holoz0r's A-Z of Steam: Crying Suns: Roguelike Space Strategy and Exploration
Crying Suns is a title that deserves italics because this will be a classy review, for a classy game. Even if the game itself borrows from the great libraries of science fiction, and returns its novels damaged, and late, to a disapproving librarian, it is a personality that the librarian wants to see come back on whatever haphazard schedule Crying Suns is running on.
The basic premise of Crying Suns is that you're an admiral of some sort, commanding a battleship through the frontier regions of a vast galactic empire, on the run from threatening, overpowering enemy forces. It feels like the early seasons of Battlestar Galactica; where the remaining survivors of humanity just narrowly avoid certain death at the mechanical hands of a Cylon death fleet.
As you run, you investigate star systems and colonies of the empire, and start to learn about the various competing factions that inhabit this enormous, procedurally generated universe, and you start to learn about the political intrigue and involve yourself in a revolving space opera; as you die, revive, and learn more each time you fail to reach an objective through the folds of space.
There's so many references to things from Dune, things from Star Trek, things from Battlestar Galactica, and other science fiction space opera that somehow cohesively manages to weave its own narrative as you engage in a mixture of exploration, upgrading, and making decisions about encounters along the way.
Every choice in Crying Suns has a cost. By doing one thing, you sacrifice the ability to do another, and this is in essence a sequence of choices that either exposes some vulnerabilities in your future, or sets you up for success.
Perhaps even, you set yourself up for failure, but don't worry about that, because death is not the end. Your admiralty, is after all, immortal, and is constantly resurrected upon failure, retaining any memory of the previous cycle, to attempt it all over again. There's a beautiful elegance in this, and it is a solution to the problems of an expansive universe and the immense periods of time required to explore - just reincarnate, and continue.
As a result, what appears to be a small, simple game with pixel-art graphics is incredibly deep mechanically and too, in narrative consequence, evoking thoughtful reflections on the human condition against the backdrop of space pirates, lunatic religious fundamentalists, machine gods, and all the other spawns of a sprawling galactic society.
Once you get through the first two acts, the gameplay loop becomes very familiar, and the difficulty curve, once towering, levels off as the repetitive mechanics start to talk hold - Explore, Battle, Choose, Upgrade, Repair, Buy/Sell, deploy, and so on and so on, until you reach an end of sector boss, discover a quest, or unlock some sort of collective memory from the cosmos that tells you more about the admiral and his many lives among the empire.
It is gripping stuff with a minimalist presentation, which does not do justice to the abundant homage to intellectual and meaningful science fiction writing. Crying Suns successfully adds to the classics of science fiction through the fact that this is a story best told through a game, and one which can only have its secrets revealed to its audience through repeated meditation on the universe's many expansive swathes of emptiness.
This is the type of game that typifies something that can really only be experienced as a game, and would not work as effectively though any other medium. As a result, this is a game that you must obtain and spend some time with if you consider yourself the type of individual that enjoys high brow fiction and engaging gameplay.
A silent masterpiece, well executed in all realms, with one let down - repetitive combat sequences - but this is countered elegantly by everything else that is on offer beneath the dark, ambiguous pixel art.
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I got this for free through the Epic Games store at some point. I can see from your writings here that it's not really a game for me. I rarely manage to get into any kind of strategy or turn based games.