412 hours. That's the amount of life (give or take poop breaks) I've spent playing FTL: Faster Than Light (brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department), a roguelike-like [sic] outer-space video game where the goal is to micro-manage a spaceship through eight sectors of galaxy and defeat the big bad boss at the end. There's also some nonsense about a Federation and rebels but that part is largely irrelevant.
Roguelike, in case that's a new term for you (or similar to me you occasionally need a vocabulary refresher due to antihistamine use or possibly gin), is a subgenre of RPGs (you can look that one up yourself) featuring procedurally-generated levels (meaning the map changes every time you play), turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permadeath (meaning if your character dies then you have to start the entire game over). Video game critics and to a lesser extent video game players love to throw around the term roguelike, much as NPR gets a tingle in their dingle every time they get to say Attorneys General. However, FTL (and after 412 hours we're on a first-name basis) is only roguelike-like [still sic] in that it has procedurally-generated levels and permadeath but is neither turn-based (opting instead for a pause-time mechanic) nor tile-based, which nets it a solid 50% match and apparently we're rounding up.
You may find yourself thinking "But how can you spend 412 hours playing a video game?" which immediately tells me you haven't played World of Warcraft and possibly have an actual social life. The answer to your frankly impertinent question is replay value, aka replayability, aka "Fuck you I'm still having fun", which FTL has in spades due to its large number of crew species, spaceship capabilities, and event encounters, on top of which after 400+ hours IT IS STILL HARD and I lose more often than I win. No matter how well you think you're doing the entire run can be devastated by one bad roll of the RNG. This has happened to me countless times (in that for my own sanity I've chosen not to count them):
I've had crew members mind-controlled while on an enemy ship, preventing me from teleporting them back before the enemy leapt away;
I've sent crew to the medbay only to have the enemy hack the room, locking the exits and killing everyone inside;
I've vented oxygen from my ship to kill off boarders only to have them break my door controls, preventing me from sealing things back up; or
They've set fire to my ship and then broken my door controls, preventing me from venting the fire into space. (Yes, a lot of this game is door-management.)
But despite the frequent run-ending turns of fate I have found great joy in managing the evolution of numerous vessels from barely-functional babbies to devastating powerhouses brimming with weapons and crew and capabilities and I still feel great delight when I do win… which I have done with every variant of every ship in the game… well, on normal difficulty anyway.
That said, being single and living alone during the COVID-19 pandemic means I've possibly spent a biiiit too much time playing FTL, so perhaps I'll move on to something else (suggestions welcome and encouraged). But for the many hours of fun and engagement and depression-avoidance and occasional profuse swearing it has provided me, I say this to FTL: I don't just roguelike you, I roguelike-like you.
[Photo: Crystal Cruiser layout B roasting bugs on a Mantis Fighter]
