A week ago, on March 25, the FTL-like card-based simulator of the Space Food Truck was successfully released from Steam Early Access.
A two-man team with the misleading name Desura Y8 Games (so "there is only one left" or is it a hint that there were originally three of them, but one left?) Has created an excellent survival game in space, which is quite suitable for the role of the first experience in the collectible card genre for those who have not yet tasted its juicy delights.

Why did I suddenly decide to write about a humble indie game (and even after only a couple of weeks with a review by Gremlins, Inc. )? After 40 hours in the Gremlins, I wanted something new, so I decided to continue watching the collective streams of Total Bisquit, where they play board and card Friv games as a company. After watching all the episodes of their hilarious matches in Secret Hitler for almost a day in a row (and they look more intense than most thrillers), I stumbled upon a test flight of this company in a space van, delivering gourmet food to anywhere in the galaxy.

I wanted to write about it because there are a lot of indie Y8 games, including CCG, but not everyone is able to really interest, offer something new and clearly explain the thrill of this new one. Space food truck won me over first of all with its integrity: visual, gameplay and narrative. Not every game is capable of turning a set of abstract rules into something so intuitively understood and simple.

The first to catch the eye are the kawaii characters, the lamp atmosphere of imminent death and the funny world of the future, somewhat reminiscent of Futurama.

Or the universe of Alisa Selezneva, if you like, the cook is generally the spitting image of Gromozek, both in appearance and in character. The deliberately down-to-earth mission of our heroes - not saving the universe, but small business, ordinary fast food with a hyperdrive - does not detract from interest, but, on the contrary, fascinates with the lack of pathos and "the life of the middle class in the 31st century."

What kind of plot could there be? Four friends in a van prepare and deliver orders, troubles fall on their heads at every turn, they are attacked by pirates and alien invaders, space parasites and monsters, meteorites and space debris overcome. But even through rare notifications accompanying game events, the game manages to draw a curious world with graceful strokes and breathe life into it.

The four-handed cook, who cannot be dancing, because he is carrying the entire ship, the hand parasite Chelsea, which one of the crew members warmed up from loneliness, evil doubles that appear out of nowhere and rustle silently in the corner, refusing to talk to you (here Lem's stories come to mind) - all this helps to get used to the soul of the crew of your van and to take the hardships pouring down on it to heart.

The game is cooperative, ideally you play four - each for his own crew member, but you can play with a smaller squad, including one, controlling everyone in turn. I completed the game alone and did not notice any issues.

Even in a co-op, players take turns, observing each other's moves, deciding how to jointly solve a particular problem, so the differences are small. There are no elements of "social deduction" (in other words, "Mafia"), that is, none of the players is a fascist, not a Cylon or a mafia, there are no secret roles, everyone honestly works together for a common goal. However, the studio is threatening to add a sabotage mode in the near future.

All four characters have completely different functions and abilities. The captain controls the ship and makes sure that every turn the ship arrives on a new planet to renew the stock of available cards. If he does not succeed, the decks of characters will quickly become clogged with garbage and it will become extremely difficult for them to do something.

The cook prepares the dishes to be delivered - there are only three of them, deliver everything to the address - complete the game. But this is not nearly as easy as it seems. Also, the cook has the most tools for clearing the deck of weak cards and helping colleagues. Often times, the chef has nothing to cook, since not all the ingredients have been found yet, so most of the time he runs around the compartments and helps others with their problems.

Despite the fact that all crew members are necessary to complete the mission, it is the engineer who is the one on whom the fate of the entire team often hangs.

He fixes broken doors and holes in the skin, rebuilds force shields and increases the volume of the hyper engine. If the unsuccessful move of the other heroes is unpleasant, but not fatal, then an engineer who could not fix anything on his move can easily lead the whole game to its sad end.

The game process is simple, but addictive. The character receives 5 random cards from his personal deck, if he is lucky - there will be cards that allow him to perform an action (the captain - to start the ship and fly to a new system, the engineer - to fix something, and so on) and cards with which this action can be charged (cards of energy, mana, earth - this is familiar from other CCGs). Special cards allow you to correct the situation when the necessary action cards are not available - try to draw another one from the deck or the hand of another character, and so on. When all that is possible has been played, the current cards are discarded, and a new “hand” is drawn from the deck for the next turn.

