So we at To the Pain have been playing a lot of the new Kickstarted space-based “roguelike-like,” FTL: Faster than Light, lately and I’m pleased to report that it’s as good as everyone says it is.

If you’re not familiar with the title, it’s a $9 indie game for PC and Mac on Steam or Good Old Games. It places you in the captain’s chair of a small scout ship for a deliberately generic Galactic Federation. The Federation has been riven by civil war and the rebels are winning; your ship has a cargo of secret information that could win the war, but first you have to cross the breadth of the galaxy to bring that data home, pursued all the while by the massive and implacable rebel fleet.

The gameplay is straightforward enough: you have a spaceship and a handful of crewmen, and you move from star system to star system across a randomly-generated galactic map, encountering procedurally-generated obstacles and enemies.. The ship has rooms that house its various important systems (engines, weapon, oxygen, etc.) and placing crewmen in those rooms enables them to man those stations, giving those systems a passive buff. You can move energy between systems on the fly – cutting power to sickbay to charge up your engines faster for a quick escape, for instance – and upgrade them with equipment, scrap metal, and even new crewmates harvested from defeated foes.

Consistent with the roguelike experience, the game is ruthlessly challenging; you will die, and die often, but there is a rudimentary progression mechanic: completing certain achievements or finishing quest chains will unlock new starting ships or better versions of existing ships, giving you a leg up the more you play.

For something that began life as a modestly-budgeted Kickstarter project, FTL is lushly-appointed and made with care; the sprite graphics, while hardly state of the art, are attractive and well-designed, the MIDI music is catchy, and the systems underlying the game – the combat, the leveling up, and so forth – are rock-solid. The writing is a couple of pleasantly-surprising notches above competent, painting in very broad strokes a sci-fi setting that is interesting for its careful generic-ness rather than in spite of it. In all the technical and aesthetic arenas, FTL is a pleasure to play.

But for all that, the game is not quite as good as it could have been, and the culprit is the genre. Roguelikes – which began, tautologically enough, with “Rogue” in the late 1970s – tried to capture some of the dungeon-crawling zaniness of early tabletop D&D, and made up for the primitive state of both hardware and game design by introducing wildly overpowering random elements. Play a roguelike as carefully as you wanted, bring your soundest tactics to the table, and there was still a significant nonzero chance of finding yourself locked into a room full of Balrogs and a lava floor. The point of a roguelike is to be unfair.

But FTL doesn’t need unfairness to be challenging. The game’s strategic and tactical elements are balanced on the head of a pin; you are constantly making difficult and significant choices about how to outfit your ship, what to upgrade, and so forth, but it can all be taken away by a random event that leaves half your crew dead. Rather than becoming addictive, it leads to a sense of mounting frustration; your victories feel hollow, because you know that however skillfully you played, you were also lucky enough not to get the random event that killed your ferocious Rockman security chief.

So while I like FTL, I don’t quite love it. Not yet. But I think that with the widespread attention it’s been getting, it’s probably only a matter of time until the mods start flooding in. And who knows? I might be writing one of them.

IN MEMORIAM: Simon, who gave his life boarding the Rebel flagship, and Dutch, who asphyxiated in the oxygen room.

Ottomon Solo