In Blogtober, no one can hear you scream (Blogtober #9)

Every day, you wake up. The robot voice in your ‘HAB’ sleeping module greets you with an inspiration message, and a reminder that if you don’t make payments on your loan before 10am, you will incur extra charges. You know you have to get up right away, because anyone who sleeps more than the maximum mandated 8 hours gets fined. You stumble out of bed, put on your spacesuit, and get to work. You are a shipbreaker.

Today’s spooky thing is sort of spooky-adjacent. It’s a game that currently has my attention: Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

The story of this game is relatively simple. You play as a new shipbreaker, whose job is to break up spaceships that are out of commission. The game is sort of relaxing, you explore the ships, measure, cut, and sort each piece into its appropriate place, and earn rewards for doing so. The game has a sort of rhythm that really makes my brain purr.

It’s also a very quiet game. You float around in space to the gentle ‘whoosh’ of your thrusters, the buzz of your cutting tool, and the soundtrack is mainly guitars playing softly in the background.

But then you have the capitalist dystopia story underneath. You run out of oxygen in space? You’ll have to buy some more from the company that you are working for. Break something? Too bad, you’ll have to fix it with your own money. Oh, and did I mention that you start the game with a multi-billion dollar debt to pay off to the company for the ‘honour’ of working for them? Scary.

And underneath that, you have the ships themselves. Empty vessels with small hints of the lives once inside them. As you explore these dark vessels, you’ll bump into floating food packets, old posters put up my crew members, in one I found a stuffed toy rabbit. What were the people like who used this vessel? Where are they now? What happened between their lives then, and the empty vessel you are unceremoniously pulling apart? It’s this story beneath the story that really keeps me intrigued.

And then, of course, you get little tips on the loading screen like this: