Crying Suns (PC, 2019)

Some times I like to theorize a bit around the development process of a game I am playing. Did they have a good story and borrowed some good gameplay? Or did they enjoy the gameplay so much from another game they wanted to create a story for it?

It doesn't matter when the end result is as entertaining as Crying Suns, but it is clear that they were heavily inspired by another great game - Faster Than Light (FTL) - when creating this one.

I spent around 50+ hours dying in Faster Than Light back when it came out, probably the most fun I've had failing in any game in a long time. FTL is notorious for its difficulty, and even though it could be downright mean, the gameplay was so well designed the thought of "just another try" was never far away in your mind.

While this isn't a review on FTL, it's worth mentioning this since Crying Suns takes a lot of what makes it fun from that game. What it adds that gives it its own identity is a different kind of combat system and a story (the story in FTL was a bare bone reason to move your ship ahead). 

The story in Crying Suns has other good inspirations, the first that came to mind when playing it was the Empire- and Foundation-series by Isaac Asimov. The game starts out with you being reincarnated as Ellys Idaho, space admiral in the Imperial Fleet. Apparently the original Ellys Idaho died somewhere, and you are woken up as the spare (if you've followed the AppleTV+ series Foundation you get the idea). You meet your new BFF Kaliban who is an OMNI, a certain type of robot that you will soon learn helps humans around the galaxy with absolutely everything. It also seems Kaliban is the only working OMNI left in the galaxy, leaving the humans completely helpless and dying.

You set off together with a crew of characters that you will quite come to like through your run. Your task is to find out what has gone wrong and, if possible, fix it. You do this by traversing space in a huge battle ship and directing your armada in combat with a lot of different enemies. Everywhere you go you have a chance of encountering something; most often something that wants to kill you, but also people in need of help and objects to explore. Just like in FTL I find that the Universe is a harsh place, you're often tricked and trapped by people who pretend to be nice, and you're almost better off becoming the same asshat everyone else seems to be.

You will find yourself really struggling for resources quickly, especially the fuel that allows you to travel around, and turn every dime (or scrap as its called in this game) to make it just another jump, to hopefully better pastures. But the better pastures never come. Around every corner lurks evil and danger. 

It's a good thing evil and danger is so much fun to fight then. As mentioned Crying Suns employs a completely different battle style from FTL, in which you control space ships in real-time on a grid. The combat area can be affected by all sorts of additional hazards like turrets or meteor strikes, and the enemy ship of course has battle ships and weapons of its own.

There is a lot to tinker with and keep track off here, there are many different ship types, skills and weapons to keep you alive and the enemy dead. Fortunately you can always choose to pause combat to issue commands and overall the combat is well designed and very fun - I never grew tired of it. 

I did find that on normal mode I had to scrounge a bit too much for resources, which took away from the fun of exploring the story. In FTL this wasn't an issue since there wasn't any story worth exploring, just the challenge of getting to the end. But the story in Crying Suns is genuinely engaging. While there are encounters that are clearly randomly generated, I only came across duplicates two or three times on a full run, which is impressive. At the end of each zone you continue the story, and you also have a chance of encountering story parts within the zones.

Crying Suns succeeds with a lot of things; it has a story worthy of its own sci-fi series (if this gets printed I am interested!), while nothing spectacular and in certain areas cliché and predictable, it still explores a lot of themes that I personally find fun and interesting. It has a well designed and thought through gameplay, both when travelling through the zones and when battling through any of the very many battles you will encounter.

Visually every character is represented by a fairly rudimentary pixel creation, and space is littered with planets, space stations and battle ships that you visit in a framed style. It suits the game and works well for the gameplay and almost gives the game the feeling of a visual novel.

The world building and character exploration is just deep enough to fit the story and I would've loved to know more or be able to dig deeper. But that would've been another game. It's always a balance between game and story and overall I find Crying Suns has made smart choices. As mentioned however I could see this being further explored in a series of books that I wouldn't mind reading.

If I had to nitpick over anything its that you can't choose to engage in combat yourself, which left me  frustrated a handful of times. When I was tricked out of scrap by a space station I was flying past, I wanted to destroy it. But I just had to accept it and move on. Maybe Ellys Idaho has a stronger moral code than I do, luckily for the people on that space station. When I came across some pirates that chose to bribe me to let them be, I had to accept it (some times you can take the bribe and attack, but I came across an option where I couldn't). This is barely even an issue however.

I played about a third of the game on normal before I decided to enjoy it on easy. Easy is almost too easy, but at least it allowed me to not stress and to have the resources to go out on a limb here and there which in the end I think was a more enjoyable experience. It took me just over 14 hours to complete my first run, and after that you have replay value in trying to beat the game with different battle ships and trying to find out more parts of the main story (or get a different ending, there seemed to be three).

If you enjoy rogue-likes, space battles, sci-fi or just loved FTL I can really recommend checking this game out.