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Skybreak! Reviews
Author: William Dooling
Date: 2019
ADRIFT 5.0
Reviewed by Lumin
This is a remarkable game, in a real and literal sense absolutely
unparalleled. Fun, vast, and best of all, almost infinitely replayable, at the
time of this review there's just nothing else out there like it.
Skybreak! is a refreshingly approachable game for newbie and veteran players
alike, easy to pick up with no barrier to jumping right in and playing, and yet
dangerously addictive. The gameplay on the surface is simple: Numbered CYOA
style choices lead to random encounters, which require use of your character's
RPG style stats and skills. You travel from one planet to another, choose one
option in each location, resolve an encounter and move on. The character
background chosen in the beginning will determine your win conditions and thus
certain things about your playstyle, giving a non-intrusive sense of direction
as you explore the galaxy sized-sandbox at your leisure.
This game relies
on the same old ADRIFT capabilities that have been around forever, just waiting
for someone to really make use of them to this degree and on this grand a scale.
And when you first start to play, the massive scale of everything will
absolutely make an impression on you. The setting, the lore, and then the game
content itself, the actual reams of text involved in setting up so many
possibilities for the player to encounter. It's a vast game and the writing
itself pops and sizzles and makes everything seem even vaster.
Nothing
pedestrian or dull ever happens to your character, Skybreak! makes your every
action feel like that of an ultimate badass in a galaxy full of larger than life
characters, stunningly beautiful vistas, wonderfully strange happenings and dark
unknown terrors beyond the veil of time and space. The setting is influenced by
many sources, and apparently one the author has been developing since high
school when roleplaying with his friends. (There are bits and pieces of it that
are referenced in his other games as well, and Tingalan itself exists within
this universe...or maybe a bit beyond it...) The fact that this is such a labor
of love which had behind it the intent of letting the author play a game and
have his family play a game bringing this universe to life is undoubtedly what
drove it to such heights.
Skybreak! is easy to play on mobile, even with
the very limited capabilities of the online runner. Although I recommend
downloading it simply for ease of saving and for the lovely fonts. (See the
forum if you're having trouble with Windows Defender.)
Skybreak! is
genuinely an experience of pure joy.
Skybreak! is really quite fun to
say, with the exclamation mark and all.
Needless to say, I am eagerly
looking forward to the release of Lost Coastlines.
Reviewed by
antscoff
I started the game, picked a species and talents, and
inherited a spaceship that loved me. At first blush, the gameplay seemed a
little choppy because I didn't know what to expect. I went through a cycle of
landing on planets, making a choice, and leaving. But after the first ten
minutes it started to make sense. Lots of sense.
A Fantastic Sandbox
Skybreak! worlds are hand-crafted. Travel seems random, but it's regionalized.
The lore is deep, but delivered in pieces delivered across multiple playthroughs
and locations. Every species has its own special encounters and background
descriptions. Every talent gives you a different way to win, so you end up with
many alluring playthroughs. Planets and encounters are all hand-crafted.
Trade System
There are two economies in the game. One is with goods, like
mined ores. You can buy and sell these in various places, which you might end up
exchanging later. The second is with experiences, like tales of adventure.
Collecting these tales actually involves hearing them, much like opening a book
in the game gives you an actual short story -- it's more fun than I can put into
words. There's a third element, Adventure Points, which are awarded and stripped
in special circumstances, and important to your character's longevity.
Ship Combat
Ship combat is an uncommon encounter, and was a little more
confusing to me. You have a heading in the top left corner when in ship combat,
which is relative to the direction the enemy faces, such that 0 degrees means
both of you would crash head-on if you flew at each other. After knowing that,
it became a lot more reasonable. I still considered it interesting to encounter,
if challenging to handle.
Just Plain Addicting
I want to stress again
how awesome this game is; really give it a whirl. The fact that every encounter
is drawn from a list of approx. 4-8 things balloons the replay value when you
consider the scope of the game. There are so many sub-goals in this game that
crop up as you play. There are so many ways to play and the writing is just
fantastic through and through.
