Astronaut: The Best Review

There’s nothing quite like screwing up so badly that you are rewarded for it. I’m sure it’s akin to working in the United States government, where you are flooded with money by doing absolutely nothing correctly. Well, Universal Happymaker has decided to make that sentiment into a video game with Astronaut: The Best.

Astronaut: The Best puts the player in the driver’s seat of director for the FRSA. The job entails dealing with the internal politics of a less-than-democratic state, training and preparing astronauts for a mission to outer space, and dealing with outside forces that put you in constant peril. This indie title juggles a lot of balls in its quest to make the experience as complicated and humorous as possible. Boldly and mostly succeeding in its mission, the game has a lot of charm and complication that make it one solid experience you won’t forget. Of course, not everything is smooth sailing in space.

So, strap in, dear readers, as we’re going to launch this review right now.

Simple Story, Complicated Gameplay
Story
The story of Astronaut: The Best starts with you being hired as director of the FRSA, a NASA-type organization that isn’t quite as free-thinking. As the director, your first order is to deal with everyone’s demands of your program, while also training randomly generated astronauts in several important areas – piloting, intelligence, strength, charisma, and beauty. Balancing out those areas with politics and outside forces is quite enough to complicate one’s journey to space.

The story in the game changes with the narrative of each astronaut and political figure’s demands. You’re rarely guaranteed to go through the same experience twice, on a base level. The game does feature missions and specific goals, but the astronauts can be hired and fired as you please, which shifts micro-storylines ever so slightly. This type of narrative gameplay makes a gaming experience engaging and downright thoughtful, especially for a game’s longevity.

There are different ways and combinations to shift a mission through director choices and through astronauts who bring all sorts of baggage to the table with them. For example, there was one astronaut that I trained that took performance-enhancing drugs. I had the choice to shift the story and ban them from taking them, a choice to fire the astronaut, and a choice to allow it to happen. Naturally, I allowed it to go on, which affected the gameplay severely, as other astronauts followed suit and my training days were spent with various astronauts tripping and unable to train. Had I chosen a different route, then maybe I fire the guy or maybe he quits because he enjoys drugs. I won’t find out, but the choice I chose shifted the story in a way that hindered the gameplay, which was proper for the choice.

While I wasn’t fully hooked into the story, or with my individual astronaut’s choices in life, I enjoyed that my choices changed how the game told the story and how it played out.  This branching narrative component helped make the story far deeper than expected but only to a certain extent. And that’s honestly proper. The game’s story was built with humor for its foundation, so you’re never going to get completely hooked into it and emotionally changed as you would with a game such as Death Stranding or Knights of the Old Republic, but there is enough here to warrant making choices for players and enjoying the fruits of your labor from said choices. Even the fruit is rotten and surrounded by flies because you made bad choices.

Anyway, this game was built with a storytelling structure better than I could have imagined for a game of this type.  

Complicated complications
The gameplay in Astronaut: The Best is there solely to annihilate your success. It wants you to fail more than it wants you to succeed, and it shows it by over-complicating you with choices and interference throughout the entire journey as the director. And I can dig that difficulty.

The game begins by putting you in front of the entire FRSA council which consists of a sun leader, a moon cult follower, a mongoose-cult-like follower, a woman who looks like Ursla from The Little Mermaid, and a fast-talking gent who wants to sell you shit as much as he wants to screw you out of money. Those jokers are the political figures that you must keep happy so that you can continue to be funded and continue to survive as director of the FRSA. They are the first layer of complication, as they will individually or in groups come to visit you to grill you, complain about your astronauts, and/or make insane requests that you must remember on launch day. And you have to take into account everything that they say or otherwise, it’s going to be a rough time as director.

Oh, and it gets more complicated.

Once you understand the politics with those goobers, you must get your crew together and start training them. Each astronaut comes into the program specializing in one thing and hopeful in a bunch of other categories. The categories include strength, piloting, charisma, makeover, and intelligence. While training your astronauts, you run into a couple of factors that might hinder your progress. The first factor is money.

You are given money from the five members of the FRSA council quantified by how happy you make them. Should you make them happy, then you bring up their happiness meter, which brings you more dough. Should you make them unhappy, then it dips down. Training astronauts takes time and money and getting that cheddar cheese is very dependent on the council, as well as a few other donors out there. This level of complication where you must worry about pleasing the council and having enough money to train your astronauts is time-consuming as it is complicated to balance. Every single day, you will be visited by these people who will propose a situation and you must decide through a branching narrative structure how to react so you can push forward with the space program you’re running. As pleasant as it seems, it can be maddening. Satisfying one council member might mean pissing off another, which means less money. But, if you’re looking for a simulator that shows you the true nature of politics, then you’re hitting the nail close on the head with Astronaut: The Best.

