Star Tripper

You are blissfully working in your home lab when an urgent message from your older sibling arrives. They have been kidnapped by pirates through an elaborate plot and need rescue from Sector Zero. Unfortunately, Sector Zero is just a myth. But that should not stop you. Command a ship, embark on the life of a trader, and do what it takes to be reunited with your sibling.

Quick note
I have already reviewed two other ChoiceScript games by the same author. One game was successful, the other less so, but they were both novel pieces. Star Tripper blows them out of the water in terms of creativity and innovation. It is one of the most ambitious ChoiceScript games I have seen. Not the cream of the crop in terms of quality, but I find its ambition to be remarkable. However, this is dulled by rocky implementation. I spent a long time on this game, far longer than any game I have played so far for this year’s IFComp. It has been idling on my computer for days. I have been utterly unable to reach an ending and have exhausted every lead. But I want to finish it. This will be a long review simply because I want to share my experience so far.

Gameplay
The intro is mostly exposition, but the player chooses their sibling’s attributes and other logistical details. The main gameplay begins once you reach space. Travel is straightforward. The setting is broken into quadrants and sectors, with each quadrant being divided up into four sectors. You manage your fuel and battery levels as you travel while also conducting trading and buying. If you are a fan of resource management, this game may interest you.

At first glance, this game is an open world dream. So many places to visit, including banks, churches, bookstores, bars, coffee shops, casinos, you name it. A big part is trading and selling items, but there are other ways of earning income. There are also all sorts of adventurous encounters. Avoid black holes, fight off pirates, claim your own asteroid, upgrade your ship, and more. When they gameplay begins after the intro, the possibilities seemed endless. I had the same feeling when I first tried Skybreak! Unfortunately, none of this fully comes to fruition.

The player must micromanage just to get ahead. As I was busy puttering around the galaxy, trying to maintain my fuel levels and finding planets willing to buy the excess cereal grains I had in my cargo hold, I totally forgot about my quest to find my sibling. Plus, the game sometimes gives mixed messages. Some activities are blanked out and only available in Arcade Mode which is unlocked once you complete the game. Fair enough. But there is inconsistency with Story Mode. For instance, the game will let you attack this trade ship but not that trade ship even though nothing about your ship’s status has changed. Planning is difficult when you are not sure of the game’s reasoning. Also, there is only one save slot, but I am grateful that it is available. Cling to it like a life raft when you are uncertain.

As I struggled to make long-term progress, my mind would wander to Superluminal Vagrant Twin. I want to be careful about comparing the gameplay between the two because they are made with different formats (Inform and ChoiceScript) that provide unique experiences. Nonetheless, their stories touch on a similar theme: Overcoming obstacles to save a sibling. They are also both sci-fi trading games.

Superluminal Vagrant Twin is not about finding your twin. The game does not go too deep into backstory but in a nutshell, your twin is frozen in a cryo tube, and you need to pay off your debt to get them back. A lofty objective, especially you are essentially broke. As a trading game, trading and buying goods is the core mechanic. But the game does not just toss the player out and say, “off you go, trade and buy until you make enough credits.” The gameplay is structured to point the player in the right direction by helping them identify smaller goals that lead to the master objective of getting your twin back. Having sub-objectives in Star Tripper would have been infinitely helpful, or at least an objectives list to remind the player of what to look for.

Once you manage to get your foot in the door you have more mobility. There is just a steep learning curve. I floundered for a while. Let’s see what I looked like as I floundered.

For such a vast and dynamic setting, I was overly hesitant to experiment due to the outcome of my first playthrough. I had to start over because I was stuck on a planet with not enough fuel to leave, which is not as tragic as it sounds. Every planet has a bar or drinking establishment where there is always a customer who will sell you fuel pods and other items if you buy them two drinks. The downside: I had almost no credits, not enough to buy two drinks, let alone fuel pods. I had no cargo to sell. The only option was to work a few shifts at the café. However, you get about 22 credits per order you complete during your shift. When you need hundreds of credits just to get off the dang planet this is not practical (and to seal the deal, I saved the game when I landed on the planet). Starting over seemed like the best option. I approached my next playthrough much more cautiously and was more mindful of when I saved the game.

