Voyage of the Marigold

This was a pleasant game to try out. You play as an expy of Captain Kirk, although your ship is now called The Marigold and your enemies are the Glexx.

Like the games 4x4 Archipelago and 4x4 Galaxy, you are on a 4x4 grid with the contents of most of the grid randomly generated. You can encounter planets, asteroids, aliens, and enemies.

You have fuel, weapons, and crew, and you can make a wide variety of choices, like killing everything you see or being peaceful, taking time to study nature or exploring.

I had pretty different experiences on two playthroughs, although some events were of course the same. Overall, a fun game to while the time away. It did take me a while to notice that the star map showed me which ways I would be able to exit.

I was into a lot of the standard nerdy stuff when I was a kid in the late 80s – DnD, Star Wars, Asimov, Tolkein, you name it. But the one that stood above all others, the one that really made my heart sing, was Star Trek. Even now there’s something about those ships, those uniforms, that idealistic mission of exploration, that deactivates my critical faculties and makes me just hum along with the theme: dum-dum-dum, dum-dumedy-dum… So when I realized that despite being a sci-fi roguelike about getting your ship from one side of a sector to another with limited crew, weapons, and fuel, Voyage of the Marigold owes a much bigger debt to Star Trek than it does to FTL, I squirmed with glee.

Even as a 43 year old, commanding a starship on a mission of mercy is an irresistible draw – and what makes it even better is the way you get to command it. I’ve played plenty of Star Trek games in my time, and enjoyed them, but hunching over a laptop and clicking the comm badge to open hailing frequencies or flailing the mouse around to try to shake an enemy warbird don’t have much gravitas. No, the actual fantasy is to command the way Kirk or Picard did, snapping off a cool “on screen, Lieutenant” or ordering “evasive maneuvers, bearing oh-three-six mark five.” Turning a marvel of sci-fi engineering and its highly-trained crew into an extension of your intellect just through language – that’s the dream, and it’s one Voyage of the Marigold completely nails.

To help you succeed in your mission of ferrying much-needed medical supplies through a nebula in the neutral zone, you’ve got a nicely graphical star-map and a status screen to show you your resources (we’re a long way from default Ink styling), the game itself is played exclusively via your captain’s log, which chronicles your exploits in note-perfect first-person narration, and drops into dialogue mode whenever it’s time to issue an order and make a decision. Your bridge crew aren’t deeply characterized – they aren’t given names, just addressed by their position – but they play their roles well, and I found the vagueness presented a blank slate onto which to project my positive associations of Sulu, Spock, Data, and the rest. The rhythm of warping into a new sector, scanning to see what’s around, planning how to avoid its dangers or take advantage of its opportunities, and then moving on to the next one, provides a pleasing gameplay loop but also nicely apes the show.

It isn’t just the trappings that reminded me of Star Trek, I should add; the game has an earnest, idealistic streak to it and plays with similar kinds of moral dilemmas. Your progress is dogged by not-Klingons and in some cases fighting is inevitable, and supplies are always tight, but throughout, you’re rewarded for seeing the humanity in even the most frightening aliens, not letting your need for resources push you to desperate measures, taking time for exploration and discovery even in the midst of an urgent mission, and respecting the Prime Directive.

That isn’t to say that it’s easy to win just playing as a goody-two-shoes, though – as befits a roguelike, the difficulty is such that I had to play three or four times before victory. That’s par for the course for the genre, and since each run is only fifteen or twenty minutes, it’s well worth giving it a few tries. But while overall I think the challenge is fair enough, there are a series of interlocking design decisions that occasionally can edge on frustration, and create some tension with the otherwise-consistent mood. Success hinges on navigating from one corner of a five-by-five grid to the other, with limited time and limited fuel, and the randomly-generated maps tend to be constricted, rather than open, with a few specific bottleneck sectors offering the only ways to make forward progress. I found it was very easy to make a wrong turn but only realize I was in a dead-end four or five warp jumps later, requiring me to burn significant resources retracing my steps. What’s worse, revisiting sectors you’ve been to before imposes a steadily-increasing morale penalty; I lost my first playthrough when the crew mutinied over being denied shore leave with only two days remaining before the plague killed millions of colonists. This morale hit feels unnecessary, since the thin margins on fuel and time are already punishment enough for backtracking, and it also jars with the professionalism of the Starfleet crews the game’s clearly trying to evoke.

My other complaint is that the deck of possible events is relatively thin; it’ll probably only take one and a half playthroughs to see just about everything except the endgame. This is fine for some of the more open-ended encounters, but some of them are closer to puzzles, offering clear correct decisions rather than context-dependent tradeoffs. As a result my engagement with the narrative layer started to erode in repeat playthroughs, impatiently clicking past descriptions of ancient civilizations and god-like energy beings since I already knew their deal.

