In need of a Darkest Dungeon fix, I decided to try Deep Sky Derelicts, our first roguelike deck builder turn-based RPG! (I love genre-bending!). It resembles Darkest Dungeon on a first look, but do they have more similarities than art-style? And more importantly, is it a good title? Let’s find out.
Introduction
Deep Sky Derelicts is a roguelike RPG developed by Snowhound Games, a small studio from Finland, established in 2015. The game started its shelf life on November 2017 as an early access title, and received its final release on September 26, 2018. Two DLCs followed, New Prospects on May 30, 2019, and Station Life on December 12, 2019, that added more content and a few quality of life changes to the game.
The game’s Definitive Edition was released on March 2020, containing the base game and its DLCs. It received ports for the Nintendo Switch, the PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One.
The Narrative
In Deep Sky Derelicts, you control a trio of stateless scavengers that receive an irresistible offer from the sub-governor of this space sector: find the fabled mothership, a mythical vessel, to gain full galactic citizenship, allowing your crew to live an easy life on a Mirror World. To win this prize, you must retrieve location data found on the derelicts, ancient spaceships that, due to unknown reasons, were abandoned and left to decay for hundreds of years.
Besides the monsters, space pirates, alien species, hostile service robots, decaying infrastructure and space anomalies, you will also face rival scavengers, since the sub-governor extended his proposal to other groups of scavengers.
Like most titles in which content is procedurally generated, the narrative has a hook, not a plot. To make up for this, the developers created a good number of peculiar characters that will randomly appear on each derelict spaceship. A man trying to become a machine, a woman cannonball, a taxi driver searching for his client, scientists studying a machine, a scavenger loudly eating candy, you name it. However, the abnormal A.I.s take the spotlight, as they seem lifted from a Doctor Who episode or from a Douglas Adams novel.
It’s a pity the game doesn’t have a proper plot, as I would like to know more about this universe, the mirror worlds and their apartheidian policies. Unfortunately, it will only happen if a sequel is ever produced, and right now Snowhound Games is busy with their new game, Potion Tycoon, that just recently was put on early access.
Presentation
From the screenshots and artwork, you already know this is a beautiful game. It has a wonderful art-style similar to Darkest Dungeon, reminiscent of the works from Mike Mignola. The colors, the shades, the bold lines, that “carved out” look, it’s great.
Characters, enemies, portraits, backgrounds, everything has a “worn out” appearance that you expect from decayed spaceships and people who make a leaving scavenging them. Unfortunately, there isn’t much movement going on, as all exploration is done through a map, while conversations and battles are depicted through still panels. I think it’s a stylish choice that reinforces the comic book aesthetic the developers were going for.
The soundtrack is very atmospheric and helps to establish a creep and desolate mood. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have enough tracks, so be prepared to listen to the same songs over and over.
Mechanics
As the game begins, you will need to build a team of three characters. Choose their names, their portraits, professions, a personality modifier, and finally, give your team a name. Or let the game’s RNG take care of everything for you, it’s your choice. The profession determines how your characters’ attributes will grow, and their skill tree.
Finally, select a difficulty. On normal, you have multiple saves for a game, and it’s possible to load if everyone ends dead. On hardcore, there is only one save file per game and if everyone dies, the game auto-saves and you must restart everything.
The gameplay is divided between a space station called Deep Sky Station and the derelicts. The space station acts as a hub to the different spaceships you will explore, besides being a place to buy and sell items and equipment, recover health, acquire side quests (called contracts). You can also recruit new scavengers if you ever feel someone isn’t performing well and must be kicked out from your party and lose the prospect of having a better life.
The DLCs add random events to the station, like special vendors or fights against other scavengers and pirates. It also adds a crafting system that produces better items and implants for your characters.
Exploring the derelicts is done exclusively through a grid map, each space representing a different room. Moving through them will cost you energy, and your characters will die if you run out of it. Fortunately, you can buy or find reserve cells and transform anything you find into energy (except for quest items).
Most rooms will be empty, but sometimes you will find items, enemies or NPCs. I would’ve liked if there was more to see on each room, but if you think you’re exploring spaceships that were scavenged for hundreds of years, it makes sense that they are so empty. To mitigate the waste of time, it’s possible to spend energy to scan areas around you, showing which places have something of interest and detecting traps, so you can try to disarm them.