Reviewed by Psy
My first impression of Skybreak! was just how /huge/ it is. Not just in the
world's size, but what you can do in it and who you can be. The character
creation is in-depth and gives a nice selection of species, backgrounds, and
talents, so no one character has to have the exact build. You can then name your
ship that loves you (and hopefully you love back) and off you go on an
immersive, sprawling adventure.
With the different species and groups
across the world of Skybreak!, there's bound to be a lot of lore, but it's
delivered in snippets as you explore different locations and come across various
encounters. These stories and encounters add to your experiences to tell, which
is almost a sort of currency in this game, something to exchange and pass along
in addition to the physical materials you come across.
Skybreak! is a
game that definitely deserves more than one playthrough with different
characters (or even just the same one but stumbling across different
encounters). If you're ever looking to spend some time exploring an expansive
universe with countless things to do at each stop, this is a game to try out.
Reviewed by Sam Kabo Ashwell
Skybreak! is a CRPG-ish science-fantasy space
adventure. As a wandering adventurer, you will fly to dozens of systems and
spend only a little time on each before moving on.
There’s actually quite
a few examples of this sort of thing in the general IF space: Voyageur, Out
There, Superluminal Vagrant Twin, Sunless Skies. Skybreak particularly reminded
me of Voyageur in that they both have random navigation: in Voyageur your drive
can only take you towards the galactic core, but you have slight influence over
your route. In Skybreak you can’t steer at all, but you can revisit places, and
you can only take one action each time you land. (Sometimes that action leads to
further choices, but you’re always on a brief visit.)
Many moons ago I wrote
this about Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home:
SF treats space as a
rational quantity to be managed in some way or another: an ocean to chart, a
frontier to advance, an empire to administrate. In Heliopause, space is the
Great Forest of Arthurian knight-errant and Grimm fairytale, or the ocean of the
Odyssey: anything might be encountered there, but you won’t be able to plot it
on a map.
Skybreak does, in fact, have a map among its copious
out-of-game supplements, but it’s not very useful and the principle holds. It’s
unequivocally science fantasy – you will use Occultism as much as Gunnery – and
it has a general scent of belatedness and Old Weird about its style. There’s are
mysterious towers and lost civilisations and not-quite-alive things and elves
and just a lot of good naming. Your soul definitively exists, and various
menaces will steal bits of it. In a very Fallen London vein, a lot of the
resources you collect are various kind of story or secret, rendered in the
abstract as resources, and scientific data figures as just another flavour of
those. Your spaceship is the narrator, and it loves you. So this contains a lot
of what you’d expect in a generic Space Adventure, but it is very clearly not
confining itself to that.
Skybreak is not shy about letting you know that
this is going to be A Lot Of Game from the outset. The game begins with a
multi-stage character-creation process. There is a sixteen-page manual, heaving
with more information than anyone’s going to be able to retain on one reading.
Its basic design – a floating-modules, roll-a-random-encounter kind of deal – is
one that inherently requires a large amount of Content to work in the first
place. There are a lot of different systems at work – as well as the stats and
the resources and the special skills (which I always immediately forgot about),
there’s a reputation system and combat and apparently you can fall in love
(alas, I was never given the opportunity).
Character creation is not, by
the standards of a trad TTRPG, a hugely complicated or lengthy process: if you
look at the character sheet and consider it as a character sheet, it’s pretty
simple. I’ve played storygames with denser character sheets. But context matters
a lot! Having a ton of stats and skills in a tabletop game isn’t a big issue
because the content can be crafted around them after the fact. In a computer
game, content has to be made for all of the possibilities – well, OK, sure, I’ve
played plenty of CRPGs where you go ‘sure, I’ll put a couple of points into
Lore(Nature) and Fisherdwarfship, that fits with the character I want’, and then
those skills get used once in the entire game and cost as much as the
(completely indispensable) Heal skill. But that’s bad and you shouldn’t do it.
