There is something about anachronistic sci-fi games that I find incredibly compelling, but I didn’t realise that, for all my love for games like Duskers, Fabular and The Long Journey Home, what I really needed was a dungeon crawler dressed up in a little weirdo, ultra-capitalist future… Remote Control is exceptional.
In Remote Control you’ll (get this) remote control human proxies and guide them around a mysterious, dangerous and derelict spaceship. The way that you interface is amazing, and this is where the anachronism comes in — both real world and in-universe — because you’ll be typing in commands similar to old text adventure games, and exploring the ship like a Wizardry game, as a dungeon crawling labyrinth. Yes, that does mean there’s a little reading, yes, that does mean there’s a fair bit of rotating and backtracking, but… oh jeez… yes, it feels great.
And, the reason that it doesn’t just feel good, but feels great, is because of the UI. Normally I’m exactly the kind of writer that will complain about a busy or cluttered UI, but here, when you’re piloting a proxy, it makes total sense to have a UI that fills up all of the dead spaces around the screen with masses of critical information. I say ‘dead spaces’, but that’s not a criticism… in fact, it makes perfect sense that a space ship, complete with narrow corridors, features a lot of wall space, so why not use that space?
Remote Control‘s full version will give you twelve proxies to take control of. These each have names, ages, pictures, likes and dislikes, and they can end up incredibly dead if you’re not careful with them. Those likes and dislikes play into their stress, which you’re going to want to keep an eye on, alongside the other dangers. In the demo version, which I played at New Game Plus, you have a couple of quite generic proxies to explore with, but even then I felt a strange attachment to them that was only increased by the detachment of them being referred to as a proxy. It gave a genuine tension, like having the named droids in Duskers, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
It is, if you haven’t assumed already, much more than simply exploring a derelict ship. Something strange has happened, and is happening, something supernatural and haunting. I can’t wait to learn more, and I can’t wait to throw myself into surviving Remote Control with every proxy still living.
Remote Control is being developed for PC, it doesn’t currently have a release date, but you can check out the demo on Steam and Itch.