Scandals of characters that need to be brought together in one room (and this requires a special pass card), breakdowns, a parasite card crawling into the deck - in short, a flurry of troubles. When we arrive at a new system, even if we just fly through it without stopping, we receive an event associated with it. And they, too, are almost always worthless. Sometimes we can get fuel for free, a few repair points or information about what awaits us in other systems, but more often these are pirates, time anomalies, wormholes, alien invaders attacking the planet and you at the same time. Job is full of pus, and he would not have envied the good fortune of this crew.

Obviously, the game is trying to kill you in every possible way. If you thought it was a cheerful story about a carefree sushi delivery, then you were cruelly mistaken. Basically, you deal with crises that come one after another, overlapping each other. While the door was being repaired, half the ship was sucked into a black hole, ran down the corridor for the parasite - they stumbled upon a two-meter xenomorph crawling out of the ventilation. But this is not desperate. It's fun. Because Space Food Truck, unlike FTL, does not clamp you completely to death and does not press with time frames or restrictions on moves. At the highest difficulty ("Spicy Thai"), I could not find the components for the first, most elementary recipe for 80 moves, but I managed to upgrade the shields and build a more or less strong deck. Which, of course, did not stop me from dying right after the delivery of the second recipe.

Some players complained about the imbalance of events - they say, there are much more negative ones. Someone clearly did not understand that the balance lies precisely in the fact that they are all negative, and positive should have become a pleasant surprise, a rare exception. And this, oddly enough, is encouraging.

When you know what will come to you right now, you don’t wonder if you’ll be lucky, you don’t get upset when you receive a pack of hungry googles instead of a chest of gold. You have not lived for the first day, you know that there are no chests of gold - not here, not anywhere else. There are no princes and magic frogs, no sane bosses and salaries that do not destroy your self-respect. There is only pain and suffering, which, if you're lucky, replace each other, diluting the monotony.

There is a closet in the van, two meters of personal space and a purple loaf-sized larva that you can call Chelsea and think that she loves you in return.

Already the second playthrough on medium difficulty was successful for me, and I was afraid that now I would catch the feeling that appeared after 40 hours in the Gremlins - you figured out the game, understood how to squeeze the maximum out of the available cards and then just act on the machine, the game no longer gives you new sensations and does not challenge you. But I still started a new game on the highest difficulty and made sure that the interest did not go anywhere. Passage in such Friv games is far from the end, procedural generation and variability of events, which is given by the appropriate random here, make each new run unique. Naturally, if you play with other people, the sensations become even more vivid and much more varied.

At the end of the turn, all the character's cards are discarded and a new party is drawn, but before we have time to see what we will have to deal with on the next turn, we are already being dragged to the next character. I would prefer that we were given time and the transition was carried out by the button "go to the next character." Perhaps these are all the troubles of a single passage, because if you play as one character in a co-op, no one will bother you to stare at your new cards, even if all other people's moves.

Even when you manage to probe some systems ahead of time with the help of a reconnaissance map, it only tells the name of the event that you run into. "Intuition", "Inspirational Speeches", etc. It is not said whether this event is good or not, it remains only to guess and remember for the future. This, of course, is more of a feature than a bug, and it makes sense, but at first it is discouraging, because intelligence provides zero information. But at least you already know that the rare ingredient is not there, it is said in plain text.

Procedural generation often connects star systems with such close lines that they almost merge and it becomes difficult to understand how many nodes are there and where they are, and you cannot zoom in or rotate the galaxy map. This has never become a big problem, but here it is clearly worth coming up with something.

To be honest, I did not expect that I would like this laconic and bright Y8 game so much. A simple and understandable concept, implemented really talentedly and with the same sincere, effortless humor, which conquers from the very beginning. If you do decide to fight hunger in the galaxy, pat Chelsea for me.

PS I died twice and played the Y8 game three times. The last two times - on the highest difficulty Thai Hot, and so far she still does not let me go.