Something Something Heavenly Bodies

 Hey there, been a while. Again.

Nothing special here, no glimpse into the life of your favorite space captain of the SS Hiatus. That’ll come later ;) . I wrote a review for a goofy lil space game I’ve been playing, or rather the new DLC they just put out. Reddit saw it first (kill me), but I liked what I wrote, and I haven’t written in a while, so I’m adding it to the ever-so-gradually expanding treasure trove/sewage drain of my titled works. I present to you my thoughts on Cleanup, Heavenly Bodies’ new DLC.

Long read ahead with MAJOR spoilers. 

Since completing the original game and getting most achievements not involving Newtonian mode, I hadn’t played in a good few months, until I was browsing the PlayStation store and noticed the new DLC. I was psyched; I really loved the base game (still do honestly) and was in a bit of a game drought, so I went for it. Now having finished, I’m a little underwhelmed.

Some positive notes, it’s still very much Heavenly Bodies. The visual style and sound design are just perfect, from every echoing thud you make bouncing off the station walls, to the symphony of equipment sound effects (the handheld scanner sound was especially cool, the little tune it played accelerating as you got closer to the comms terminals was a very nice touch). Even text scrolling by and completing tasks is almost like ASMR. If you haven’t tried the game with headphones, do yourself a favor. The gameplay, as you know, is all about accomplishing incredible feats of science and astronomy, all while (barely) controlling Earth’s wiggliest astronaut. For many, myself included, you can’t help but fall in love with it. For every minute, even hour, spent writhing and clambering around the void, there is at least one MASSIVE mechanical payoff, be that tuning a satellite to the perfect frequency, or perfectly tossing a fuse through zero gravity *perfectly* into its socket and powering up a machine. I remember actually breaking a sweat the first time I caused an explosive decompression when the trowel I was carrying caught the lever and I barely managed to get it back shut. It can be a truly thrilling game. For a two-person studio, the devs should be extremely proud of the gem they’ve put out into the world.

Praise aside, I have qualms. Apart from the new mission area and tools, the gameplay is practically unchanged. Which is a plus in most regards, but the handheld tools were often more of a hinderance than a boon. I can’t count the amount of times I was unable to move for minutes at a time because one of my arms were pinned between my body and a tool attached to my waist, which happened more and more often as the game progressed and I needed to bring all the tools I could carry when locating the comms terminals. Carrying a tool on either hip? Fine. Carrying four tools on a PMU and trying to switch between them while careening through space? Excruciating.

The new mission area, while at first impressive, quickly became kinda uninteresting. The original base game didn’t have this problem because each mission was an entirely new area, with plenty of buttons to push and items to play around with. It felt like there were a million ways to accomplish the task at hand, and I honestly felt encouraged to experiment. In Cleanup’s case, you learn the layout fairly quickly, and realize there’s honestly not much to do on the station itself: four identical airlocks, tool storage and sleeping quarters in one hallway, literally nothing in the other, delivery bay, scanner, and scrapper. Everything you do on the station quickly becomes a borderline mindless routine, which isn’t helped at all by the fact that there are NO new achievements you can unlock, even for finding assembling all the collectibles. It feels like there were so many chances for new trophies, just teasing you to try and do a bunch of extra work to complete a task with a “wrong formula, right answer” type of approach. One example has to do with the fact that the comms terminals are screwed into the debris sections. Like, the same screws you’ve been going around loosening and tightening with your shiny new handheld drill for the past three days, just glimmering on either side of the terminal. They’re practically *begging* to be unscrewed and cable-towed back to the signal station, which would make for an AMAZINGLY creative achievement, but no. A quick glance at the trophy list shows they’re completely unchanged. It just feels like there could have been so much more interior maintenance and puzzles and just pushing some damn buttons. Levels two and three of the base game had more mechanical play than almost the entirety of the DLC, and that was without ever leaving the bounds of the station.

I know, that was a lot of whining. But all that aside, I did genuinely enjoy my time on Cleanup. The debris puzzles were (for the most part) somewhat challenging and satisfying to complete. The scrapper, while time consuming, did give me some “smooth operator” moments. And all in all, its still very much the game I fell in love with when I first opened the solar array on day one. But after every original mission, after all the hours of climbing up walls and plugging things in and being shot into the void, I still felt like I accomplished *something*, regardless of the aftermath of the final mission. Clambering out of the re-entry pod with all the weight of the world back on me, flagging down the rescue helicopter, I felt like a damn hero. After all the hours spent in Cleanup, essentially just doing chores with the only real sense of progression being “we found more data!”, I just felt kinda tired. 

I realize now that I just misunderstood the objective of the last mission, but with the fuel cell and detonator and very bomb-esque thruster, I honestly thought the last mission would end in blowing up the foreign body. But when I finally got the thing set up, planted the fuel cell, triggered the detonator and flew away as fast as I could, it just moved. No big bang, no celebration, just roll credits. Compared to the ending of Evacuation, really the whole game, this just felt like clearing another obstacle so you could get back to work. Which wasn’t nearly what I was expecting, but I guess for an $8 DLC titled Cleanup, maybe that was the whole point.