplay but enjoyed the ‘vibe’, so left Jim Guthrie for a more positive ambient-synth soundtrack.
It does feel a bit expensive, which is so often the root of reviewer’s underlying palate. This game at, say, $5 would be a steal so to speak. At $35 dollars, it does feel a bit like Kickstarting an indie-micro experience that you’re overpaying for but knowing what you’re getting.
I bought it while it was 40% off last week, which, when coupled with the big update and the expansion I figured was a good price for something that looks/sounds so interesting.
That said, I’ve only fired it up briefly and the framerate was really funky. It looks and feels like it’s running at 30fps despite it saying 60, and changing the refresh rate from 60 to 30Hz doesn’t change anything which only compounds that feeling. The subtitles–and only the subtitles–are blurry because they don’t scale to my resolution (1440 or 4K), which isn’t great given the in-game language is fictional so you have to read them, and during the tutorial my ship kept disappearing necessitating a rewind (apparently the latest update has been rolled back to fix this).
On the game itself: the tutorial was confusing and didn’t really help me understand the controls/concepts, and trying to play while reading subtitles is… incredibly awkward, especially if you’re a slow reader like me! It pains me to say that my first impressions aren’t great!
Okay, that’s the 2021 campaign down! Now on to the 2023 expansion ‘Given Time’…
Some thoughts on The Far Shore.
So while the frame rate on foot remained uneven and juddery (an engine thing I think), the actual flight proper was really slick. I never got comfortable with playing and reading subtitles at the same time (my first few hours were very stressful, to the point I nearly refunded it) but I did make peace with it and resigned myself to the odd ‘comms log catch-up’. The controls are quite technical but that kind of makes it feel better to pilot and do cool stuff.
This is a beautiful game though, the visual design, the music (Jim Guthrie and Disasterpeace were involved in a couple of tracks and the rest of the OST is brilliant). You feel like you’re inhabiting a race of people striking out into the unknown. As a fan of Outer Wilds, that was a big sci-fi hook.
That said, this couldn’t be further from it. While you’re steering the ship, the game gives you a relatively narrow path and never really shuts up. Your co-pilot, Isao, and the rest of the crew over comms are almost always talking–in a fictional language so it’s all subs–so you can imagine how that impacts your ability to just play. Remember Superbrothers’ ‘Less Talk, More Rock’ manifesto from 2010? Imagine Falco, Peppy and Slippy constantly talking through a Star Fox mission. That’s Jett. Obviously the dialogue here is much better!
The rhythm/pacing of the game is bizarre. Sometimes it’s tricky to work out what do because of various pressures but the game takes a while to clue you in as well so there’s a weird friction there, and other times you can be way ahead of the game and waiting on the characters to catch up with your actions. I feel like I missed quite a few cues because I was too busy reading or looking in the wrong direction or trying to pilot my jett. I will say, if ever there was a game to show why developers pause the action and wrest camera control away to show you things, Jett: The Far Shore is it. In fact, while most of the dialogue and cues are delivered in real-time without interference, there are rare moments when time pauses or slows down, you advance dialogue manually and the camera points at something important. These feel like out of place (but welcome!) concessions, as if the developers realised it was overwhelming. That said, jetting around is really cool once you get a feel for it. It’s downright graceful at times. And setting down to get a first-person view was such a great perspective shift that elevated various moments.
A lot of this sounds negative and it kind of is but at the same time I really enjoyed my time with Jett: The Far Shore. It’s rare I’m this conflicted about something while still coming out the other end feeling really positive about it. I want to play more so I’m glad the Given Time expansion is next! As mentioned, the presentation is top notch, but I liked the characters, the voice acting and writing (Terri Brosius is credited here); how it ruminates on colonisation, its impact and other themes coming from that; the trajectory of the story (completing this in 2021 without the expansion to follow it up sounds unbearable).
Another weird thing is that the mechanics and gameplay systems are quite involved (you can tell Randy Smith was design lead on this because a lot of it reminded me of Waking Mars), but The Far Shore doesn’t really explore a lot of that because there’s so much forward momentum. You get glimpses of something so much more expansive but then you’re pushed along. There is downtime but that’s usually when you’re on foot; when you’re in the jett, it’s all go. And that’s okay because the story calls for it but it does make you wonder what Jett would be like if it eased off on the throttle…
From what I gather Given Time is a lot more open so I’m really intrigued to know how that shakes out, in addition to knowing where the story is going of course!
I think my big takeaway from Jett: The Far Shore is I don’t know of anything else like it and while it has plenty of quirks, I really appreciate and admire its vision and commitment to that.
I mean, it sounds a lot like how I felt about Sword & Sworcery.
It does sound fascinating. I wish I’d just grabbed it when it had that generous launch discount.
One time when the game studio I worked at was trying to come up with new, relatively small narrative games (“our Firewatch” was kind of the mandate), I pitched a game about driving, picking up passengers, and dialoguing with them while you drove calmly down the highway. No racing, no crashes… the driving would just be that thing to keep your hands occupied while you digested these characters’ stories. There’ve been some taxi/uber games recently that ran with this idea. Anyway, sounds like what Jett is doing too?
Definitely fill us in on the new content when you have played it!