Breathedge – Zero Punctuation

Oh sorry I guess I’ll fill in the gap with fourth-wall-breaking humour that over the course of the game gradually almost imperceptibly moves over the line from amusing to insufferable. But let’s not pull our dicks out before the striptease has even begun. Breathedge has much the same starting premise as Subnautica – you’re a spacer who’s minding their own business on a giant spaceship when it dies horrifically of not all being in one piece anymore, vomiting bits of itself all over fifteen to twenty hours of exploration-based gameplay and leaving you the only survivor with nothing to your name but a single escape pod and the ability to turn raw materials into complex machinery by tucking them under your scrotum for thirty seconds. So the traditional Subnautica gameplay structure ensues – you explore the immediate vicinity to gather basic materials to craft bigger oxygen tanks and better equipment that lets you explore further out from your starting position and find more exotic materials for even more complex equipment, and if there’s one thing Breathedge absolutely nails, it’s Subnautica’s majestic quality, as applied to space.

The lonely spectacle of the distant stars and planets is a symphony for the eyeballs and you really get a sense for the massiveness of everything and the sheer unforgiving distance between it all. You can basically see everywhere you’re going to go right off the bat, but you can’t get to most of it at first because you’re using some bubble gum on a straw instead of an air tank and you’ll suffocate before you can so much as get close enough for your farts to register on an extremely sensitive richter scale. So it’s definitely got that Subnautica-brand majestic beauty crossed with terrifying hostility like a sultry attractive woman with the face of a giant spider. And one certainly gets the satisfaction that comes of getting near the end of the craft-explorey loop when you finally build your endgame rocket flip flops or whatever that allow you to fully traverse the sandbox, at which point the sultry attractive woman still has the face of a spider but now you’re kind of into that because those pedipalps can do things to your prostate that will make your toes roll up like tubes of nearly empty toothpaste. So those are the parts that Breathedge gets right. Ooh, there was some subtext in that last sentence, wasn’t there, children, did you spot it?

The protagonist apparently refused to splash out on one of the better quality magic scrotum replicators because every tool he makes breaks down quicker than a germophobe at a bum licking contest and the majestic distances of space are all very well until you wear out your flip flops travelling to one of the rare non-stingy asteroids to draw some resources from only to find once you get there that your drill only has two uses left because apparently it’s just an electric whisk with a cheesy wotsit on the end. There are also way too many instances of having to craft a highly specific tool to get past one obstacle that never comes up again, especially in the second half of the game when Breathedge goes off its attention deficit disorder meds and forgets what kind of game it’s trying to be. You spend the majority of the game in the big survival sandbox gradually expanding your capabilities until you acquire a working spaceship. And my assumption was that this was the next stage of expansion, I was going to be able to cruise around the sandbox in my new penis extension, go back to all those mean asteroids that once bullied me and drive through a nearby puddle to humiliate them in front of their asteroid girlfriends.

But no. All you can do with your new ship is fast travel to another, entirely separate sandbox where there’s space combat mechanics all of a sudden, and introducing combat at this stage is like giving us a Snickers where all the peanuts are crammed into the last two bites although you don’t even have to fight them so it’s more like all the peanuts were put in a little ziploc bag and taped to the outside. Because all progress from this point forward is made by docking with one space station after another and going down some linear corridors until you find something that advances the story, except the game is still clinging by its fingernails to its identity as a crafting survival sandbox so you occasionally stop dead because some tool or component is required to proceed and you need to walk all the way back to your ship to craft it. And since we can’t go back to the first sandbox to hunt resources the game just has to awkwardly sprinkle some around the floor like a previous player ran through here with an overloaded shopping trolley taking the corners too quick. It’s rather baffling. It’s like the game realised it forgot to spread the plot around the whole game and had to load it all into the last two hours of it.

This might be related to Breathedge’s deliberate attempt at fourth-wall-breaking subversive comedy, which early on I thought worked well and gave it a humourous edge that made it stand out in the garbage trawler that is indie survival craft ’em ups, but while a fourth wall break is surprising and funny, all subsequent fourth wall breaks is just waving your comedy hammer at empty air. And the omnipresent fast-talking AI narrator who flits back and forth between doing a comedy motormouth bit and just talking too fast because they’re not a very good voice actor really starts to grate when they constantly point out all the gags. “Oh no, you can’t get past here without crafting another piece of arbitrary bullshit, the developers, who are me, who are writing these words that I’m saying, must be trying to pad the gameplay out, what a bunch of scamps. Oh look! It looks like something is about to happen! Oh my goodness! The thing we were all expecting didn’t happen the way we were expecting it, what a clever subversion on the part of the developers who are writing these words.” See, there’s poking fun at yourself, and then there’s poking a finger so far up yourself you can pull undigested Cheerios out of this morning’s breakfast.