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Jumplight Odyssey

Jumplight Odyssey: A roguelite colony sim with inspiration from both FTL and Two Point

The team behind Armello has another project, alongside Solium Infernum coming up.

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The team behind the tabletop fairy-tale board game, Armello has a lot going on right now. League of Geeks is hard at work on its next strategy game, the hellish Solium Infernum, but despite this being the case, the team has decided to double-down on its production, to create an entire second game as well. Known as Jumplight Odyssey, this project is regarded as a roguelite colony sim that is best described as FTL: Faster Than Light meets Two Point Hospital, and ahead of the game entering Early Access next year, as part of its unveiling, we've been given a first-hand look at what it will be serving up.

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For those who are wondering what FTL meets Two Point Hospital amounts to, picture a cosmic title where you have to evade a pursuing threat by constantly making lightspeed jumps to further systems, all while managing and improving a spaceship full of the last remnants of your people. The storyline basically sees a malevolent and terrifying faction known as the Zutopans, destroying your home planet, and in a bid to save the last few members of her people, protagonist Princess Euphoria orders her command ship to retreat and flee towards the promising Forever Star. This isn't quite as simple as Princess Euphoria would hope however, as the Zutopans, led by the cruel Admiral Voltan is chasing after them, and the journey toward the Forever Star is chock full of hazards and dangers to navigate as well, including merciless and deadly space pirates.

So with all of this in mind, you can get the gist of what the gameplay is offering. You have to constantly make quick jumps to the next system, all while gathering as many resources and items from the current system you find yourself in, in an effort to expand and improve your ship. This can mean creating new rooms for food production, or places for the crew to rest, or even improving your defensive capabilities, but the one thing that remains true all throughout is that this is not a game where you are on the offensive. You are constantly facing threats and having to manage problems, and this could be as obvious as the impending and chasing Zutopans, pirates who are attempting to board your vessel, or even having to overcome environmental hazards like black holes or the extreme cold in systems without a star at their centre.

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Jumplight Odyssey
Jumplight OdysseyJumplight OdysseyJumplight Odyssey

Handling and managing these problems will eat up a lot of your attention, and you have to treat each issue with a bit of care, as there is a bleeding effect. What I mean by this is that you only have a specific number of crew members, each of whom bring something to the table and are connected to others in some form. So, for example, if your ace pilot dies in battle or from being sucked out of an airlock, you will be lacking in defensive capabilities, and your crew morale will take a hit as that pilot's wife could be grieving, and so forth. These are little things that are crucial because you have to keep tabs on your overall Hope, something that will decrease as terrible events and occurrences pop up, and will determine how much faith your crew has in you. They could even initiate a mutiny if things get really dire.

And this is where the roguelite features come into effect. Jumplight Odyssey is not meant to be crushingly difficult and each issue is designed in such a way that it can be overcome, but at the same time the bleeding effect will likely cause some of your runs to fail. But that's one of the core design efforts, as the Memories system allows you to learn and improve upon your mistakes and grow as a leader.

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As for the ship building mechanics, this has been designed in such a way that it resembles Two Point and Evil Genius. It has a straightforward, simple to understand design where you can customise a lot of the ship's internals, deciding on where to build rooms, place decorations, move things around and so on. Only the command centre and bridge, elevators, and the Jumplight Drive cannot be customised significantly, as these are pre-placed facilities that are used for navigation and movement around the ship. The Drive in particular needs to be protected most of all, as if this is destroyed or broken, you won't be able to move between systems and will be a sitting duck for your pursuers.

Jumplight OdysseyJumplight OdysseyJumplight Odyssey
Jumplight OdysseyJumplight OdysseyJumplight Odyssey

Assuming you do make it to the Forever Star and effectively beat the game, League of Geeks has already thought about what comes next. Once this is done, you will unlock Endless Mode for a non-stop challenge, and Augments to change the length of a run or to tweak certain factors. And this is just with the Early Access launch in mind, which will be on PC in 2023. Following this, the developer plans to spend around a year in Early Access, before also launching on PS5 and Xbox Series in 2024, and then shifting to post-launch support and content. Needless to say, League of Geeks has a lot on their plate.

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