If you play with the DLCs, you can use three types of movement: stealth, that allows you to ambush enemies but costs more energy; normal, which won’t give you any benefit; and dash, which will cost far less but will let you be ambushed every time you find an enemy. It makes exploration faster, as you have better control over your energy consumption, lessening the number of times you have to go back to the station to buy more energy.
There is also an Arena mode, in which you fight ten battles with a newly created party. It’s a fun mode if you enjoyed the combat and wants to test your resourcefulness.
Battle System
Battles are turn-based, and use a deck-building system, in which each action is represented by a different card. You start off with a fairly limited set of cards, but you can grow it by acquiring new equipment and gaining new abilities.
Characters will draw three cards at the beginning of the battle, taking a new one each turn. Cards will depict attacks, area attacks, attacks with special effects, buffs, debuffs, defensive cards… there are a lot of different options to accommodate different play styles. You can even use random environmental cards if you don’t have anything useful on your hand.
A positive aspect is that by selecting a card and hoovering the mouse over an enemy will show how much damage that will deal, a welcome feature for a game that every move is important. The game also shows the turn order, another positive aspect of its UI.
An interesting aspect of the game is the use of shields. Shields protect a character’s health points by absorbing damage. Only after they are depleted it’s possible to hurt someone’s HP, unless the attack has a piercing chance, when it bypasses the shield’s protection directly damaging a character’s life. Fortunately, you can recharge your shield during battles, a critical defensive move, as there is no way to recover a character’s HP on a derelict (the DLC has a treatment kit field, but it restores up to 30% of HP). After you leave a battle, they wlll also be completely recharged.
Beware that fighting also consumes energy, with every character consuming 10 energy during their turns (add 15 to that if you choose to use environmental cards), so it’s possible to die mid-battle if you run out of energy.
Fight enough times and your characters will level up, increasing their attributes and acquiring access to new abilities through skill points. At level four, you can select a specialization that will give a character a second set of skills to decide and change how certain attributes increase. It’s not bound by a character’s profession, so anyone can have any specialization. However, it’s wise to pick between compatible ones, maximizing character growth.
The game’s max level is 10, which you will probably reach before the final dungeon. If you feel you made poor choices on the skill front, you can reallocate them for a fee.
I liked the battle system, and I think it’s the reason most people stay with the game until its end. Combat can become a bit slow later on, as some enemies have ridiculous amounts of shield, but if you play your cards well, your characters will compensate by dealing lots of damage. There are a lot of options that I didn’t talk about, like recycling cards, forcing enemies to drop cards on their hands, lethal attacks, damage over time… yes, there is a lot to explore here, yet it never feels overcomplicated nor clogged with useless options.
Finally, at the cost of repeating myself, I appreciated the use of static panels to depict attacks. It looks stylish and captures the comic book style a lot better than simple animations.
Final Thoughts
I liked Deep Sky Derelicts, but I have a hard time recommending it as it has a slow progression, with exploration that many times lead to nothing, with some fun fights here and there. It’s also a beautiful title with a great atmosphere, has some fun quirky characters and unusual situations, and an easy-to-grasp deck-building system. It also feels barebones if you don’t buy the DLCs.
Is it Darkest Dungeon in space? No, it isn’t. In Darkest Dungeon, you control a scholar who manages different teams of adventurers. The gameplay loop necessarily involves dropping older, damage characters, in favor of newly recruited ones that don’t have so many psychological problems. There’s also the affliction system, that will leave you anxious every time you enter a map.
Deep Sky Derelicts has no punishment for entering a spaceship, nor does it incentivize you to keep changing characters. Yes, it’s possible to reform your crew like the Ship of Theseus, but unless you want to change something that’s not working on your party or try something new, there is no gain for doing it. The game is more focused in acquiring new loot and selling it, something not so prominent in Darkest Dungeon. Sure, Deep Sky Derelicts can be a hard game at its beginning and sometimes its RNG feels unfair, but it won’t crush your spirit and it never feels excessively unjust.
Final opinion: recommended if you enjoy the fight-loot-sell-repeat loop, otherwise, it won’t offer you anything special. In any case, buy the two DLCs, otherwise the game becomes too barebones for my taste.