So: a big list of skills is a promise of content that’s both very extensive and
reasonably balanced. (If you read the manual, it strongly recommends at least +2
in two of the following skills: Survival, Technology, Gunnery, or Strength,
which I didn’t notice until way too late.)
Character-creation does do a
good job of offering an initial sketch of what the universe looks like, though:
a lot of the evocative power of lists is at work here.
The biggest
problem with all of this is that this is using an unadorned parser-IF system,
and so the game’s output is a single stream of text. The download comes with a
printable character sheet, and I don’t think this is meant as a joke: you’ll
want to be able to refer to this information regularly. This might be a clue
that this game could use a better way of displaying information. In particular,
I constantly wanted to check my inventory to see if I had the resources
necessary for a particular challenge – your inventory changes a lot more often
than your skills – and, because the inventory is formatted as a vertical list
with every possible resource listed, it takes up more than one screen of text
(and scrolls your choice menu way up off the page). Often, I’d just guess rather
than dealing with that. There are a too many resources to hold in memory, and
you won’t necessarily be able to focus on grinding one resource for one task, so
being able to reference them is a big deal. It’s particularly difficult to
remember whether you’ve got some Forbidden Lore, Forgotten Lore or Foretold
Lore.
This is particularly an issue for a game which is designed to reward
long-term play: I didn’t get used to the UI jank over time, and indeed I got
more frustrated at how it was slowing down my learning of the game’s systems.
So: as an experience this would have been hugely improved by a UI that
managed player information more smoothly – which, in practice, would probably
mean a platform other than ADRIFT, so that seems unlikely to happen. But its
mode of interaction is almost entirely menu-based, so being based on a parser
platform really isn’t doing it a lot of favours.
The space combat system,
too, is a bit opaque unless you go and read the manual; it’s not super-clear
even then, and every fight feels a little bit too long. And once you’ve got your
ship beaten up it’s hard to get it fixed – you can’t do the usual RPG-fuckup
thing of hurrying back to a safe haven after you get your ass kicked, you just
have to wait and hope that you randomly appear at a place with a starport.
There’s also a tendency to get long runs of uninhabited systems; I’m not sure
whether this is just because the game has a well-considered balance between
common, routine content (uninhabited systems where you mine and do scans) and
rarer, more detailed stuff (major populated planets), or whether the navigation
is more structured than it initially looks, and leads to you wandering around
empty zones.
The writing is capable, although with so much Stuff it
varies quite a lot in effectiveness and tone. A lot of the time it’s going for a
generic mode – these are events that you’re going to be repeating – and
sometimes this comes through a little too hard:
You successfully make the
journey, though your limbs are weary and your bones ache.
It is truly far
better to travel than to arrive. After the journey is complete, you look back on
it in wonder and amazement. Did you really accomplish that? How incredible. You
have a new tale of adventure to tell.
When you do get highly unique
content, it can sometime come with a lot of text – a page or so – and this is a
bit of an abrupt gear-shift.
I encountered a fairly small handful of
bugs: in particular, when an event makes you travel to a new part of space, the
menu for the new system sometimes doesn’t display correctly.
It isn’t
really possible to do more than scratch the surface of this within the comp’s
time limit; by the end of that time, I had quit prematurely once and died a
couple of times, each time only at the beginning of working on my character’s
objectives. There are a lot more character builds to explore; I need to develop
better ways of not dying. There’s clearly a ton of longer-arc content that I
haven’t got to grips with, and lots of elements I haven’t had the resources to
explore. Either in character terms or in worldbuilding, I didn’t really get my
teeth into any narrative arcs so much as random adventure and a lot of
atmosphere.
An impressive (and somewhat intimidating) piece of work, not
being shown off to best effect. 8.
Reviewed by MathBrush
I would have been happy to pay for this game. I intend to play through this
game many times in the future.
