Adr1ft

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Capped Momentum

“ Adr1ft cheats its physics a bit.

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Thin Air

“ Adr1ft reveals itself as a two-hour idea stretched into a six-hour game.

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“ All of these tasks boil down to chasing the pointer on your compass.

Spaced Out

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From there, as you set out to find a way to not die alone in the cold darkness of space, Adr1ft justifies itself by doing a good job of creating a feeling of isolation and quiet desperation. The space suit you’re in functions more like a vehicle than an outfit, and in order to move around in zero-G you have to learn to deal with complete freedom of as well as momentum. It’s unfortunate that we’re not allowed to customize our keybinds, but the default setup works well enough, and gamepads are supported.Another limitation is that your suit is leaky, so you’re constantly on the verge of running out of air. Getting close enough to grab the comically plentiful oxygen canisters you need to stay alive is, at first, a good way to practice precision movement. (Grabbing one makes me think of Space Balls’ President Scroob every single time.) Oxygen is also used as propellent for your suit, so the more you move, the faster it burns. Failure to refill your supply before heading out on a long trip between station fragments causes a suitably unsettling, gasping death by asphyxiation.So slowly moving from place to place without running out of air is about 90 percent of what you’re doing here. It feels a lot like the underwater level of every first-person game of the 2000s, except there are no enemies, which is appropriate for a game like this. You’re not totally safe, though: Adr1ft does eventually fold in some hazards to avoid, such as arcing electricity from damaged sci-fi stuff, but it’s handled poorly. Beams of energy feel starkly out of place in this near-future setting, and often seemed to hit me (draining oxygen) when I appeared to be nowhere near them. Maybe that has to do with not having a clear idea of where my body was because of the bulky suit.On the other hand, the bits and pieces of story that are presented in audio logs and emails from your former crewmates are all well written and acted, and some of the characters who wax philosophical about life and death in space have genuinely interesting things to say. However, having finished Adr1ft, I still don’t fully understand what exactly happened that caused the station to break apart or why – I just know who was responsible for it. Maybe that answer is floating out in space somewhere. It’s all a little awkward, too, since our semi-mute character clearly knows exactly what happened the whole time, but we have to figure out the mystery while embodying her.While it dramatically overstayed its welcome, I still couldn’t help but be impressed whenever I floated outside the ruined station. Adr1ft revels in the beauty of viewing the Earth from orbit, and that is its single best quality. At certain points we see the surface lit up by the lights of civilization, and even tinged green by aurora borealis. So at least it leaves us some awe-inspiring sights to remember it by.