Affordable Space Adventures (Wii U)
With the Wii U far in the rear view mirror now, it’s clear the GamePad controller was a failed concept. Holding one screen in your hands while looking at the television set to play was not the cleanest concept for designing games around, and for the most part it was Nintendo itself that experimented within that space to try and find what potential it may have. There were some interesting ideas to be found in games like Nintendoland and Game & Wario, but while Nintendo was trying to sell the concept of its controller with those games that revolved around the GamePad, Affordable Space Adventures is an indie game that sought to explore a unique idea utilizing the controller without such an incentive.
Affordable Space Adventures has you piloting a spacecraft appropriately known as a Small Craft, the television screen displaying a side-scrolling view of you exploring an alien planet with it. However, controlling the vessel involves more than just moving the control stick around as various systems must be managed to get around the hostile environments you find yourself in. Different controls will appear on the Wii U GamePad’s touch screen that you’ll need to appropriately delegate power to. Too much power and the Small Craft can start to have issues, too little and you won’t be able to get around the obstacles ahead of you safely, and soon hazards arise that will begin to truly test how well you can control your machine’s output to avoid triggering hostile machines and automated defenses. While there are button shortcuts for some features like quickly cutting out or activating your two different engine types and swapping between the different types of landing gear really does need the quick button shortcuts for the puzzles it rubs up against later down the line, you will still spend much of your time considering the information on the GamePad control panel and trying to make things work out on the television screen showing your situation.
As for why your little Small Craft finds itself in danger at all, that relates to the game’s title. You are a customer of the UExplore company that promises affordable trips out to a mostly uncharted planet so you can experience the wonders of discovering a whole new world, but before you can ever reach the beautiful alien vistas of Spectaculon shown in the advertisements, somethings goes awry. The vessel carrying your Small Craft crashes into a dreary part of the planet, your own vehicle only barely functioning enough to begin looking for some way to contact UExplore and hopefully find your way to safety. Luckily, despite only initially being able to putter around, the Small Craft’s features are gradually rebooting over the course of the game’s 38 stages. As systems come back online you’ll be able to approach the hostile environment with new abilities, but your Small Craft was made for exploration, not combat. Avoiding the attention of the strange machines active on the planet becomes just as important as weaving around lasers or trying to keep yourself from being cooked by extreme conditions, but a fun touch occurs between stages. Your UExplore manual pops up on the load screen to remind you of the company that seemingly didn’t take your safety into account, especially when the game will play an ad of UExplore boasting about a perfect safety record that somehow goes back to the 1990s. The manual can provide helpful refreshers on mechanics at least, but it also stands in humorous contrast to the eerie exploration of dark caverns as you search for some way to contact help.
In many ways, the levels of Affordable Space Adventures are puzzles focused on how you allocate power to your ship’s different systems. When you come across an impediment to your progress, it’s often not immediately obvious what you’ll need to do in full unless the game is introducing one of the freshly rebooted systems to you. Your fuel engine might make so much noise it triggers a nearby machine to riddle you with bullets, or you’ll need to find a way to drift through a minefield with activating them since your electrical output will cause them to turn aggressive. Many levels can be rather short as they focus on that approach to designing a puzzle, the player spending time trying to find the right way to use their small set of abilities to safely make their way through. At times it can feel a little like it leans a lot on the three output meters of your ship, the player needing to experiment to make sure they’re not within certain range that will alert nearby enemies, but it can lead to many interesting puzzles as well where the concept is inverted in some way or you can feel some rather thick tension as you try to ever so slightly maneuver your way forward without triggering some instant death attack. Checkpoints exist within levels so you can go right back to experimenting on how to solve the current puzzle, that easing the impact of some of the moments where things are more about fiddly management than cleverly figuring out how your systems can be used to navigate.
