Colony Ship: consequence without curiosity

I played The Age of Decadence years ago and came away genuinely impressed with Iron Tower. It was obviously made by a tiny team on a tiny budget, sometimes painfully so, but there was something genuinely interesting underneath all the roughness. The setting was strange, the game was happy to let you miss huge amounts of content, and following seemingly minor threads could take you somewhere completely unexpected. I'm pretty sure I played it at least twice back-to-back.

So I was always interested in what Iron Tower would do next. I tried Colony Ship during Early Access, came back again around launch, played another few hours and lost interest. It wasn't until I saw their newer, smaller fantasy project, Heralds of the Third Apocalypse, and thought that looked far more interesting that I decided to give Colony Ship one proper go again.

This time I finished it on Underdog.

And yeah, I can see why it never grabbed me before.

Space is mostly wallpaper:

The premise should be fantastic. The Starfarer is a generation ship on a centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centauri, with whole generations born and dying aboard it after the original social order collapsed. The people you're dealing with have never seen Earth and have built their entire societies inside an ageing spacecraft.

Yet for something literally called Colony Ship, space barely fucking matters.

The ship could almost be buried underground or sitting inside some isolated post-apocalyptic megacity and most of the game would still work. The factions, politics, quests and conflicts are almost entirely internal. Space mostly explains why everyone is trapped together.

This thing has supposedly spent centuries crossing an incomprehensibly large void, yet apparently nothing particularly interesting happened out there. No alien contact. No strange signals. No cosmic horror. No unexplained phenomena. No weird discovery that fundamentally changed the ship or the people living aboard it. Nothing interacting with the Starfarer from the outside that makes the journey itself feel dangerous, mysterious or even particularly relevant.

It doesn't need to have aliens popping out of airlocks every five minutes or Cthulhu wrapped around the reactor. It just needed the actual space part of this enormous sci-fi premise to matter somehow.

The destination at least has native life, but that's the destination. The centuries spent getting there somehow produced almost nothing remotely as strange.

Instead, most of the setting feels surprisingly contemporary. There are implants, energy weapons, mutants and some biological oddities, but underneath the sci-fi dressing you've mostly got recognisable twentieth-century ideologies and social structures arguing inside industrial corridors. The factions rarely feel like cultures produced by generations of people who have never experienced an actual planet.

I played Rogue Trader last year, and obviously I'm not comparing budgets. Owlcat also had decades of Warhammer 40K material to pull from. The comparison is simply what each game does with people living aboard enormous spacecraft. Rogue Trader constantly turns that premise into bizarre cultures, rituals, technology and situations that feel inseparable from its setting.

Iron Tower had complete creative freedom here. They could invent whatever the hell they wanted.

And this was it?

That's what left me cold. A generation ship travelling through space for centuries should be an excuse to get strange. In Colony Ship, the ship mostly feels like the building where a comparatively ordinary political RPG happens.

Exploring without discovering much:

That lack of weirdness carries straight into exploration.

I don't remember every detail of Age of Decadence after all these years, but I remember wanting to dig through its world because there was always a chance something genuinely strange was buried underneath it. Ancient technology, supposed gods and demons, forgotten history and discoveries that could take a seemingly ordinary character somewhere completely unexpected. Follow enough obscure threads and you could somehow end up becoming a god.

That's the kind of secret I remember years later.

Colony Ship has hidden areas, optional routes and plenty of things tucked away behind skills, but I rarely got that same feeling of finding something I wasn't supposed to know existed. Usually it's more equipment, another container, a shortcut, a terminal or another encounter. Useful, sure, but rarely exciting.

Most of the supposedly strange parts of the setting are already normalised anyway. Mutants are an established population. Mind worms and floaters are known creatures. Implants are everyday equipment. Old ship systems are things you repair or hack during quests. Very little feels genuinely forbidden, horrifying or outside what the game has already told you to expect.

The one thing that came close was Ol' Bub.

Ol' Bub, short for Beelzebub, has an actual legend built around it. There's supposedly some enormous monster lurking deep inside Mission Control, people are scared of it, and the whole thing has acquired enough mythology that I genuinely wanted to know what the fuck was down there.

After all that build-up, Beelzebub turns out to be a giant worm with mandibles.

That's your legendary monster.

And then the game attaches what was, for me, the shittiest fight in the entire game to it. So the creepy little horror story surrounding this thing doesn't uncover some forgotten experiment, bizarre creature or genuinely unsettling secret. You fight the big worm, cut off its mandibles, hand them in and get 2,000 credits.

Brilliant.

Ol' Bub is almost the entire exploration problem condensed into one encounter. The setup briefly promises something stranger than the normal game, then the payoff collapses straight back into enemy > loot > credits.

You explore the hidden corners of Colony Ship and mostly find more Colony Ship.

Fifty shades of combat systems:

Then there's the combat, which quite frankly is about fifty shades of shit.

I played on Underdog, so difficulty itself isn't the issue. The problem is that Colony Ship piles systems on top of systems while its progression makes experimenting with half of them a bad idea.

There are multiple weapon classes, different attacks for individual weapons, armour, evasion, cover, penetration, criticals, gadgets, implants, grenades, stimulants, shields, reaction attacks and status effects. There's plenty to fiddle with, but I rarely felt that all this machinery produced equally interesting decisions.