Obviously, though, it’s not a harsh a criticism of a game to wish there was more of it. I heartily enjoyed my time with Voyage of the Marigold and was sad when my time with it came to an end – though learning I was the only Federation citizen for decades to come who received the Glexx Crown of Honor (second glass) for my humanitarian efforts helped take the sting off it. This is a gripping but feel-good game that’s precision-engineered to appeal to me, but even for folks who don’t dream about wormholes and bumpy-headed aliens and low-velocity space battles, there’s a lot here to enjoy.

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 1.75hrs, 4 plays, 4 fails

Have we culturally saturated ourselves on Star Trek riffs? I won’t leave that hang: No. No we have not. VoM leverages a deeper-cut aspect of its inspiration to tremendous advantage: reductive two-fisted approaches to complicated problems.

Let me start by acknowledging ALL narrative is reductive. Figuring out what to reduce to tell a compelling story is a core challenge of storytelling. What details are important to the tenor of the piece? What details destroy the piece with abject ‘realism’? Adventure fiction in particular uses two-fisted action either as metaphoric shorthand or as a mechanism to deliver morally-unambiguous thrills. In our post-COVID world, the idea of sending an under-fueled, under-gunned boat of cure through enemy territory with insufficient resources to get there… ridiculous! This is a diplomatic/large military operation of infinite complexity and nuance!

In Star Trek world though? THIS IS EXACTLY THE CORRECT APPROACH. Evoking that vibe bypasses any quibbles we might have and puts us smack into the right frame of mind. The piece does not provide thinly veiled caricatures of familiar characters. Why would it? There’s plenty of that out there already. Instead, it crafts a series of Trekky scenarios in just the perfect combination of unique and familiar. We are essentially watching a season-long arc (presuming Trek trucked in that) on fast forward. Our familiarity plays off these scenarios in exactly the right way to maximize our enjoyment and minimize drag. We don’t need the details, we get it. It is a terrific choice, implemented confidently, and lands like gangbusters.

We are blindly exploring a sensor-defying nebula, searching for the route to a plague-ridden planet. Encountering all manner of alien species, strange phenomenon and ancient artifacts, not to mention meddling Glingons. And solving them all via WWKD. (What Would Kirk Do?) Each mini-encounter is an abbreviated television episode where we are trying to wring out fuel, weapon upgrades or information and not lose TOO many redshirts. These encounters are satisfyingly broad, varied and dangerous. If we seize initiative and power through, with a little luck we might save the day.

First time, I didn’t . Ran out of gas. Barely skimmed the endscreen before cycling back in for more. On repeat play, some gameplay artifacts started showing. For one, encounters started repeating. Obviously I was more successful second time. For another, the path through the nebula randomized, meaning every game would feature blind exploration, with many possible deadends and backtracks. I failed again, this time as a result of an encounter decision I had no way of deducing. Just guessed wrong. Then out of fuel again on a third run.

Then a playthrough that broke me. Applying what I had learned to by-now-familiar scenarios, and focusing maniacally on refuel opportunities I explored to within four jumps of the end, with three doses of fuel. It was in sight! I was presented with a wormhole that promised to shoot me… somewhere. No way to predict, just guess. I guessed… wrong. It shot me so far from the goal, and provided no opportunity to refuel. I conclude: 1) the randomizer is not adequately constrained for balanced gameplay and 2) waaay too much weight is placed on blind guessing problem solving. The latter is bad, but at least manageable through repeat gameplay. Coupled with blind exploration, the former is death. To know that I can exhaust fuel through no fault of my own, or be placed in unwinnable state by random luck… these are deeply unsatisfying experiences.

Even with all that though, the charm of the setup and encounters still shines through. Yes, maybe they get a little tiresome once ‘solved’ but they haven’t yet chafed. Yes, it was a fun, immersive experience for the first few runs. No, it is not compelling enough to fight the randomizer until you win. But honestly, you still get plenty of grins without that.

I realize, due to my stream of consciousness ramblings, I have neglected to praise the MacIntosh-1bit graphics which are just delightful and resonate with the retro-narrative vibe in a terrific way. For whatever reason, Ink continues to showcase superior graphic design, and Marigold is a proud member of that fraternity.

Mystery, Inc: “We’ve got a Mystery on our Hands, Gang” Fred
Vibe: Boldly Going…
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project I would pay attention to the route randomizer, and ensure refueling opportunities are presented frequently enough to avoid dead runs. I would ALSO double, maybe triple the encounter mix, so that replays have a decent chance of showing some new ones in with the old. Reward replays with new challenges and opportunities to bellow loudly at the sky. GGGLLEEEEEEXXX!!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.