Superluminal Vagrant Twin
April 2, 2024
superluminal vagrant twin by cej pacian is a space sim in the form of a text adventure. pacian is also the author of gun mute, an experiment in applying the verbs of a first person shooter to a text adventure.
such attempts to translate various other genres to IF fascinate me. which mechanics translate, and which don’t? what stories can you tell with them? superluminal vagrant twin is an open world space exploration game. you’re five million credits in debt, and you can’t get your twin back until you pay it off.
your main quest is to get inside hardshell, a mysterious metal & flesh sphere enclosing a star system. you need a variety of tools in order to accomplish this, and those tools cost money. the game can be boiled down to two challenges: you gotta find these tools, and you gotta get the cash to afford them.
there are a lot of ways to do this! i saw two inroads on my playthrough, and i’m pretty sure there’s a third i missed. outside of these routes inside hardshell, everything seems to be achievable every playthrough.
superluminal vagrant twin an exercise in breadth before depth. many things you’d expect to be text adventure mainstays have been sacrificed at this altar, including map geography (!) and the ability to examine things (!!!).
still, the writing’s quite good. its sparseness serves it well. as i was playing i kept lists of my favorite little bits of dialogue and description. every location has a line or two of description for it and the things within it. one of my favorites comes early on:
A fuel jockey orbits lazily - tentacles trailing, bladders swollen with deuterium.
similarly, there’s a little line on someone’s appearance and bearing whenever you talk to them:
Hydraulics whirr and hiss as his features assume a smile.
just enough description to be evocative, to leave you with an impression. that’s good, because very few characters are fleshed out enough to be anything more than that.
there’s a lot i want to talk about with this game, but it’s worth playing for yourself first. even if you’ve reached the ending, there’s bound to be stuff you missed, so i’m splitting the rest of this review into a bunch of little spoiler sections. click at your own risk!
odd jobs (click to reveal)
you start the game off doing some odd jobs to get cash: bringing cargo pods into orbit, and delivering packages. bringing pods into orbit is the kind of thing that’d maybe be fun if there was a more tactile method of input. as it stands, it just feels like busywork. you can only type take pod launch land take pod so many times.
package delivery, meanwhile, is one of the best bits of design in the game. you’re given a package and told to deliver it to someone on a particular planet. this is introduces you to new places you can go, gives you some much-needed early cash, and characterizes the recipients a little bit more. it’s brilliant.
…but you can infinitely repeat your delivery runs if you wait long enough, which ruins the immersion and makes them turn stale. i understand that these jobs need to be infinitely repeatable — it’s a safety net against bankruptcy-induced softlocks. still, i recommend not repeating the delivery runs unless you really, really have to.
exploration (click to reveal)
mapping is no longer a concern. every planet has only two “rooms”: its orbit and its surface. you have a single navigation command: jump to <planet>. if you know a planet’s name, you can jump there (with one narratively important exception.)
this makes every bit of dialog an opportunity to introduce a new location. if someone says they got an awesome shirt from planet x, you can jump to planet x! you might even be able to buy a shirt there. it’s a really good way to slowly expand the radius of the player’s world.
navigating by name also allows for some pretty neat puzzles around inferring the existence of certain planets. i’m of two minds on these. on the one hand, it makes me feel really clever when i realize where i’m meant to go. on the other hand, these are basically riddles, and they run into a lot of the same issues. it can be pretty frustrating if you can’t figure out the intended pattern, or if you miss a step in it.
fortunately, you don’t have to visit any of these inferred planets to complete the game, but some of them are required for 100% completion.
trading (click to reveal)
one of the main economic engines is trade. buy something from one person and sell it to someone who needs it. this is a fun puzzle. the game tracks the potential buyers you’ve met, making it an exercise in lateral thinking far more than memory. it feels incredible to come across the right buyer for the thing you’ve had in your cargo hold for ages.bounty hunting (click to reveal)
bounty hunting is another way of making money. you get a list of names from an imago republic official. if you have a weapon and come across someone on the list, you can arrest them. i expected this to be Morally Complex, but it’s hard to build Moral Complexity on the backs of characters you barely interact with. as far as i can tell, each person on the list only gets four opportunities to speak:
- talk to them (before arrest)
- while arresting them
- talk to them (while they’re in your custody)
- while handing them over
you can paint a nuanced picture in that small a space. i don’t think this game’s interested in that. when you arrest someone, they almost never get the last word. the official almost always rebuts any claims to innocence.
perhaps there’s some very subtle commentary here. if you’ve completed every trade, you’ve committed at least one crime, and yet here you are, arresting people. (i don’t think this is intentional, but the reading does exist.)
100% completion (click to reveal)
getting 100% completion was kind of a slog, and it all comes down to exploration. if you forget to note a planet when it’s first mentioned, circling back to find it can be a pain. it doesn’t help that the 100% completion ending isn’t a very satisfying endpoint when compared to rescuing your twin.
(advice for any player stuck on the last handful of things: make sure you’ve hit every planet in the solar system. i spent ages trying to figure out what i was missing until i realized i had forgotten about neptune.)
i recommend superluminal vagrant twin. exploring its little universe is delightful. i love the world its various tiny pieces trace out. however, i’m not sure i recommend doing everything it has to offer. better to end on a high note then to grind out the last lousy points.