This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, but it’s a pet peeve of mine when games don’t treat space with the kind of respect it deserves. I get it: we go there so often now – in games – that maybe it’s safe to assume it’s no longer a big deal, that it’s fine to use as a backdrop, a setting, a plot device, without giving it much more thought than that. But as much as I get that assumption, it’s still wrong. Space is a big deal. The biggest deal. Space is a unifying, almighty dream and total existential nightmare all in one, an end goal and a gateway to an even bigger one. It’s important! The appropriate attitudes to assume when considering space are awe, majesty, reverence, maybe a bit of fear, a touch of dread, even a righteous fury at the thought of the most egalitarian concept may be colonised before we plebs even get a whiff of the collective blank slate. It is infinite and you are not only finite but, like, very, very finite. “You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space”. And so space is anything – literally anything – but a prop.
And wow, Jett: The Far Shore doesn’t half get that. After a good few hours with it, what I know of Jett is that it’s a game very much about the bigness of space, the bigness of travelling through it and across it, the momentousness of both location and occasion. (In fact, it is so frequent in reminding you how overtly about space’s bigness it is, that I am almost considering changing my mind, and thinking maybe it would be better if we just did the whole “space looks cool” thing and moved on – but I’ll come back to that.)
In Jett you are Mei, a scout and pilot of a very nifty little ship, your “jett”, and also what people around you keep referring to as a “mystic”, although it’s not entirely clear what that means just yet. Your planet, a mixture of rural, spiritualist village folk where you live and oppressed-looking worker drones over at the “cosmodrome” (Superbrothers seem to borrow from a lot of cultures, but there is a particular kind of Sovietness that lingers), is bleak and sparse. It faces some kind of extinction event, only alluded to via euphemism and knowing glance. But your people have also seemingly been called to, by some outer space being known as the hymnwave, and a few select folk – including you – have been deigned of the chance to jet off and investigate, travelling to, scouting, and preparing this new world – “the far shore” – for your people’s fresh start.
