Adr1ft (PS4)
Adr1ft isn’t “Gravity, the game”, let’s get that out of the way. It’s not a tense high-action spectacle in orbit. It’s a member of that odd genre of games that give you a pain-in-the-arse control scheme and expect you to accomplish somewhat complex but clear tasks, but which don’t play it as a joke a la Surgeon Simulator.  Those tasks are the framework for a rare videogame story about mistakes and the meaning of redemption. While not wholly successful, it’s an interesting novelty with some real narrative substance.
You wake up in a damaged space suit as Commander Alex Oshima; your space station has suffered a catastrophic accident, and you must slowly jet around to various sections of the ruined complex activating the systems needed to launch your escape pod. In the course of doing so, you find the typical audio and text logs that introduce your crewmates and help you understand what caused your station to disintegrate in the first place. Or rather, how you caused your station to disintegrate.
It’s unusual to find a game story that is about the player’s character’s failure, and which also casts this as something to be lived with, and not something to be reversed. Redemption has a very clear meaning here that has nothing to do with minimising or negating guilt. Different aspects of this theme are brought up through the other crew members - in relationships, in addiction, in parenting - in ways that intersect with each each other and with your own central mistake. That the developer had learned about the dynamics of guilt and shame first-hand is a distraction from the pleasant fact that this game deals with the topic, and deals with it well.
The floating-in-space concept is an excellent situation in which to explore these ideas. While in principle you could just line up the audio files and text and get the same narrative, being trapped in a self-contained bubble, drifting in the void with only space suit noises and the sparse soundtrack for company provides plenty of metaphorically-appropriate time to ruminate on these ideas. The initial fiddliness of the controls and stop-start movement give way to, if not fluency, a kind of steady, systematic clarity that allows you to focus on the austere void around you and the words in your ear.
This is still a slim indie game, with some scripting that doesn’t play very well with the end-game freedom to backtrack and voice acting that doesn’t always hit the mark. The visual landmarks are sparse and vague enough that becoming sufficiently oriented to find all of the game’s audio logs and remaining collectables is practically impossible. However it deserves attention and the four hours or so that are needed to play through it reasonably comprehensively. Worth a look.
