Deep Sky Derelicts: Definitive Edition

Genre: Turn-Based Card RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Deep Sky Derelicts, first released on PC in 2018 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2020, is a Turn-Based Card RPG that has players commanding a crew of scavengers in space, picking their way through derelict spacecraft fighting off space creatures and rival scavengers while hunting for salvage and possibly information about a fabled alien ship.

The visuals in this game use hand-drawn 2D images with a comic book style to them, with a dark color palette and grungy artwork. These visuals unfortunately have the effect of making human characters all look somewhat interchangeable, as it’s not easy to distinguish at a glance one grungy dull-colored space suit from another grungy dull-colored space suit. At the very least this game boasts a solid soundtrack, with great moody synthesized tunes like Even the Sweetest Pain Will Fade and Fury and the Oblivion.

As for the gameplay, there’s a lot going on here, and sadly the game does a poor job of explaining everything to the player. Players will be exploring a gridlike spacecraft looking for points of interest, with each action eating up precious energy, putting a time limit of sorts on everything you do in your expedition – each move you make, each turn in battle, and so on. Players can use up a bit more energy to scan a wider area to see if anything interesting pops up, or spend a bit to gain advantages in battle, but must weigh the benefits of doing so against their dwindling reserves.

In combat, things shift over to Card RPG gameplay, where each character in your party maintains a small deck of various abilities to attack enemies and assist allies. I felt myself getting extremely frustrated with this combat – given the small size of each character’s deck, it seemed inexplicable that absolutely vital cards seemed to only rarely come up. When roughly half of all characters’ cards are attack cards and an entire round of combat goes by with no attacks popping up, I start to wonder if the random number generator behind the scenes is being particularly stingy with me, or if there’s something else going on under the hood I’m not aware of.

However, the problem goes deeper than that. Deep Sky Derelicts is extremely stingy with providing information to the player. I couldn’t find any way to check things as simple as a character’s maximum shield capacity in combat, or more information about what a specific status effect does. This seemed like the sort of thing where you might tap on an icon using the touchscreen to see an explanation or something to that effect, but this game has no touchscreen support.

It’s bad enough for a game to be stingy with explanations and withholding information, but for a game to do so with a high difficulty and a clock ticking on your every move… I found myself losing patience with this game very quickly. I don’t mind games that are punishingly tough, as long as I know why I’m doing poorly and how to correct the problem… or at the very least, as long as I know where I can find the information I need to do so. Deep Sky Derelicts certainly has a lot of interesting and complex mechanics that could make for a fun game, but it simply does not seem interested in ensuring players understand just what the heck is going on, and very interested in punishing you for that lack of understanding.

As a result, I can see this being a game that could be engaging for players with the patience to not only figure out this game’s mechanics, but actively seek out tutorials for the game online and pour over them to learn how to play the game at even a basic level. I do not have that sort of patience, nor do I believe most players are. As a result, I expect most of them will see this game the way I do – a frustrating, punishing exercise in futility.

tl;dr – Deep Sky Derelicts is a Turn-Based Card RPG where players take the role of a team of scavengers fighting enemies and searching for salvage on derelict spacecraft. While the game clearly has some intricate gameplay mechanics, the way it refuses to explain those mechanics and hides important information all while hitting you over the head with time limits and a high difficulty level makes this game extremely frustrating, and something that only those dedicated to studying how to play it will be able to enjoy.

Grade: C-

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