Jumplight Odyssey Preview

Jumplight Odyssey begins with an “all hands on deck” red-alert situation. You’ve just narrowly escaped the warmongering Zutopans, an unrelenting armada of aliens led by Admiral Voltan, but there’s little time to breathe. Your Starship, the SDF Catalina, suffered damage across multiple decks, and your crew is hurt, stressed, and busy trying to put out the fires. However, with your home planet destroyed, your only choice is to keep moving forward on a star-hopping adventure through the galaxy. Playing as Princess Euphora, everyone is looking to you for the next steps. If you can get your people to the mythical Forever Star, you might find safety once and for all.

Developed by League of Geeks, Jumplight Odyssey is a roguelite starship colony sim coming to Early Access on Steam very soon. Visually, it's sporting ‘70s anime vibes à la Star Blazers, and gameplay-wise, the team was inspired by well-known titles, such as FTL: Faster Than Light, RimWorld, and Two Point Hospital. As a fan of the latter two and all things sci-fi, I was excited to give this a look ahead of its Early Access launch, so let’s get right into it.

The early build that I played had two game modes available: Create New Odyssey and Euphora’s Odyssey. The former is more of a custom route, as you get to choose your Captain, Starship, playstyle, and more to personalise your adventure. However, that’s best saved until you’re more experienced with Jumplight Odyssey’s gameplay. New players are strongly encouraged to play through Euphora’s tale, which includes the tutorial. The game warns you that skipping it leads to a more challenging experience from the start, which I can vouch for, as I tried it out of curiosity and promptly got overrun by Zutopans. Lesson learned!

The tutorial begins shortly after you leave your home planet behind, and the first order of business is to get the SDF Catalina back to some semblance of normalcy. As your division officers give you a status report, you’ll observe the six different decks of the Starship: the Bridge, Promenade, Quarter Deck, Hangar, Lower Deck, and Engine Room. You can seamlessly shift up and down between each level by using the up arrow and down arrow, or the control key and your scroll wheel. The camera gives you an overhead perspective of each area, and everywhere you look, the ship is basking in an urgent red glow, but since you’ve put some space between your crew and the Zutopans, you can shift the Alert Level from Red Alert to Green Alert, giving the all-clear. For now, at least.

There’s a sense that you’re never safe in Jumplight Odyssey, as the Zutopans are always on your tail. When you look at the Star Map, you’ll see a countdown indicating how long you can stay in your current Star System before you need to escape again to a nearby one. You do this by Jumping, fueled by the titular Jumplight resource, allowing you to travel at warp speed to get away in a hurry. Every time you escape, the timer until the Zutopans reach you will reset. You’re basically on the run until you reach the Forever Star, and judging by the size of the Star Map, it will take quite some time to get there. The galaxy is randomly generated for each run, and there are plenty of biomes to explore along the way, offering various resources for you to use on your journey.

Whether it’s Metal or MediGel, managing resources is a main component of the game. One of the first things you learn in the tutorial is how to enter Build Mode to create a Greenhouse, which produces a steady supply of Biomass that Scientists synthesise into MediGel. You can check on the health of your supply chain by hovering over the resource icons at the top of your screen, providing you with a neat Trend number that lets you know how many units you’ve lost or gained in the last hour. In terms of the actual building process, designing rooms and placing objects worked very well. You’re unlikely to accidentally place an object you don’t want because the game requires you to confirm your building plan before anything is finalised, which helped me out multiple times. However, I often forgot to place Power Switches and Oxygen Generators, necessary items for obvious reasons; imagine my surprise when I got a notification that my crew members were asphyxiating due to low Oxygen. In my defence, this trial-and-error gameplay is arguably a hallmark of the genre. Plus, soon after my blunder, I discovered you can toggle a filter showing you the Oxygen levels of rooms and corridors.

Another key part of keeping your Starship running smoothly is managing your crew. You can see an overview of all members in the Manifest, which is accessible at Euphora’s chair on the Bridge, or you can select any character in the environment, bringing up their personal report and viewing the Manifest using the provided button. From there, you can take stock of your crew’s emotions, health, and work assignment. Each character belongs to one of four divisions — Science, Combat, Supply, and Engineering — and you can transfer crew members to any section that needs extra help. The game implements rotating shifts so that a portion of your crew is Off Duty while the rest are on On Duty. However, the alert options that I mentioned earlier can override the shift system. Yellow, Red, and Magenta Alerts put all your crew on duty, which is helpful when something goes awry. Currently, this variety of options doesn’t seem to go in the other direction, though, in terms of giving characters a break. There were a few times I had wounded Engineers and starving Scientists walking around and still performing their jobs! I felt so bad for them, but I couldn’t shift their status to Off Duty, so I could only watch them hobble around with reduced movement speed. On the bright side, there’s no doubt that you’ve got a dedicated team standing by your side!

It’s not all work and no play, though; your crew is living full lives on the SDF Catalina, complete with lovers, rivals, and family members. A character’s Emotional State is affected by their interactions and environment. For example, you have the option to Inspire your crew by sending Princess Euphora to socialise with them, improving their overall Morale. This all serves to raise Hope, which is represented by a pink bar at the top of your screen. Hope is your crew’s belief in you as their captain; it depletes whenever a character falls into despair or dies, but it increases whenever a Promise is fulfilled. Losing all Hope will end your run, so you’ll want to pay close attention to it. For Euphora’s Odyssey, your Promise is to rescue Civilians as you progress — the more survivors you bring back to the Starship, the more Hope you gain.

Which brings me to Away Missions. You have a couple of small space shuttles located in the Hangar that can be sent out on various missions, whether it be Salvage Opportunities for resources or Search & Rescue to look for surviving Civilians. Each mission has a timer, and if you’re like me, you might forget to launch them until the Zutopans are on your tail in four minutes, but you still need to send your crew out on a three-minute mission. Do you decide to cut it close, obsessively watch the spacecraft return, and speed away to the next Star System at the last minute? Of course, you do! And it’ll work… sometimes. Other times, your timing might be a bit too close, and you’ll find your lower deck breached by invaders, your Hope begins dwindling fast, and you’re debating if you should reload your last save. You could send your ship back on Red Alert to mobilise your Combat team, but it might not be enough. As the saying goes: you win some, you lose some.

Jumplight Odyssey is the kind of game that makes you feel like you’re the captain of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. The unique anime aesthetic and ship gameplay definitely help it stand out from the crowd. If you’re a fan of roguelites, starship simulators, and resource-management titles, keep an eye out for its launch into Steam Early Access on the 21st of August 2023.