Pity the poor Kerbal. His expression remains passive as his hastily bodged-together ship slingshots around a planetoid and sails off course. Fatally. Kerbal Space Program is a wonderful sandbox that lets you build ships to navigate the universe. It also has these delightful moments of existential dread as ships flake apart, run out of fuel or just sail off into the endless darkness, never to be recovered.
With Starfield just around the corner, I have been touring space games to enjoy a variety of terrors. Star Wars: Squadrons looks fairly close to Starfield’s dogfights, and proves a good place to start. I soon find myself cowering as laser fire drums loudly against the canopy. Dashboards spark, alarms blare and desperate attempts to redirect ship power to my shields prove futile.
Space is a perfect setting for games. Dashboards map nicely to game pads, keyboards and flight sticks. What’s more, starfighters are fragile beasts. I rarely feel as vulnerable in games as I do in a cockpit under fire. Shields fizzle out – – enemy ships lay siege to the exposed hull – It’s almost a relief when the ship explodes in a puff of superheated gas. This isn’t just a heath bar sliding to zero: it’s a catastrophe.
Space games can deliver so much more than the panic of a swift death, too. The task of exploring a solar system can create moments of awe and terror. In Outer Wilds you blast off in a wonky little vessel to assemble logs scattered across nearby moons and planets, but quickly encounter strange, disconcerting interstellar phenomena.