Ten seconds ago, my mission to infiltrate a spaceship in Heat Signature was going quite well. I’d taken out almost every guard — all I had left to do was sneak up behind the last one (who just so happened to be my mission target), complete the set in the next 60 seconds or so, and then the spaceship would be mine. Then the guard turned around as I was creeping up behind him, shot me with a stun gun, carried me to an airlock and threw me out into space.
Now, I’m careening helplessly through the void as a countdown reminds me that I’ve got about twenty seconds of oxygen left; oh, and only thirty seconds to go before failing the mission. Yeah, not likely that’s going to ma- and that’s when I saw the ‘remote control your pod’ blinking in the corner of my screen. No way. No way.
Twenty seconds later, I’ve remote-controlled my breaching pod to come over and scoop me up before I passed out, and I’m boosting madly back towards the ship I’d just been so unceremoniously ejected from. With less than ten seconds to go before mission failure and no room for subtlety, I manage to somehow slam the pod into the same damn airlock I’d been tossed out of and, as the timer started flashing red, I burst through the doors and took a shot at the guard as he whirled around and...mission complete.
That exact sequence happened less than thirty minutes into my first play of Heat Signature. It almost seems counterproductive to say anything else about Heat Signature – you almost certainly already know if this is a game for you or not. That said, for anyone still on the fence, Heat Signature is a game about infiltrating a variety of procedurally-generated spaceships and completing various missions. There’s a bigger picture involving the liberation of bases from various domineering factions, and every character you play has their own personal goals and motivations, but don’t be fooled — at its heart, Heat Signature is a puzzle game.
Every time you successfully rendezvous with an airlock and the ship opens up before you — that’s the puzzle you’ve got to solve. Do you have the tools to deal with it? There’s a lot more to this game, but it doesn’t really seem like it. Various enemy types and abilities, various environmental hazards, new and better weapons and abilities — all of those are just components in the jigsaw that awaits you with every mission. And that’s honestly the best thing about Heat Signature — the fact that each mission is effectively a giant Rube Goldberg machine of possibilities, and you parachute into the chaos with whatever set of tools you want and set it off. It’s a phenomenal game, and a masterful example of how to do a lot with a little.
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Arjun Sukumaran
(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)