In this era of democratic and institutional decay, it’s easy to feel powerless. It’s easy to feel disposable and restrained, like an insect trapped in an ant farm, forced to trudge from one minor task to the next under the watchful eyes of increasingly insidious technocratic overlords.
This might not feel like a particularly fun scenario for play, but it is the elemental basics of Hull Rupture’s tongue-in-cheek premise. Imagine the ant farm as a dioramic ship hurtling through space, our tech overlords as a rogue AI that recently destroyed Earth (hard to imagine right now), and you’re right in the ballpark. Hull Rupture is a roguelike real-time management tower defence game developed by Konfa Games (Despot’s Game: Dystopian Battle Simulator, Slime 3K Rise Against Despot) and published by tinyBuild (Not for Broadcast, The Final Station, ReStory). It sees rogue AI Despot commanding its own spaceship hurtling through the galaxy from one solar system to the next as the Galactic Federation sends wave after wave of alien enemies to stop your progress. Hull Rupture follows the premises of Konfa Games’ previous titles, though unfortunately I’m not familiar enough to comment on their continuation here.
Roguelikes are a saturated genre today, though management roguelikes less so. The iterative handling of fiddly supply chains, spreadsheets and menus feels less directly suited to the run-based repetition of a roguelike, where your progress and creations get wiped away on a regular basis. Nonetheless, we have seen some entries that have sought to synergise the two together effectively, most notably the excellent Against the Storm. Hull Rupture makes a good, though not (inter)stellar, case for the genre hybrid through its charmingly presented and handled management systems and less than compelling roguelike nature.
Hull Rupture’s first impression is a very positive one. It has an intricate, detail-oriented diorama presentation to its ship that is both surprisingly legible and easy on the eyes given its density. From the side, you see your ship laid out in a grid of different-sized rooms, each full of various modules and systems that can be zoomed into to watch all the little details and animations rendered in an expressive pixelated style. So much of the pleasure of a run in Hull Rupture is seeing your ship expand and add increasingly rare and elaborate modules till it becomes a grand, unruly machination of an iron ant farm filled with pink little humans hurriedly running from one task to the next.
Your ship [eventually] becomes a grand, unruly machination of an iron ant farm filled with pink little humans…
Indeed, humans, alongside energy, are a central resource for you to manage in Hull Rupture. It’s amusingly callous to see how they’re treated, ranging from being sent to work in the baby-making factory with all the crass visual innuendo you’d expect, to being ordered into a pit of acid to create fuel. In general, Hull Rupture has a loose, slapstick comedic energy to its presentation and tone. It borders a little too much on a Rick and Morty-style of both misanthropy and referentiality that I found a tad grating, but it does succeed in adding a level of personality to proceedings and making many of its modules and weapons a bit more memorable.
Given the level of chaos and amount of systems your ship accumulates, it’s also impressive how legible and readable Hull Rupture is, too. A good user interface is a massively underappreciated factor of game design (particularly given the best interfaces don’t draw attention to themselves), and while it takes a bit to learn Hull Rupture’s visual language, eventually its menus and resource management begin to purr. It is often a process of abstraction, in which the complexities and intricacies of systems are stripped away in favour of clear, simple information. This does remove some of the nuanced details of supply chains and productivity rates that I would agonise over in other management games, but the lack of friction here is admirable and supports the other components of its design effectively.
It also does a great job balancing its management and tower defence systems. Each run takes place through twenty different waves, with each wave seeing an assortment of alien invaders land upon your hull and make their way to the airlock to kill your supreme AI leader. The way you counter these waves is through (a remarkable variety of) turrets you can build on your ship’s exterior, as well as strategic decisions about how to build your ship out.
Have a turret whose projectiles bounce and do well in confined spaces? Build out your hull to funnel enemies into a kill zone. Are enemies getting to the airlock too quickly? Make them go on a merry up-and-down across your ship’s exterior to give your turrets the most time to take them out. It’s a balancing act that forces you to forgo a focus on spatial optimisation in favour of pathfinding tactics.
Hull Rupture’s management and tower defence systems therefore make for a solid foundation, but unfortunately this foundation is not properly utilised by its roguelike nature. While its Steam page categorises itself as a roguelite, I would personally contest that description given metaprogression is quite sparse and relegated to a small handful of different game modes, ship layouts and artefacts. Many of these modes and ships are also locked behind tricky achievements or the hard difficulty mode, and artefacts rarely meaningfully change gameplay given you can only have a set amount each run and are very modest in their impact. Getting another microchip every thirty seconds does not meaningfully change how I play.
This lack of variability between runs is something I critiqued in Ratatan recently too, though it’s far less egregious here. As roguelikes seemingly become the de facto form of the indie game, it’s beginning to feel like this particular element of the genre – that each run should feel materially different from the last – is being lost or watered down in favour of simple repetition. The best of the roguelike genre, whether that be Spelunky, Dwarf Fortress, Hades, Slay the Spire and on and on, are beloved because they are so varied and vast experientially, even while the looping run structure remains core to their gameplay.
Getting another microchip every thirty seconds does not meaningfully change how I play.
Sadly, many of my runs in Hull Rupture began to blur together quite quickly. I played a run of Hull Rupture almost every single night of the review period, but rarely more than one run at a time. This isn’t helped by the runs, especially when you don’t religiously use the fastest speed, feeling quite long and sluggish towards the end. While ship modules and new rooms are randomised, I still saw the same configuration of rooms consistently, and even started seeing a lot of the same random galaxy events appear.
Hull Rupture’s randomisation can also be quite punishing at times, with a series of bad room configurations or being unable to find the exact module you need invariably compounding into run-ending instances. This is exacerbated by many of the game modes that could add greater replayability being locked behind the hard difficulty mode. In general, Hull Rupture really could have benefited from a system of modifiers or greater unlocks to ensure the monotony of its (otherwise good) management systems didn’t set in too quickly.
That said, though, for folks deeply into this particular style of roguelike management and the pleasures it can afford, you may be more receptive to its sameness. This also shouldn’t take away from Hull Rupture’s genuine strengths elsewhere – its presentation, detail, UI and management systems all create a strong foundation, even if that foundation is not as capitalised on as it could have been.
Story via the original publisher. Read the original article