On the surface some of the skills do sound rather tame, and one reason Affordable Space Adventures has puzzles that are so enjoyable to overcome is its inventive use of what sounds like basic functions of your spacecraft. Sticky landing gear is good for ensuring a stable landing, but it can also be used to latch onto moving objects or carry things about. The antigravity at first seems like a cleaner way to move through the air than the sometimes imprecise movement afforded by the fuel engine, but mess with it enough and it can sometimes carry you through an area without having to risk the sound and power output thrusters necessitate. Figuring out how to overcome the limits an area imposes on you involves removing the limits on what you think your spacecraft’s features are capable of, and while you’ll always feel vulnerable in your Small Craft, you’ll also feel fulfilled when your knowledge of it allows you to get around a tough obstacle once things finally click in place. Not every function of the Small Craft is equal in how interesting it is to utilize though, but while some like the flare shot lets you engage with your world and it is the world design itself that becomes more interesting because of that power’s simple function, the boost charge feels like a rather weak idea. Eventually you’ll get a booster you can charge up with power so that you can then propel yourself forward with a temporary surge of energy, this allowing you to avoid some foibles of the two engine types but coming with the all new problem of requiring quick and precise action. Use up that power too quickly and you can land in an unsafe area where you are doomed to die, but even when it works as intended you sometimes just do the boost, wait, charge, and do the boost again in a slow segment where it’s less about figuring out a solution and more about using the only means available to proceed. Some sections are certainly constructed to embody the tone of this struggle for survival more than a difficult challenge, but the boost section just feels like a weak idea that crumples under the brief spotlights it receives.
Luckily, Affordable Space Adventures is far more focused on inventive uses of your ship’s seemingly mundane systems to get around the evolving hazards of a hostile planet. Areas get stranger as you plunge deeper into the planet in search of help but you have no way of really understanding the alien world around you, although luckily the puzzles you must overcome are not too cryptic in their demands and the vital information is usually easy enough to uncover with a bit of prodding around. The solitude of finding your way around this space seemingly occupied only by unspeaking robots makes for some moody exploration that certain moments lean into a bit more as the game isn’t always focused just on presenting puzzles, but you don’t necessarily have to travel alone in Affordable Space Adventures. Up to three players can attempt to fly the Small Craft together, two players with Wii Remotes taking over the controls of certain functions to add an unusual form of cooperation to the adventure. On one hand you are putting your safety in the hands of someone else by inviting them along, but delegating such tasks can also help ease some of the fiddlier sections that ask for swift system management normally. The GamePad player still ends up allocating power to the systems, but with someone else focused on moving when the time is right and another aiming the flashlight and firing flares you can also handle the time sensitive sections a bit better.
THE VERDICT: The atmospheric world you find yourself struggling to survive on in Affordable Space Adventures is filled with a good amount of imaginative puzzles that ask you to manage your space craft more like the machine it is than a mere stand-in for a game character. The power output, the systems active, and even the ways you can utilize a function for uses beyond its intended purpose all make the Small Craft into an interesting Swiss Army knife for problem solving, and while some moments perhaps lean a little too hard into fiddly micromanagement, learning how to safely overcome an obstacle with the right power set-up is often the satisfying pay-off to accessible experimentation.
And so, I give Affordable Space Adventures for Wii U…
A GOOD rating. This collaboration between KnapNok Games and Niflas’ Games not only managed to come up with a nifty use of the Wii U GamePad, but it did so in a reasonable way where the systems you manage would likely be too much if they were all assigned to controller button. It knows where to make concessions too like with the specific button shortcuts, but the GamePad also gives you clean readouts on the situation while the television can maintain its focus on showing the eerie world around you unimpeded. Most of the game’s stages are about the delicate balance of power needed to stay safe while performing important tasks, but while the game does rely on machines ready to fire upon you the moment your meters hit dangerous output levels, the game doesn’t run out of inventive ways to design stages on the whole. The gradual restoration of your powers gives you time to discover more creative applications of those systems which then are mixed together with new abilities and environmental variables rather well, and if not for things like the very straightforward and tedious power booster, most of them have moments where you’ll feel clever for utilizing them right. Having the little check-ins with the UExplore manual also help the game avoid feeling too devoid of story, your exploration rather lonely otherwise although logically so considering the predicament you find yourself in.
Affordable Space Adventures’s experimental management of a spacecraft’s systems are perhaps a fitting form for a game that is getting experimental with the hardware it’s available on. Some creativity was necessary to figure out what that screen in your hand should contribute to a game experience, so it’s little wonder the design team could then think of special uses for the systems the Small Craft has to offer. That ambition does unfortunately mean Affordable Space Adventures will go down with the ship that is the Wii U, but perhaps if more creators were as experimental with how the GamePad could be utilized than maybe it could have been a system defined by ambitious designs rather than underwhelming implementations of an odd controller.