When I first laid eyes on Crying Suns months and months ago, my whole body shook with a single word: Yesssss! The game looked to deliver a few of my favorite things: grim-dark pixel art, Faster Than Light-like tactical gameplay, SPACE!, and a hearty dose of narrative storytelling. So onto the wishlist, it went until the fateful day when I would have a chance to try it out. Well, my friends, that day has arrived. I finally had a chance to sink my teeth into this game, so kindly read on to find out if Alt Shift’s space romp Crying Suns lives up to the promise.
A CAPTIVATING NARRATIVE CONTEXT
Let’s begin with the first moments of the game because it sets the narrative direction and overall tone superbly. The intro sequence reveals a Matrix (the movie) -like infinite chamber of cloning vats overseen by a similarly Matrix-like floating tentacle robot called an OMNI. These OMNIs run every facet of a star-spanning galactic empire, with the OMNIs’ production and operations tightly controlled by the Emperor himself and his (ig)noble house.
You assume the role of Admiral Idaho, or rather a newly awakened clone of the good Admiral. It turns out that the cloning facility is of the “super-duper secret sort”, complete with a big red phone connecting directly to the Emperor. As fate would have it, the Emperor stopped making his routine phone calls to check-in, and so the facility’s controlling OMNI started emergency protocols, cloned you back to life, and demands will accompany you on your journey back to the heart of the empire to figure out WTF is going on.
I don’t normally get too excited about game narratives – but my god the setup is awesome. I consume more than my fair share of sci-fi space opera novels, and the narrative premise in Crying Suns feels right at home among genre classics. In short order, you come to realize that all of the OMNIs that were connected to the normal galactic network have shut down for inexplicable reasons, leaving the whole of humanity in a desperate struggle for survival. It’s a nice reversal of the usual AIs-turned-evil trope and is instead a referendum on the risks of relying too much on the support of AIs, lest we lose the means to take care of ourselves.
The developers cite Asimov’s Foundation and Herbert’s Dune as inspiration. I can see the influence, but it mostly reminds me of Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space-series, which has a similar post-technology crash vibe, with civilization struggling to cope with a massive nano-technology plague that pushed us back into a pseudo-dark age. In any event, Crying Suns did an awesome job setting the stage for a grand adventure, sprinkled with a tantalizing number of mysteries (what happened to the real Admiral Idaho anyway?) to keep you hooked.
I should mention the overall audio/visual atmosphere as well because it meshes delightfully well with the narrative. I’m a sucker for the modern pixel art style that blends pixels (duh) with atmospheric lighting and layers of other effects. Crying Suns nails the aesthetic vibe. There is something about good pixel art, and in the balance of how much it reveals and suggests versus how much it obscures and blurs, that engages your imagination in filling in the visual gaps and details. More realistic-looking games rarely conjure this same feeling.
The game’s musical score likewise supports the immersion, fusing grandeur with a cold, haunting, and dark feeling. It works splendidly. On a subtler note, the game uses a little trick when it comes to text narration that I’m seeing more and more. Instead of trying to voice the lines (a difficult and expensive endeavor), it uses a garbled non-language, synthesized sound sequence to give the impression of the spoken word without having to rely on actual spoken voice-overs. It’s a cool trick that really works and contributes to the overall strangeness of the setting.
This was a lot of setup before even talking about the gameplay!
SOLID STRATEGIC GAMEPLAY
The basic gameplay structure is similar in many respects to Faster Than Light (FTL). See if you can follow along: The full narrative is uncovered over the course of five acts. Each act is about the length of a single run in FTL and, similarly to FTL, takes place across three sectors. Also similar is that each sector is depicted as a star map, with stars connected by different travel lines that you’ll navigate along. Each time you make a jump, hostile forces fill in behind you (sound familiar?) forcing you to keep pushing forward and not dally too long in the sector. This, of course, forces you to make some modestly tough routing choices.
All of this is pretty straightforward and very much like FLT. But there are some important departures and wrinkles in the formula. First of all, instead of each star system you visit being a single encounter, each star system contains upwards of five different locations, including planets, space stations, distress beacons, etc. It’s at these locations that the game’s narrative is slowly revealed through a combination of random encounters and scripted event sequences. The skills and talents of your crew, which you slowly build up over the course of an act, determine the event’s options and outcomes – which is a cool addition to the formula.
Another addition to the FLT formula is the ability to explore – very abstractly – planetary surfaces by sending down an away team. The whole away-team process is an exemplar of the game’s graphic design and style. You’ll watch the team’s progress, safe and sound from your battleship’s bridge, as through the eyes of AI drone viewing the world surface in topographic relief. Encounter icons flash up and resolve as your team makes progress towards a hopeful discovery or point of interest. It’s a cool sequence of effects with a little nail-biting tension as you watch your soldiers suffer attrition.
More broadly, the core of the gameplay from a strategic standpoint is about building up your ship’s capabilities (weapons, armor, launch craft, etc.) over the course of the act in order to defeat a final boss at the end, thus opening up the gateway to the next act/sector. Principally, you’ll need Neo-N (a fuel source) and high-tech OMNI “scrap” (why is it always scrap?) to expand your capabilities and keep moving forward. Thus, each encounter embodies a little risk-reward proposition of whether or not you might come out ahead. The encounters themselves range from humorous to downright horrific, the latter of which isn’t surprising given the whole “humanity on the brink of collapse” overtone. No more spoilers on this front.
