Game Review: Seedship

Game: Seedship

Developer: John Ayliff

Platform: android, apple, mobile, online

As I’ve I mentioned before I love playing mobile games on my commute. So I thought it was high time that I start reviewing the games that have captured my heart.

One of my friends introduced me to this game and at first, I wasn’t really sold on it. But the game was free in the app store so that was the deciding factor (I’m cheap I know). The game itself is entirely text-based. There are no extra graphics or effects that distract from the game itself. The only real graphics around are with the display: you can adjust the screen so it’s either white text on black background or black text on a white background.

In the game, a catastrophe has hit humanity. As a last-ditch effort to save the human race, 1000 people were loaded onto a ship with a database of all the science and culture humanity has created. That ship, the seedship, is you.

You play as the artificial intelligence guiding the ship and trying to find a new home for humanity. Along the way you have to judge a planet for its suitability to be a new home for your cryogenically frozen humans on board, try to preserve your databases of cultural and scientific information, maintain your equipment so that you get accurate readings of the planets you’re searching, and deal with the dangers that come from flying through uncharted space.

I’ve played through it at least a dozen times now and every single time, I’ve found something new. Even scenarios I’ve run into before have had a different outcome: sometimes that’s in my favor and sometimes it’s really not. For example, you can get lucky and run into a repair droid that will fix your ship up right as new but sometimes that repair droid is so degraded by time it will just hurt you even more. As the AI on board, you have to make that call if the reward is worth the risk.

The game is filled with decisions like that from charting the right course to ultimately deciding what planet would make the best home for humanity. You can judge it based on its atmosphere, temperature, gravity, water sources, resources, and other traits like planets that may have like another civilization living there. Every step of your journey will impact the outcome.

If you land on the perfect planet but your scientific data base was wiped out during a freak astroid storm during your long flight then even in perfect conditions your humans are going to quite rise to the level that they did before they had to flee Earth. If your cultural databases been destroyed well there are definitely going to be some problems with government, happiness, and religion. Your landing and construction equipment will dictate how well your people are able to survive once you get to the right planet. If your construction equipment has been destroyed there’s not going to be much to help them build and if you’re lending equipment has gone down you’re probably going to lose a lot of your colonist on the way down to setting home.

For a simple, text-based, and free game this is absolutely a blast. I’m kind of obsessed with it and tend to pull it up and see how fast I can get through but even now after playing dozens and dozens of times I still run into new scenarios and new planets and new endings. It has a ton of replay value and it’s super quick to pick up and go. The gameplay is simple and you don’t get to know what impact your choice will have. They don’t even always result in the same thing. Sometimes pushing the engine past its safe limit to escape the blackhole causes no damage at all and sometimes during that exact same thing means you suddenly lose 250 of the sleeping humans on board.

Each playthrough only takes 10 minutes or so which makes it a fun quick game to get through and a great game for if you’re waiting in line somewhere or just need to kill a couple minutes was something entertaining.

I’ll definitely be checking out what else the developers are creating because a story they’ve built with this simple game is absolutely amazing. Are you ready to take control of the fate of humanity?