As I mentioned earlier, it is hard to get ahead. Buying a ship to travel to Sector Zero is a distant dream. The most hopeful opportunity for my floundering self was mining on Class 1 planets. Filling a sack full of ore brings in 1000 credits plus a bonus. Sounds great. You decide how deep you want to go down a mineshaft. The deeper you go the better chance at finding ore (the max is 50 meters). However, if you decide on 50 meters you must click on a link- tap, tap, tap- 50 times in a row to reach the bottom of the shaft. If you find ore, you click on a link a few dozen times to fill your bucket. Then you click 50 more times to reach the surface. It takes about eight of those trips to fill up a sack, and that is assuming you find ore when you go down the mine. Progress was so slow.

But that can change.

The following is the rest of my semi-successful adventure. I found a strategy that made a million credits become a realistic goal, and even learned a few more details about saving my sibling. I am just going to hide it under one big spoiler tag. Hopefully this may give you some ideas.

My experience
(Spoiler - click to show) Fortunately, I did not flounder forever. The key is to establish a colony factory on an asteroid. But this is far, far, easier said than done. If you stumble across an asteroid, you can claim it for your own without fees or legal tape. Then, you hire colonists, and supply them with building materials such as iron or lumber. If you bring enough of these to your asteroid, you can upgrade its production level to increase your profit. The downside is that every time you upgrade your asteroid the game decides to reduce your cargo hold limits, which is unreasonable if your ship’s cargo hold only has five storage slots to begin with (as is the case with the Pigeon class ship you have at the start of the game). The game does not even explain why. Furthermore, each upgrade requires more materials that will need to fit into a rapidly shrinking cargo hold. Because of this, industrializing an asteroid was not something I could do for quite a while.

I finally managed to hammer out a strategy for buying and selling goods on planets, and I reached the point where I was doing pretty well. The days of mining were gone. I went from a mere Pigeon class ship to a Firefly, and then a Gila. Making 100,000 credits became an unexpected reality, and this allowed me to buy a Clipper class ship with 100 cargo hold spaces. This whole process, however, was slow and repetitive, so I decided to take a whack at colonizing an asteroid. Even if my cargo load were reduced there would hopefully be some left to continue trading. It did not take long for my ship’s cargo hold to go from 100 to 0, but by then things were looking up. I was making enough that I could simply buy another Clipper class ship to replace the old one. I burned through THREE Clipper class ships as I industrialized my asteroid, but by the time I had my production level reach level 16, the cost of a Clipper ship was practically pocket money. I could now buy the million-credit ship that my sibling mentioned in their message.

Oddly enough, that is where everything stagnated. Now that I had millions of credits at my disposal, I was relying on several scraps of information to carry me through, but none have brought me any closer to finding my sibling. I have tried everything. I will share them in case you have any input.

ONE: At the start of the game, your sibling says that the ship you need to buy costs a million dollars. There are two ships that fit this description. I bought both, but nothing happened.

TWO: Your sibling’s friend tells you that they may send you information on Sector Zero if they found anything in their research. That never happens. I did get one, and only one, message from my sibling after the intro, and all it said was that I needed to find the Golden Key to reach Sector Zero.

THREE: Once you have a million credits, you will eventually stumble across traders who happened to find the Golden Key and are willing to sell it. When you buy it, the game says,

🔑 Now that you've got your hands on the infamous Golden Key, it's time to find someone to help you install it.

I could not find anyone who could help me install it, nor did I know where to look. Furthermore, I had this encounter twice in this game. I would buy the Golden Key a second time and the game would act as if I first laid eyes on it. The stats page does not even mention that you acquired it.

FOUR: A useful tactic is that you can get general hints at coffee shops by buying something and sitting at an empty table to listen to the background chatter. It is possible to catch gossip about Sector Zero. You hear two people talking about a scientist who attached a gold quantum capacitor (which sounds awfully like the Golden Key) to a Zheng He class ship and managed to get it to go Warp 11. So, I bought a Zheng He ship. I am not sure if this was the ship my sibling had in mind since it costed less than a million credits, but none of the other ships had any promise. I already had the Golden Key (see previous), and I knew I needed to find someone to install it. Off I went exploring, but I did not find anyone whom I could talk to about my ship. I even had my ship wired to go Warp 10 (the max speed) in case it helped. No change.

