Lost in Deep Space: Shipbreaker - the miserable life of a worker in space

With such a job, he is unknown and extremely hard. He has to face the former industrial giants, but the practitioners themselves can only wear shabby clothes to barely make ends meet. This job is that of a shipbreaker (shipbreaker). Workers in this industry face dangerous and unstable working conditions with little training, safety equipment, and medical care, working with toxic chemicals, gas blowtorches, and large guns in an environment filled with asbestos and oil. Hammer to dismantle the 10,000-ton ship. The entire process takes 6 to 8 months, and up to a year for large tankers.

Moving cranes, falling steel plates, gas explosions and broken metal coils are all ongoing risks in the yard. Working 12 hours a day is the norm, but they receive poverty line wages, as low as $2 a day.

This dangerous work is performed by migrant workers and poor young people from poor rural areas of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. Most shipbreakers have never seen the sea before being hired by labor brokers, who transport them from villages to shipyards. Living in very crude accommodation next to the compound, often without clean drinking water or proper sanitation, workers often never visit the local city, even for tourism.

And this job is an indispensable part of the world's huge shipbuilding industry.

With the booming development of private aerospace, careerists such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos continue to advocate private aerospace companies as the only alternative to traditional state-owned aerospace. There are reasons to believe that in some future, even if interstellar travel will enter our lives in some way, it will be just another place where working-class people are exploited by the giants of capital.

"Dark Space: Shipbreaker" takes place in such a future. The solar system has been colonized by the giant corporation LYNX. And Earth is a ragtag place abandoned by the wealthy and plagued by civil strife, extreme poverty, food shortages, and climate change. As a native of the Earth, the player plays the role of a blue-collar shipwrecker, dismantling huge abandoned starships from all over the galaxy for LYNX in exchange for the opportunity to leave the Earth.

The core gameplay of "Dark Space: Shipbreaker" is a first-person, sandbox-style zero-gravity space simulator. Use a suite of tools such as modular cutting torches, gravity tethers, and grapple guns to salvage ships for raw materials. Use your helmet-mounted scanner to transform each ship into a translucent frame made of key materials and protruding support structures. Then use a welding gun to melt these supports, and then break the entire huge starship into small pieces for recycling like a puzzle toy in exchange for a small profit.

But just like reality, players should also pay attention to their own dangers when playing. Flammable fuel tanks, electrified batteries, antifreeze coolant tanks, small nuclear reactors - any of these items are extremely valuable, but one wrong operation of your laser welding gun can trigger a huge domino effect, and continuous huge explosions will Destroy the entire hull instantly and turn you into ashes.

Oh, and don’t forget you’re in space, which also means randomly opening airlocks or using a laser welder to cut around. A vacuum implosion will occur, which is powerful enough to shatter you.

While it is common to die while completing your shipbreaking job, there is no need to worry as the player is even deprived of the right to die. If the player accidentally dies in space, they will be immediately resurrected as a clone, and then have to pay the cost of replicating themselves. In other words, death is a costly errand, not a game over. The real game is over when the money is gone.

The art of the game adopts the heavy and bright style of classic golden age science fiction, with a strong industrial feel of spaceships and a beautiful space background. Players float in zero gravity and connect along the bolts of abandoned sunken ships. Slits cut through the massive hull and witness a massive starship fall apart as it is torn from the inside out by several strategically placed gravity tethers. This process itself has an inexplicable Zen feel. It's like shucking corn.

(Although this corn may explode in your face)

It must be admitted that "Dark Space: Shipbreaker" is a challenging slow-paced game. Like a zero-gravity surgery, players use a scalpel to peel away the ship's thick outer shell to gain access to the ship's delicate metallic guts. A scanner in the helmet displays a schematic of the ship, including its skeletal ribs, and weak points of support, and players must carefully consider every move.

Everything you do conforms to Newtonian physics. Lassoing a piece of the boat that is heavier than you will move you towards it when you pull it, whereas anything lighter will be completely different, a really large piece of boat will be pulled with a small but constant force by the tow rope, Very slowly move the huge panel away from the hull. The game undoubtedly has a realistic and accurate physics simulation system.

But as mentioned above, shipbreaking is dangerous. Accidentally cut into a pressurized chamber and it will depressurize violently, creating an explosion that will destroy everything. Instead, the safest method is to sneak in through the airlock and safely depressurize the compartment from the inside to resolve the issue.

At a certain point, this game turns into an ancient tomb exploration game. Players need to always pay attention to their oxygen levels and plan their way forward. Maximize profits on every move, after all your tools, accommodation and spacesuit are not free.

If players can accept a very slow and very soothing game rhythm. This game is a rare masterpiece. Its story background full of vicious metaphors and brightly colored and beautiful art style are very attractive. Ironically, the game process wrapped under the vicious shell of capital is a very unique and calm experience, with little excitement and combat. It's just a matter of cutting a spaceship into pieces and throwing all those pieces into a giant furnace, but it's all surprisingly focused. Just like clearing away a messy table.