Saturday!

During the Steam Sale, there was a trifle called “Duskers” that I picked up on sale.

It’s good.

Here’s the basic conceit: you’re a spaceship (kinda like in Firefly? Maybe?) that is travelling from hither to yon and, along the way, you find decrepit space ships that you can search for such things as fuel, batteries, and other stuff that you can sell for credits.

Your main tool for exploring these decrepit space ships is a (small) handful of drones.

It is your job to pilot these drones.

Now, on the easy levels, it’s pretty easy: send the battery power drone to the backup generator… once the ship is powered, then use the backup generator drones to open doors as necessary and use your “pick stuff up!” drones to go out and pick stuff up. However, you quickly discover that some of the wrecks you’re scavenging are populated by quite unpleasant creatures.

So you also have to use your “scan” abilities as well as your various “interface” abilities to make sure that you get through the vessel’s carcass without incident. Seriously: don’t open a door that might have an entity behind it.

And so you jump from galaxy to galaxy, from ship to ship, from job to job, and the main goal is to not die. Make it another day. Then do it all over again.

It’s got a lot of horror elements, it’s got a lot of programming elements, and the gameplay is such that it will allow you to take a deep breath and then press play on your favorite playlist before you go through and pick the bones of a handful of space corpses before ejecting the remainders of whatever unpleasant entities remain on the spaceship out into the ether (and then you can go through the space ship and pick the bones in peace).

If you haven’t yet seen it, put “duskers” on your wishlist. It’ll haunt you.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]