This is a menu-based Adrift game (I
strongly recommend downloadable play). Basically, you are in space, and you
visit worlds. At each world, you can do exactly one thing before you leave.
However, you may randomly visit the same place again in the future. So if
you missed out on something, or started something you couldn't finish, you get
another chance.
The game has many stats, almost 20, but it becomes more
natural over time. The game is right when it says it's better to have a lot of
1's than a few 3's or 4's.
You can pick abilities, talents (which
increase abilities and give you special powers or the ability to unlock a new
kind of story), and two backgrounds. The backgrounds drive the game, and decide
what your win conditions are. For instance, my character had the goal of
collecting 30 stories (from the storyteller background) and also the goal of
exploring 10 or so new planets (which is how I won).
For the regular
backgrounds, achieving your objective ends the game with no fanfare. There are 3
'special' backgrounds that apparently give a more coherent story (I didn't
choose them in my first playthrough, as they seemed more difficult).
Progress is slow in this game, and there is a lot of grinding. Probably half of
the links are systems where you can scan with Astronomy or mine with Mining.
But this game uses a lot of the principles that make things like gambling
addictive. It has infrequent, random rewards that are pretty awesome, so it kept
me chugging through the grind.
Loved it overall, and plan on playing it
more. There are a few small bugs (like an option the says "Explore Explore
[Planetname]" and a choice I clicked on that didn't have any follow-up text).
But these were very slight. Love it!
Reviewed by Spike
Skybreak! is a huge space exploration-and-trading game, with RPG elements and
multiple win states. You can explore star systems; mine planets, asteroids, and
comets; recruit spies; unearth lore; acquire alien artifacts; and collect
beetles - among other things.
Skybreak! feels like a cross between
Superluminal Vagrant Twin and Sunless Seas. Skybreak!'s setting, method for
moving between locations, and text-based format are reminiscent of the former,
but it has some of the features (such as lore-gathering) of the latter, and its
scope is closer to that of the latter.
That isn't to say that Skybreak!
is as large as Sunless Seas. It doesn't take nearly as long to win Skybreak!,
for instance. (A few hours, three playthroughs, and judicious use of UNDO got me
a nice ending in Skybreak!.) However, much of the reason Sunless Seas takes so
long is that you spend a lot of your time moving your boat around on the screen
and managing your fuel. Strip Sunless Seas down to its item- and
knowledge-gathering aspects and its quest trees, and the scope comparison
between it and Skybreak! starts to seem more reasonable. Skybreak! really is
huge; I can tell from the few hours I've spent on it that there's a lot to the
game I have not seen.
Where Skybreak! surpasses both Superluminal
Vagrant Twin and Sunless Seas is in its number and variety of role-playing
options. At the beginning of Skybreak! you've got a choice of five species
(well, four and then an "other" option), two of ten background characteristics,
and three of sixteen talents. These affect your win-state goals (as in Sunless
Seas), your secondary goals, and the kinds of tasks you're most likely to
succeed with. They really are meaningful choices, too: On my first and third
playthroughs I made very different character selections, and those two
playthroughs looked quite different. By comparison, SVT has no RPG elements, and
Sunless Seas allows you fewer options.
By biggest criticism of Skybreak!
is the random navigation. I can see that this prevents players from doing as
much grinding, which would destroy a lot of the fun of the game. But it is also
frustrating to be presented with half a dozen or more interesting options for a
particular solar system and yet only be able to choose one of them before having
to move on, perhaps never to return on that playthrough. The UNDO command does
mitigate this frustration somewhat, though, as it allows you to try out the
different options and then select the one you like best.
There's a great
deal to see and do in Skybreak!. If you enjoy games like this, there's enough
content to keep you engaged for many, many hours.
Reviewed by The Stack
It’s easy to get the impression that all of Interactive Fiction is based on
just two models, the explorable environments typically seen in parser-based text
adventures and the branching stories typically seen in hypertext. So it’s good
to get occasional reminders that there are other alternatives. Skybreak! is
built out of randomized storylets, kind of like Fallen London and Reigns — but
more like Reigns in the way it denies player control.
