The UFO 50 Diaries: Pilot Quest

Stinkremental

Having recently subjected myself to the agony of Tower Wizard (fun game, no shade), not to mention the dozens of hours spent in flagship offering Cookie Clicker (again, fun game, no shade), I have to say I’m not really a massive fan of incremental games.

They do something awful to my brain that makes me hyperfixate without gleaning any meaningful joy from the time spent. A passive experience, running in the background while you do something else. Crunching your resources for the eternal drip feed of ever increasing numbers. It’s a bit crap, if i’m being honest. But it's crap because I don’t think it was ever meant to be something you engage with independent of other elements.

I’m reminded of the village building subgame in the original Bravely Default, itself a sort of incremental game designed to exist quietly in the background as you go about your adventures. Drawing us back to the matter at hand, for Pilot Quest it is that adventure that comes to define the success of this particular title, and the incremental mechanics that somewhat dampen it.

Initially Pilot Quest is a game defined by the amount of time you spend not playing it. The bulk of the adventure is blocked off to you until you start engaging with its incremental mechanics: flinging your Yo-Yo at a big crystal to gather ‘moon drops’, which you then feed to a jolly tree to grow plants that will generate more moon drops. Leaving the game to venture into other titles in the collection will generate these moon drops in your absence, but, rather smartly, there is a sharp cap to what you can store without upgrades. Upgrades that require you to engage with the other half of the game.

The real adventure comes once you’ve hit those first few milestones. Gather enough moon drops to generate an ingot. Use that ingot to build a thriving meat business. With a juicy hunk of flesh in hand, finally, you are allowed out into the wilds, to see out the parts of your crashed ship that will allow you to escape.

There is a time limit. Taking damage reduces that time by an alarming amount. Get caught in a vicious cycle and you die, returning to base empty handed. Hang on. Is this just Minit?

The juxtaposition of these two concepts of time is rather clever. Waiting for things to happen and trying to jam as many things into a tight window has this interesting rhythm where one requires the other, and vice versa.

To get back out there, you need more meat, but you need to wait for the shop to restock, and for the requisite moondrops to be available to make your purchase. In order to upgrade your processes, and your survival chances out in the wilds, you need to put yourself out there in the danger zone.

Pilot Quest starts out like the lawful good version of those old energy-as-currency facebook games. Its core loop is an interesting divide between active engagement and a bizarre encouragement to go and play other games in the collection.

Its a game that understands how offputting failure can be, designed so that you are never really able to go full tilt whenever you fail to achieve a goal, because in most case you have to wait before you can head back in.

I’m in two minds about this game. On the one hand, I really appreciate how quickly the incremental elements start to fall by the wayside. I’m only a couple of hours into the experience and already have all the upgrades, the rest is now up to me. It takes that exploration loop from Planet Zoldath (remember that game? From like nine months ago?) and grips it in the terror of an ever ticking clock.

But at the same time, with enough familiarity the game becomes a sequence of increasingly frustrating gauntlets. Although there is a slight roguelike-y feel to proceedings, the world itself is a fixed point each time you return. A world full of frustrating little niggles.

Dead ends. Disorienting colour combinations. Its quite hard to navigate. I really don’t think its fair that some enemies have the ability to knock whole minutes off your timer, especially given how limited your mobility is during combat.

Especially in light of the great gamefeel and world design of previous entries in the collection it does feel a bit stinky by comparison. I think another six months in the incubator to tighten things up and this could have been an alltimer. As it stands, it's a pretty good game, marred only slightly in execution.