Every game of Faster Than Light is an epitaph; a dirge sung of the lives lost on your ship’s journey through the stars. One game (which can last anywhere from ten minutes to an hour) might have your c🅷rew picked apart one at a time by bad luck and worse decisions, while other games might see them to the end of their journey before your ship is blasted apart by rebels or aliens or robots. How your crew might perish will change from game to game, but one thing will always stay the same: They are, eventually, going to die, and there’s a good chance ♔it’s going to be your fault.

On paper, FTL is essentially a spaceship management game. On your way across the game’s eight sectors, your lone ship and its crew--all of which can be named, adding additional investment in their survival--must jump between dozens of star systems, leaping from event to event and prompting random encounters along the way. When you need to fight, and you’ll need to fight often, combat is engrossing and strategic, with different parts of your ship requiring power, and different weapons leading to different strategies as you face different c♔hallenges.

Changing weapons, upgrading systems, and 🌸purchasing enhancements can completely change how your ship functions, and the openness of the system makes it so no one build is inherently better than another, allowing for plenty of experimentation and trial and error. This, obviously, means dying and starting over. Over🔯 and over again.

If that sounds cruel, that’s because iꦦt is. FTL can be downright mean at times, punishing your curiosity and damning your lust for exploration. But it’s here, when things are bleakest, that success feels the sweetest. Though it’s brutal, and mean, and sometimes needlessly so, it’s never truly unfair, and though things may sometimes go from good to your entire ship bursting into flames in a matter of moments, it’s never done so with an unjust hand.