This is the two hundred forty-seventh entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. This particular entry is also part of the Keeping Score series about games and their soundtracks. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Our two hundred forty-seventh random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality has emerged from a light jump, searching for a new home. It’s The Away Team, by Underflow Studios, and its tagline in the bundle reads:

In this interactive sci-fi adventure novel, you are the AI pilot of Earth’s last in…

I’m always down for an interactive sci-fi adventure!

I was confused, initially, about what an “interactive sci-fi adventure novel” would entail. Did Underflow Studios mean a visual novel? No. Where visual novels tend to look like dialogue scenes from other genres like adventure games or role-playing games, complete with character portraits and background scenery, most of narrative in The Away Team is pure text. It recalls interactive fiction more than anything else, although that’s not quite right either; there’s no parser for typed commands here, just choices between a few predetermined options. There are graphics, however, rendered in lovely and colorful pixel art. Everything is framed by a spaceship control panel interface with sub-screens and chunky buttons, be it a text-based away mission, a crew management screen, or exploring each sector of space while scanning for habitable planets.

You’re searching for a new home for humanity, you see. Things have not gone well on Earth. Several ships full of cryogenically frozen humans and human embryos have launched already, their fates unknown. This mission marks the final ship that will be launched, the smallest and fastest. Players take on the role of the ship’s AI, which monitors the mission and cares for the active human crew members. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those slop-regurgitating algorithmic models that our tech overlords have declared to be “AI”. This is an actual artificial intelligence, capable of independent thought and analysis, integrated into the ship itself. In a sense, it is the ship, monitoring and controlling its systems, making mission-critical decisions, and trying to give its crew and frozen human cargo the best chance of survival.

First, players must choose their crew of six, from a roster of premade characters. Each has a short bio, and their own set of positive and negative traits, so players will want to find a good mix. Then, it’s time to explore the first sector of space, which is one part of the game that’s not text-based at all. Space exploration works a bit like moving a unit in a real-time strategy game: click somewhere on the screen and the ship will fly there, revealing more of the sector as it goes. Flying through empty space is quick; through asteroid fields slow. Reserves of food and fuel will continuously drain, so it’s a good idea to be efficient when mapping out a sector of space, and then proceed to the edge of the screen to initiate a light jump to the next sector.

Each sector has one or two points of interest to find, usually planets or space stations. These are where proceedings switch to text-based interactive storytelling. Assign crew members to the away team, and embark upon a text-based adventure, filled with choices to make. These can be anything from directing the away team where to head next, to advising them on what to say in a tense situation, to simple observations on what is happening. Sometimes I was presented with a single choice to select, simply to move the story onward. But mostly I was impressed with the amount of choice on offer. I didn’t play a second time to check what might have gone differently by making other choices, but many of them seemed pivotal.

On my first away mission I wasn’t sure what to expect, so I sent my entire crew, just in case their skills would be useful. Instead, I promptly got two of them killed. The deaths were sudden, and I didn’t feel I’d had a chance to avoid them; they only made sense in retrospect, based on the characters’ negative traits. I did realize that, when I picked my crew, I was mostly thinking about life aboard the ship. I wanted a group who’d be able to get along without driving each other crazy. But life aboard the ship is not what this game is about. I should have heeded the title and focused on away missions, which is where all the action is.

After this ignoble start, my away missions went much smoother. While the sectors appear to be somewhat randomized, I believe the away missions themselves — and the order in which they’re encountered — are fixed. It’s here that the “novel” part of the game plays out. Most missions involve the fates of the previous ships that left Earth, and they’re not always as dangerous as the first one. Each is an opportunity to explore a big sci-fi idea, a means by which humanity may have tried to survive when faced with dwindling resources and options. There are planet-scale constructions, mysterious subterranean ruins, records of despair or hope.

There are also clues that provide some direction to the journey. The Away Team’s tale leans heavily on relativistic time, such that many more years have passed for those living on planets or stations compared to those traveling at near light speed on board a colony ship. This lets players see the end results of different attempts to build a new civilization, even though the ships all left Earth within a short timeframe.

I did eventually find a home for my crew. There were only two of them left at that point, plus the frozen human cargo. Two others from my crew, who had served faithfully through many away missions, voluntarily left at one of the stops (a choice that once again stemmed from their personal traits), leaving my final two crewmembers to carry on. Even then, I suspect our final destination was not the only possibility. I had to make some snap decisions about what was best for the humans under my care, decisions that could easily have led them to a different fate.

For example, I ran out of food once during the journey. Fortunately, my crew was able to tough it out until we found a planet with organic matter that could replenish the food stores. But it could have gone much worse, forcing drastic measures up to and including cannibalizing some of the crew. Who knows what might have happened if I’d made different decisions? Or chose different people for my crew, who may have reacted differently to various situations? It’s quite possible none of them would have made it.