If that wasn’t enough of a factor to shift the gameplay, then you’re in luck because the astronauts in this game are incredibly dumb. Their unintelligence trips the entire training process most of the time, which means you’re wasting time. For example, there was a moment in my playthrough where I built up an astronaut’s charisma so high that they decided that they were too wonderful to continue being an astronaut. To keep them and not waste all that money that I put into their training, I had to guarantee that they would be the first choice of astronaut to board during launch day. Or maybe it was the first to be mentioned in the broadcast. I can’t remember, but they had to be first at something or they were going to walk. Dealing with the astronauts and their personalities was an additional complication to the entire gameplay process. Much like dealing with politics, it was just maddening at times. And that is even before you talk about dealing with the astronaut’s stress while training. Yes, there is a stress meter that opens the door for injuries or psychotic situations. You must tame that stress while training the astronauts while dealing with their occasional issues. Again, it’s maddening.

These two single factors, money, and politics, had so much baggage attached to them that the task of being a director was overwhelming at times during gameplay. I’m sure that was on purpose, but it just led to so many obstacles that at times as I was laughing at the content, I was secretly crying on the inside that I was losing time and money dealing with too many issues at once. Astronaut: The Best doesn’t make the process of being director of the FRSA at all easy. It purposely makes your life as difficult as possible. And that is good and bad, depending on what you expect.

Regardless, the fact that it brings this much complication to the gameplay design is genius and it certainly will build a challenge for those looking for one. Now, if you’re not looking for a challenge, then this game might feel different.

Failure to launch
One of the more damning aspects of Astronaut: The Best is that it wants you to fail. This is kind of like the type of failing that you would find in The Binding of Isaac, where the game doesn’t give you a break at all. When you’re doing well, you’re not actually doing well, even though you might believe that you are headed in the right direction. I felt this through the review experience. By the third go around with this game, I finally understood that preparing multiple astronauts to succeed in singular categories might be the best course of action for success in this game. For the first two run-throughs of the game, I tried to balance out all the skills of each astronaut and that simply led to failure. As the old saying goes, jack of all trades but master of none. You never want to be the master of none.

Now, even after I figured out that focusing multiple astronauts on singular categories was the way to go, the game still demanded more of me. If I had one astronaut high on charisma but short on piloting, it didn’t matter when a mini-game based on charisma came up. One particular mini-game was a television show that featured challenges against other NPC characters. The better a category was, the more I could succeed, at least I thought. When it came to charisma, which my astronaut had a level 11 of at the time, it should have been enough to conquer the challenge set forth – which was to get my rocket to the moon with charisma. The first two go-arounds were a success. The final two were failures. The game seemed to ramp everything up so much that there just didn’t seem a way for me to win at it. And this happened multiple times. Probably around the fourth or fifth time with this mini-game, I just assumed I was a lost cause. I knew I wasn’t going to come out of this successfully and just decided to concentrate on building up my astronauts after the challenge was over. Failing at this mini-game, affected my astronaut’s stress level and my glory points, which also made my post-game job harder.

While we have discussed astronaut stress levels, the previously mentioned glory points come with the success of these mini-games, satisfying the council, and ultimately succeeding here and there during missions. The glory points help the director keep their job. I spent a good chunk of my time in the negatives with glory points. Every single time I finished the game, I was usually fired…or worse. There was a worst.

Anyway, the difficulty in this game is that it wants you to fail, and it does little to let you know you’re succeeding. The humor helps to blanket the large amount of failure that comes with your efforts, but I still felt it a bit and it created a minor amount of frustration along the way. Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to keep playing the hell out of this game, but the difficulty just seems to truly work against you the entire time. If you can get over that, as I can live with it, then you will find a fun game that tickles your fancy more than causes you to curse. Just be aware of it.

Taming frustration a bit
One of the brighter spots of the game is how it tames you with unlockable encouragement. As you succeed ever so gradually in the game, you will unlock new missions to conquer or fail. You will also unlock items that help build the confidence of your astronauts as well, which helps push the gameplay in the right direction. The items could be something simple as sugar to de-stress your astronauts, or a raw egg to bring an astronaut back from injury. These do help to tame the frustration the game brings regularly, while also encouraging you to keep playing to see what else you can unlock and gain.

Gameplay is still good
Despite the frustration of failure, the gameplay here is complicated and pleasantly so. It provides enough interesting obstacles to juggle and brings enough variety to the gameplay that you’re bound to enjoy nearly every instance of it.

Presentation
This game looks and feels like a spin-off of a Ren and Stimpy cartoon. It looks like the Nickelodeon favorite, and it even acts like it. The art style is overdramatic and as goofy as the content that comes with it. The game never breaks from this type of presentation, and it only helps to add humor and entertainment to the entire package. It’s wonderfully written and wonderfully drawn.

You won’t be disappointed by how the presentation goes.

What you will be disappointed with is that this review is getting wrapped right now.

Conclusion
Astronaut: The Best from developer Universal Happymaker is a challenging game that brings so many layers of complication that it can be overwhelming as much as satisfying. The difficulty might catch some gamers off guard, but the humor helps keep the ship together and create a fun experience.