One important note is that a recent patch to the game fixed an issue where only a fraction of the available encounters were actually getting used. I was going to complain that encounters were far too repetitive, but since the patch things feel much improved. With hundreds of supposed encounters and events, the goal is that no (or very few) encounters repeat across a given act. That’s good news, and my last act play session felt significantly more varied.
BRUTAL COMBAT
The last major part of the gameplay relates to combat. Combat is always a battle between two large battleships. The capital ships square off on opposing corners of a hex-grid. Combat proceeds through two main avenues: launch craft and capital ship weapons. By the way, “Battleship” isn’t quite the right word for the ships in Crying Suns. The ships are more like floating ship-fortresses merged with an aircraft carrier. Each battleship can contain dozens of squadrons of launch craft, from a swarm of tiny drones or fighters to a fleet of frigates or even cruisers-class ships. Based on your battleships upgrades and class, you can only field a certain number of squadrons at a time.
The combat plays out in pausable real-time (like FTL) as you issue orders and move your squadrons around the hex-grid to bring fire to the enemy. Tactical battle maps can contain asteroid to hide in, defensive structures, and other anomalies that add texture to the tactical layer. As squadrons take damage, you can pull them back to the docks, cycling them out for a freshly repaired squadron. During tough encounters how you manage your flow of squadrons to keep them being destroyed is critical to success, not just of the battle but the entire act.
The other aspect of combat has to do with your battleship’s massive weapon systems. There is a host of different weapon types, which can be used on opposing squadrons and/or against the opposing battleship directly. The effects of these weapon-systems are fairly varied and range from EMP-like weapons that stun enemy fleets to area-denial weapons or those designed to punch through battleship armor. Weapon systems are on variable cool-downs, so the pace and flow of battle often come down to timing squadron movements alongside coordinated weapon strikes.
All this said, the combat, particularly early on in each act, can be a little monotonous and repetitive. The easier combat encounters are fairly trivial with often only a single squadron and battleship weapon in the mix. However, by the end of an act, it’s a study in absolute chaos, with defeat often the result of letting the situation spiral out of control your control. Enemy ships can be reinforced by additional squadrons separate from their primary launch craft, meaning you are often outnumbered and outgunned and must rely on your clever ingenuity to win. I’m a fan of using a single stealth-capable squadron to sneak around my opponent’s craft in order to knock out the battleship’s systems. This will pull back any attackers onto the defensive, and so I’ll dive back into the shadows of an asteroid to hide and recover.
I quite like the dynamics and flow of combat in Crying Suns. On one had it isn’t as multi-layered as FTL’s combat, which requires you to juggle power settings, the position of officers, boarding parties, weapon systems, shields, etc. On the other hand, I appreciate Crying Suns’ greater emphasis on the spatial element of combat. Issuing a movement order gives you an indication, down to the tenth of a second, of long it will take, which is often of critical importance as you strive to stay ahead of your opponent’s weapons and ship deployments. All in all, combat is well-done and it does gets better and more challenging and varied the further into the game you go.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I haven’t made it to the end of the game yet – and so I can’t spoil the ending. At times, the overall quest feels a bit repetitive across the act’s, as the sector bosses all fall into a familiar pattern of “being the bad guy” and then “passing the blame” onto the next sector and its associated boss. I can’t tell if it’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek joke or a commentary on conventional villain-ism. Either way, it’s a minor point in an otherwise outstanding game.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with Crying Suns. The narrative and aesthetic atmosphere has pulled me in, often in subtle and surprising ways, and kept me motivated to make it to the end of the game. I can’t comment on the replayability too much yet, as I haven’t made it to the end of the game. Once you finish the game, you’ll be able to go back to prior acts and try them out with controlling different battleships (that you unlock after each act) in a hunt for achievements. I’m not sure if this will be enough to draw me back personally, but time will tell.
Overall, the game reinterprets the underlying FTL gameplay in ways that is immediately familiar and appealing but has enough differences to provide a fresh overall experience. Unlike FTL’s rather generic and forgettable narrative, Crying Suns delivers a solid dose of world-building married to an equally engaging strategic/tactical adventure. It’s worth a serious look.
TLDR: Crying Suns is a tactical space-adventure roguelike with an underlying structure similar to FTL. The game fuses an intriguing and dark narrative at the bitter end of humanity with gritty yet gorgeous pixel art. It’s an aesthetically rich and immerse experience with plenty of tough narrative and strategic choices to make along the way. While the combat can feel a tad repetitive at times, there are enough cliffhanger encounters and close battles to keep you deeply engaged when those moments arise. All in all, this is a wonderful little gem.
You Might Like This If:
- You are a fan of tactical roguelikes in the vein of Faster Than Light (FTL)
- You enjoy a gritty dark sci-fi atmosphere with big galactic mysteries
- You dig real-time (but pausable!) tactical combat
You Might Not Like This If:
- The chaos and randomness of uncertainty are anathemas to your preferences
- You have a fundamental problem with cloning vats
- Your name is Nate Lobos
Oliver has played over 12-hours of Crying Suns on a Clevo Notebook ( i7-6700HQ Skylake CPU, 16GB DDR4, GeForce GTX 980m). Oliver was provided with a Steam key by the developer.
Oliver is a perpetual dabbler of all-things gaming. This includes: game playing, game theory-crafting, game designing, game blogging, game criticizing, and of course game gaming. His interests span from strategy to FPS games, from tabletop miniature and boardgames to PC and mobile games. Oliver was first bitten by the 4X bug with Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, although other 4X favorites include Armada 2526, Starbase Orion (on iOS), and Age of Wonders III.