I am out of ideas. I have played this game for endless hours, much of which I enjoyed, but I simply cannot reach an ending. Now I am groveling about in my own review. If anyone has any ideas, please comment.

Story
From the start of the game, we get a sense of the complicated political environment in the game’s universe. It takes place in a galaxy ruled by a Galactic Council that is heavily influenced by the Central Families that dominate the center of attention. Then there are the wealthy Inner Rim families, the working-class Outer Rim, and everything in between. Lurking about is a pirate group called the Syndicate that plunder spaceships and planets. All this sound extremely simplified, a classic version the galaxy being categorized into polarized groups of “good” and “bad,” when in fact, these lines are blurred.

What I like best about this game is that it is one big learning experience for the protagonist who is from a Central Family and has always taken these benefits for granted. Now, they must rescue a sibling from a group of pirates that (Spoiler - click to show) turn out to have a closer association with the Central Families than most people, the protagonist included, realize. The protagonist is also unable to make use of their own affluence because the Syndicate is watching every move. The only option is to start from the bottom. No money, no ship, and no leads except the name of potentially sketchy friend who feel from grace mentioned in your sibling’s message.

Then again, whether or not the protagonist actually learns anything is technically up to the player. You see this development (or lack of it) with the dialog options where you can choose to respond to people with entitled indifference or with open-mindedness. Because I have been unable to reach an ending, I have no idea if this whole debacle will permanently change the protagonist’s view on life. But after weathering public transportation, Class 1 planets, and dingy spaceships, well, who knows.

Characters
Character interactions are shallow but are there if you want to seek them out. They are often quite comical. I think the overall light-heartedness works well in this game.

::: What do you want to do?
🪑 Join Saboson and Star at the table
🏃‍♂️ Turn and run back to the spaceport

For the most part, NPCs are just part of the scenery, but there are ways of initiating more one-on-one interaction. Aside from the characters in the intro (and even then, their names are randomized) there is no single character whose full identity remains the same for every playthrough. I think that adds some spontaneity. The game relies on procedural generation, and it wields it well.

👧 "You know what? Screw you, Saboson. You're a thief and a liar."
👦🏻 "A thief? Because I stole your heart? Give me a break, Star!"

::: How do you want to respond, Captain?
🗣️ "I'm learning a lot by listening to you two."
🗣️ "I don't feel like I'm really being heard."
🗣️ "I hate to be rude, but let's change the subject."

What surprised me was the depth of traveling companions. They travel with you in your ship and add some diverse dialog by commenting on the things you do or even initiating discussions. (Spoiler - click to show) Unfortunately, they are only interested in hitting on you in borderline-creepy manners. For science, I tried to marry one of the NPCs. It resulted in an error that said: wedding_chapel line 951: Non-existent variable 'priest_level' which almost crashed the game. Fortunately, I just loaded my save file and decided not to test it. And to be honest, I did not want to get married. Regardless of how you feel about the NPCs, it is nice to know that the option is there.

Visuals
The game is extremely sleek looking. The text boxes are dark grey outlined with glowing borders that add a pop of colour. All of this is set against a lighter grey background. There are also little emoji icons that I have seen in the author's other games. They add an excellent visual. A whole variety of emojis are found in this game and are used strategically by the author to illustrate a point while avoiding emoji overload. That is one thing I noticed about the author's games that I have played: regardless of their content at least they look spiffy.

Final thoughts
With the author, no subject is off limits. Zombie apocalypses, farming simulations, and now a sci-fi trading a game, and I genuinely love the creativity and innovative usage of ChoiceScript. For a while, I never perceived ChoiceScript as a format that uses visual effects in storytelling. Now I am seeing how flexible it can be with not only visuals, but also with puzzle types and gameplay mechanics.

Star Tripper is a tough and confusing game, but it also has humor and adventure. Even if you do not manage to find your sibling you will still have a memorable experience with making a name for yourself and formulating strategies. It does need more polish, hence the low rating. There are some clunky bugs, but the biggest issues are, A, it is difficult to make progress, and B, long-term objectives are murky. But underlying it all is a solid foundation. If you have more than a few minutes, play this game. It has a lot of fun sci-fi and resource management themes. Just requires a little extra patience.