The premise is one
of space-opera exploration, zipping from star to star, but the destinations are
chosen by your ship’s AI, which claims to be in love with you. When you arrive
at a location, you get a series of menus that let you choose what to do there.
Once you’ve followed a path through the menu tree all the way to a leaf, it’s
time to get back on that ship to another randomly-chosen destination. Often the
choices are, unfortunately, meaningless: you arrive at a star with multiple
planets and choose which one to explore further, on the basis of nothing more
than an orbit number. However, on the basis of a jpeg map included with the
game, I think it’s likely that the contents of each star system is fixed, not
randomized at runtime. That you could theoretically take meticulous notes about
every destination and use that information on subsequent playthroughs. It would
take some time, though, because you can’t control where you go, and the galaxy
is large.
Large, and uncooperative. At one point I seemed to be stuck in
a morass of planets where there was basically nothing to do but mining, which I
was terrible at. See, in addition to inventory, there are character stats and
skills in this game, and a fairly elaborate character creation process; success
at your actions is frequently contingent on where you put your skill points. I
had optimized as a scholar/storyteller, figuring that finding the lost history
of extinct civilizations would be the most interesting path. But I never found
much of that during the Comp’s two-hour judging period.
Character
creation involves choosing a race from a short list and two “backgrounds” from a
longer one. The races notably include elves and goblins, and the backgrounds
include sorcerer. Which is at least honest, I suppose. Backgrounds give you both
victory conditions (which I never got anywhere near) and special abilities, some
of which involve actions that aren’t in the menus. See, even though the game is
basically menu-driven, it’s the sort of command-line-based menus where you type
in a number at a prompt. Other commands can be typed in too, such as the ones
that display your stats or inventory. This system feels a bit old-school, like
Hunt the Wumpus, especially if you play it in a browser, where clickable links
are more natural. But I kind of dug it. The game is written in Adrift, which is
usually used for second-rate parser-based text adventures. I don’t think I’ve
seen an Adrift game on this paradigm before.
The whole thing is just
impressively baroque. There’s stats and skills you’ll never use, things you’ll
never find. There’s a whole section in the inventory for exotic beetles. It may
be best appreciated as an art object rather than played as a game.
Reviewed by
Thomas Mack
I have fond memories of playing board games like “Arkham
Horror” or “Agents of Smersh” that are essentially multiplayer versions of
gamebooks. That is, they’re similar to old Choose Your Adventure Books, but with
some sort of RPG-style stats, more state, and significant random elements.
“Skybreak!” is a charming space adventure written in that style.
Gameplay: The goal of the game is to acquire certain kinds of items (or abstract
things like scientific data) by randomly travelling through space. Exactly what
kinds of items are needed depends on the details of the initial character
construction, and the stats chosen at that point also affect how the later
vignettes on each planet play out. None of them are particularly complicated,
but they’re enjoyable and play smoothly. 6/10.
Mechanics: The encounters
on each planet are similar to those in the two board games above. They’re
straightforward and designed well, although they get a bit repetitive over the
course of the game. There’s significant state to the game (enough that the
author provides a printable character sheet for reference, although all that
information is also easily accessible from within the game), and there are
opporunities for exchanging or otherwise taking advantage of items that the
player has collected. 6/10.
Presentation: The lightly comedic of the game
is consistent throughout, and I enjoyed the scenes that played out on arriving
at distant planets. There’s a large roster of skills, character backgrounds, and
other embellishments to add variety to the gameplay. 6/10.
You might be
interested in this game if: You’ve played and enjoyed games like “Arkham Horror”
or “Agents of Smersh.”
