Corpse of Discovery Review

Picture this: you’re a Major in the Corps of Discovery. Not the 1800s Jeffersonian, Lewis and Clark one, but a public company sending explorers out into the inky black void between the stars to see what is out there, provide value for the shareholders, and eventually make it back home to your family and a promised life of luxury.

Now this game is described by the developers as “a walking simulator with an occasional jetpack and deadly obstacles”. I think that is a little unfair, it’s much more than that, albeit short. I finished this one in six hours even with many a distraction and the occasional death. Ok, lots of deaths, many deaths, many many deaths. Whether it’s falling off things, mistiming a jump, standing in solar radiation or big black floaty eye wraith things looking at you, you will die a lot. The odd thing is, because of the way the game is played, death is nothing more than an inconvenience. You die, you wake back up, and trog on yomping your way around whichever planet accompanied by your faithful floaty white robot called A.V.A.

On each planet you wake up, are briefed by the company as to what they expect you to do (find anomalies to tag, discover and identify animals, find minerals etc) and are sent off to do your job. All with A.V.A “helping” you along, showing you where the targets are by marking them on your really rather intuitive Heads Up Display. Also on this HUD you will find things that A.V.A appears to either not see, or not understand. A piano, doughnuts, an Iced Latté, a globe showing a view of the inside of the bedroom of your children and others. A personal WTF moment was finding a message sattelite that displayed a pink background to a small dog that told bad jokes, the worst of which was “What is worse than finding a worm in your apple? Dying alone on a desolate planet”.

The base in which you start also has a message system that allows your family to contact you and send you heart rending messages begging you to come home along with your kids telling you little things about their day. A storehouse, a greenhouse and other facilities. I personally would not be able to cope there though as the coffee machine appears to be broken. As the game progresses; the missions go from planet to procedurally generated planet, and A.V.A starts to get really annoying in a GLADOS-esque way.

This game is not for everyone, the developers themselves explain this on the Steam page for it. It’s a nod to classic science fiction works like Perdido Street Station in digital form that explores the meaning of existence and what it is to be alive. I’m not going to tell you more about that since the narrative is pretty much all there is to this game. There’s some jetpack use, a lot of walking, huge chunks of surrealism and abstraction alongside some beautiful graphics, but a lot of players will not like this game.

I was one who did, it appealed to the sci-fi nut in me. The one who reads Alastair Reynolds novels and wishes the world of Altered Carbon was real and wants to buy Takeshi Kovacs a beer.
If you want something different, thought provoking and unusual, give this one a punt.