Jett: The Far Shore Review

In JETT: The Far Shore you play as Mei, the pilot of a little twin-seater craft that zooms along over the water, powered by SCRAMJETs. You, your co-pilot Isao, and a crew of researchers have been sent from your very Sino-Soviet-looking home world on a millennium-long journey to find a new planet to call “jiā”. The generation ship trundles off with the crew in hibernation and finds a mythical water planet which is where the gameplay takes place after it deploys the Jett scout craft and its intrepid crew of two.

The titular Jett is a nimble little thing, tough enough to take a bit of a kicking but not some bruiser that can take everything on the chin and shrug it off. Think more a Scorpion armoured fighting vehicle (it’s not a tank, it’s an AFV, tankers get very stressed if you call the small ones the wrong thing) from the ‘80s rather than the Challenger II Main Battle Tank, but with wings and a SCRAMJET (Supersonic Combusting RAMJET) engine pushing it about over the waves.

That engine is one of the many mechanics that need to be considered when you’re scooting about over the surface of your new home. Waves of vapour cool the engines and let you fly longer; give the engines a blip over particular plants and the beastie chasing you will give up— these game mechanics allow you to turn all the lovely flora and fauna to your advantage, and the idea of “punting” globules of goo at herds to make them chill out at least caused a smile After all, not everything looks at the Jett and thinks “oo, friend!”; in fact a lot of it looks at you and thinks “ooh, food!”

One minor bugbear is the UI: for example, early on in the game, right when the whole plants and beasties thing is being explained in quite excruciatingly obtuse ways, there’s a looming storm front that makes you pause on your journey but the naffing great timer telling you when it’s coming rather breaks the immersion. These kinds of events aren’t always intruded on by UI prompts or Isao the co-pilot wittering on, but it’s the times that he shuts the hell up that are special. Finding sandbanks, searching for salvage, just pottering about as your Jett skips over whitecaps and whooshes onward to the next objective, lively and reactive under your controls… those are the moments that make Jett: The Far Shore special.

The pain in this game isn’t physical, it’s emotional. There’s a sense of loss and longing running throughout it that makes the moments of joy all the more noticeable. Isao, Mei, and the rest of the crew knew when they set out on their journey that the family, friends, and thousands of onlookers the game shows you in the beginning would all be long dead by the time the expedition reached its destination.

Jett: The Far Shore is a simple yet beautiful game that makes space seem scary and dark, yet wonderful all at the same time. Not being one who has a complete set of working senses I can’t say what the sound is like. The visuals are well crafted, almost reminiscent of 16-bit titles like Virus on the Acorn Archimedes. One little trick I especially liked was the way in which while in conversation with Isao, the interior of the cockpit is seen as if Mei and Isao are looking at the inside of Jett’s canopy and the dark outside is causing the cockpit lights to illuminate them, allowing them to see themselves in semi-reflection; like reflections in the windscreen on a long car journey at night.