Beyond the Sun
June 26, 2021 | ≈ 556 words | Beyond the Sun
Thoughts on Beyond the Sun
They told me it was a tech tree game. Everyone. Every review. Roony nooner. They all had me expect a tech tree.
What I actually got was tech colonization.
So in games that actually have a tech tree, you level like your basic abilities that are pretty shite, but then later, these basic abilities “fuse” or “give you the required prerequisites” for a much better and cooler ability that you can only get after learning those previous specific basic abilties. But then a couple of those cool abilities can give you access an even cooler ability later on, and that’s like what I imagine Civ games to be like or Age of Empires or Starcraft or…Civ…any other game that has a tech tree. You gotta research early stuff to get to the reward of the late game good stuff.
Beyond the Sun rewards figuring out how to get tech with…figuring out how to get more tech.
It takes all the fun creativity and imagination of getting a cool build, with a dry, soulless grind of getting resources to “upgrade” these techs, because the only thing on these techs are:
- Resources
- Actions that let you get resources
- Cool Passives that never ever appear
There’s no cool build. None of the abilities actually upgrade into a cool ability. There’s no thematic sauce. They all feel disjointed. Nothing goes into another thing exactly how you want.
However, there is a second board with some serious stuff and oh boy does this second board have some seriously spicy serious stuff if I say so myself.
The “main” board that has the tech tree actions are in service of this smaller side board area control game. When you control an area for the first time, you get a little bonus like resources. Or actions that let you get a resource. Huh, kind of like…the big “tech tree” hogging all the attention. These areas you control can also be colonized by getting rid of your pawns on the planet to permanently place it into your…tableau…giving you a cool passive that-
-might be the entire point of this game? Spicy.
This little side board contains the missing intrique and discovery and development that the main tech tree lacks. It recontextualizes the exact same resource-gathering-monotany into a more interesting and thematic package. And the benefit is that you get cool passives, like a real Civ game. Neat! These planets you spend multiple turns colonizing to gain their special powers or end-game scoring bonuses require a similar quality and quantity of effort as researching up a tech tree. In the context of this game, the “tech tree” serves to give you more efficient means to get these special powers on these planets.
A tech tree should spark your imagination and give you that feeling of wanting to try a cool build or wanting to get to a certain tech. It’s genuinely disappointing when this very large and visually impressive slab of cardboard pretends to have one, but luckily there is a smaller little spicy piece of cardboard that manages to colonize that feeling (spicy).
(The joke is that the game still uses the word colonization in a game that doesn’t need to use that word and I’m misusing it in a similarly uncomfortable way ha ha ha.)