Underflow Studios make a big deal about the malleability of the story. The Away Team is scripted with Lua and uses JSON data files, to make it easy for players to create their own away missions. There’s also an in-game character editor, letting players create their own crew members. This editor reveals that, in addition to traits, each character has an invisible set of statistics which presumably affect the outcomes of events in away missions. And yet — despite the seemingly pivotal choices I mentioned above — I suspect the overall story doesn’t change that much. Players’ choices will lead to different endings, of course, and determine what happens to individual crew members. But the fates of the earlier colony ships will be the same, told via those fixed away missions, some of which feel more like static stories than interactive adventures.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and the added elements of choice and resource management really add to the experience. I was always worrying about how much food and fuel I had left, a concern that colored every decision I made on every mission. This put me in the same mindset as the AI I was inhabiting, weighing every option in terms of the welfare of the crew and the good of the ship. At first I thought that the various crew members weren’t as different from one another as I’d hoped, reduced to just a set of statistics and traits that determined outcomes in the missions. They didn’t react when another crew member died, for example, and I suspected that much of the dialogue and events would have been the same even if I’d brought different people along. But later I realized that this, too, reinforces the main themes of The Away Team. Humans aren’t that different from one another in the mind of the ship’s AI. Sure, the AI knows about each person’s quirks and foibles, but ultimately it is caring for the crew as a whole. No one crew member is more important than the survival of the species.

I guess what I’m saying is that The Away Team didn’t leave me eager to try another playthrough. Much of it would have been the same, and while I would have liked to see another ending, it wasn’t worth going through the whole story again. But I did greatly enjoy the first playthrough, which gave me a story that felt just responsive enough to my choices, with a highly satisfying and appropriate ending. It’s rare for games to have great endings, but the one I got in The Away Team impressed me, a testament to the high quality of the writing throughout. The Away Team depicts a bleak future for Earth, which isn’t hard to believe given how things are going right now, but it finds some hope out among the stars. There’s danger, and many reminders of how high the stakes are. But my scrappy crew managed to pull together and find somewhere to start over. Maybe yours will too.

If you enjoy sci-fi storytelling, I can recommend The Away Team. And don’t worry if you missed it in the bundle, because it’s sold for any price you wish to pay, including free. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and includes an expansion pack called Lost Exodus (which is seamlessl integrated into the game such that I’m not sure exactly what it adds), as well as the original soundtrack. Which brings me to…

The Score:

The soundtrack, simply credited to Underflow Studios, is offered in FLAC format and runs just over an hour and eighteen minutes. That’s spread over 16 tracks of greatly varying length, with several that are only about 90 seconds long, and others that are eight minutes or longer. Fittingly for a game about space exploration, the music conforms to several cliches about “spacey” music: it’s mostly-beatless electronica, full of slow synthesizer swells and lots of reverb to give the impression of a vast, empty void. Do not think I condemn such cliches; indeed, I have my own playlist of just this type of music, which I find very conducive to work tasks that require a lot of focus. This soundtrack marks a welcome addition to that playlist.

While playing The Away Team, some moments are silent, while in others music will fade gently in and out. This is very effective for setting the mood, but it also meant I wasn’t paying close attention to the music itself. The soundtrack offers a chance to appreciate the compositions on offer, which manage to stay interesting and varied despite the overarching sonic theme. There are pure ambient pieces, like “Intro Spector”, “Gas Giant”, or the 13-minute “Zenith” with its meandering synthesizer melodies that ebb and flow like the tide. Other pieces, like “It’s Out There” and “Waves of Space”, are anchored by arpeggiated synthesizer patterns, making them more energetic and — in the latter case — creepy. “Photosynthesis”, which plays during the end credits, uses a chord-based synthesizer melody that may be an intentional nod to Ben Prunty’s iconic soundtrack for FTL.

“Photosynthesis” is also the only track that I remember featuring prominent percussion in the game. On the soundtrack, however, percussion pops up in unexpected places and makes for a more interesting listen. “Astrum Cloud” begins with a pattern of gentle synthesizer plucks, before a skittering drumbeat drops in halfway through that recontextualizes the rhythm. The nine-and-a-half-minute “Omni Terra” opens with faint synth pads, adds in a prominent synth lead near the 2 minute mark, and then drops a full beat 90 seconds later, along with a new arpeggiated melody. It then fades back into gentle ambience for the final two minutes of its runtime. Perhaps the most striking example, however, is “Light Brigade”, which slowly builds for a full five minutes before a beat and some new synth leads kick things into overdrive, changing the feel of the piece completely.

These touches make the soundtrack an engaging listen, instead of fading into the background as so much purely ambient music does. It also make me wonder if the soundtrack was remixed somewhat compared to what’s in the game. It’s possible that the game simply uses the quieter moments of each track, or perhaps Underflow Studios reworked the pieces into longer and more dynamic versions for the soundtrack. Either way, it’s an excellent selection of music that is a welcome addition to my collection.

That’s 247 down, and only 1494 to go!