Score: 6
Reviewed by
Iris Colt
New Adrift games are few and far between at the moment but
the IFComp is just about the only moment when Adrift games are played by a large
number of normal persons, with commonly held IF beliefs, tastes or interests,
and mainstreamers. I am glad that Adrift games are no longer de facto MS Windows
games since IFComp 2011 thanks to ADRIFT WebRunner, as this year I am only
rating entries with a “Play online” button. This game works seamlessly in my
Android Firefox Focus, and note that the same cannot quite be said of Quixe,
however, wink.
This game strives to give you a promising introduction,
and the optimism that underlies this No-Man’s-Sky-esque concept approach and the
very room descriptions are themselves no doubt inspiring, but things only
scatter from there with its lackluster and repetitive gameplay. I expected, a
collection of well-executed callbacks to older games, at least.
I would
also recommend polishing the UI/look; this would benefit greatly from a little
attention to the color scheme. And I discovered that several important commands
were only briefly mentioned. For example:
➢ 5
You decide not to recruit a
hero. They are not worth your time.
➢ 3
The dark matter currents have
shifted. For better or worse, it is time to move on…
➢ move on
Sorry,
I didn't understand that command.
Previous text said:
(We can make a
single choice here, then we will have to move on. We can do that by typing "c"
and then "l")
So, I noticed that I would have needed to memorize those
commands. By the way, what is the purpose of using these two commands together,
might I issue one command but not the other in certain moment?
The game
had an attractive premise and, on the level of prose, a concise execution.
However, interface design and implementation are too important to be treated the
way this game treats them, and it suffers for it.
Reviewed by Carl
Muckenhoupt
It’s easy to get the impression that all of Interactive
Fiction is based on just two models, the explorable environments typically seen
in parser-based text adventures and the branching stories typically seen in
hypertext. So it’s good to get occasional reminders that there are other
alternatives. Skybreak! is built out of randomized storylets, kind of like
Fallen London and Reigns — but more like Reigns in the way it denies player
control.
The premise is one of space-opera exploration, zipping from star
to star, but the destinations are chosen by your ship’s AI, which claims to be
in love with you. When you arrive at a location, you get a series of menus that
let you choose what to do there. Once you’ve followed a path through the menu
tree all the way to a leaf, it’s time to get back on that ship to another
randomly-chosen destination. Often the choices are, unfortunately, meaningless:
you arrive at a star with multiple planets and choose which one to explore
further, on the basis of nothing more than an orbit number. However, on the
basis of a jpeg map included with the game, I think it’s likely that the
contents of each star system are fixed, not randomized at runtime. That you
could theoretically take meticulous notes about every destination and use that
information on subsequent playthroughs. It would take some time, though, because
you can’t control where you go, and the galaxy is large.
Large, and
uncooperative. At one point I seemed to be stuck in a morass of planets where
there was basically nothing to do but mining, which I was terrible at. See, in
addition to inventory, there are character stats and skills in this game, and a
fairly elaborate character creation process; success at your actions is
frequently contingent on where you put your skill points. I had optimized as a
scholar/storyteller, figuring that finding the lost history of extinct
civilizations would be the most interesting path. But I never found much of that
during the Comp’s two-hour judging period.
Character creation involves
choosing a race from a short list and two “backgrounds” from a longer one. The
races notably include elves and goblins, and the backgrounds include sorcerer.
Which is at least honest, I suppose. Backgrounds give you both victory
conditions (which I never got anywhere near) and special abilities, some of
which involve actions that aren’t in the menus. See, even though the game is
basically menu-driven, it’s the sort of command-line-based menus where you type
in a number at a prompt. Other commands can be typed in too, such as the ones
that display your stats or inventory. This system feels a bit old-school, like
Hunt the Wumpus, especially if you play it in a browser, where clickable links
are more natural. But I kind of dug it. The game is written in Adrift, which is
usually used for second-rate parser-based text adventures. I don’t think I’ve
seen an Adrift game on this paradigm before.
The whole thing is just
impressively baroque. There’s stats and skills you’ll never use, things you’ll
never find. There’s a whole section in the inventory for exotic beetles. It may
be best appreciated as an art object rather than played as a game.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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