Equipment became especially dull. So much armour and weapon loot consists of slightly different collections of numbers that later in the game I frequently couldn't be bothered figuring out whether something was meaningfully better than what I already had. Finding equipment stopped being exciting because most of it became stuff to sell.

Then the inventory and trading UI made selling it irritating too.

By later parts of the game I genuinely stopped bothering with some of the junk because sorting through everything wasn't worth the hassle for another pile of credits. I can understand an ugly or clunky interface from a studio this small. It still manages to turn one of the basic pleasures of an RPG, finding new shit, into admin.

The bigger problem is how all those combat options collide with the skill system.

All these options, just don't experiment:

Colony Ship uses learn-by-use progression. Fight with something and that skill improves. Use Lockpick, Computers, Electronics, Steal, Biotech, Sneak and the other utility skills successfully and those improve too. Dialogue has its own specialised skills on top of that.

The problem is that the game is finite.

There are only so many fights, so much ammunition, so many locks, terminals, bodies to harvest, people to steal from and other opportunities to actually gain that progression. The game offers loads of skills while giving you a limited supply of chances to develop them.

Say ammunition is limited, so during easier fights I decide to conserve it and use melee instead. Perfectly reasonable.

My melee skill goes up.

My gun skill doesn't.

Then I reach a harder encounter where I actually want to use all that ammunition I've been saving, except my accuracy is still shit because I've spent several encounters progressing the wrong weapon skill.

I saved the resource for when I'd need it and made myself worse at using it.

The utility side has the same rigidity. If I haven't been consistently developing Lockpick, Computers, Electronics, Steal, Biotech or whatever else from early enough in the game, later checks can simply sit beyond my reach. Missing earlier uses also means missing some of the progression that would have helped reach those later checks.

So much of a good build depends on already understanding how the game distributes its limited opportunities. Which weapons will I actually want later? Which character should handle Biotech? Who gets Electronics? Is Steal worth pushing? How much Sneak will I need? Which skill is going to suddenly become useful several areas from now?

A second playthrough obviously answers those questions.

I have zero desire to do one.

For a game offering this many apparent approaches, the systems strongly reward deciding what you're doing early and repeatedly doing exactly that. Spreading out because you want to try different weapons or utility skills burns progression that can't simply be recovered later.

Choice cosplay still feels like the best description. There are loads of options on the character sheet, but the game really wants you to know which handful you're going to commit to before you've seen enough of it to make that decision properly.

When the combat throws out its own lessons:

Some of the later encounters make all of this even worse.

For most of the game you're taught to care about accuracy, evasion, armour, cover, positioning, initiative and squeezing as much as possible from your AP. You build characters around those systems and gradually learn how to manipulate them.

Then things like mind worms and floaters arrive and start throwing psionic effects and debuffs around, going early and wrecking your AP economy before you've properly done anything.

If you already have the right consumables, implants, equipment or whatever specific setup helps against them, good for you. If you happened to level the appropriate utility skill far enough to bypass one of these encounters entirely, even better.

If you don't have those things, tough shit. Now you've discovered what this particular fight wanted from you.

That's what annoyed me about these encounters. They don't feel like the existing combat becoming more demanding. They feel disconnected from the rules the game spent hours encouraging you to build around, with enemy-specific bullshit suddenly taking priority over the evasion, cover and positioning systems you've been learning.

And because consumables, resources and skill progression are already limited, you can't freely compensate for it either. The game wants you to specialise, conserve resources and plan ahead, then occasionally asks whether you specialised, conserved and planned for something you had no reason to expect.

Ol' Bub manages to combine both problems beautifully: the biggest let-down in the game's exploration attached to one of its most irritating fights.

Lots of consequences, very little worth caring about:

There are objectively plenty of quest routes in Colony Ship. You can fight, talk, sneak, use utility skills, support different factions and reach different resolutions.

I just didn't care about most of them.

The factions are mostly caricatures, the companions are mediocre and the setting never gave me enough reason to become invested in what happened to any of these groups. A lot of quests eventually became a matter of checking whether I could pass whatever skill option was available and, if not, killing the people in the way.

Then you get the resolution and move on.

The endings are similarly flat. For a game built so heavily around branching outcomes, none of them made me particularly interested in seeing what the others looked like.

That's where the replayability completely dies for me.

I'm fairly sure I played Age of Decadence at least twice back-to-back because another run meant seeing a genuinely different side of this weird little world. There were things I still wanted to discover.

Another Colony Ship run would let me build more efficiently now that I know where everything is going, pass different checks and back another faction.

I couldn't care less.

Small indie only explains so much:

I know Iron Tower is tiny. That's been obvious since Age of Decadence, and it's precisely why that game impressed me as much as it did.

Repeated environments, rough animation, limited production values and a clunky interface are easy enough to understand. There are only so many people and so many hours available.

The setting, systems and writing are what matter more here. Iron Tower already proved with Age of Decadence that a low budget can still produce something genuinely strange and memorable. Colony Ship has far more mechanical machinery, yet I found much less underneath it that I actually wanted to see.