Game Review: Faster Than Light

FTL opens with a beautiful space-themed airy soundtrack with, with high and light tones giving a sense of mystical adventure as you load up the new game screen. For those who haven’t played FTL yet, it is an indie space adventure game where you manage your crew and ship in order to get to the final “sector” of the game. The game is divided into 8 sectors, with each sector being either hostile, friendly or nebula. Within each sector, you must guide your ship through a number of jump points in order to reach the end of the sector, where you can jump to the next one. In the final sector, you must fight the rebel flagship, which you have been tasked since the beginning to destroy, as only you have the information that the destruction of the rebel flagship will end the rebellion once and for all.

Even though this narrative of your ship being the only one with the information to defeat the rebels is fairly straightforward, there is an underlying tension that pervades throughout all playthroughs of FTL. You are not the good guy. In a few random events in the game, you may see the rebels hindering civilians or harassing merchants, yet the vast majority of events show the rebels helping civilians and the federation oppressing them. Because of the ostensible simplicity of the quest your ship is sent upon combined with the mystical soundtrack and overt hostility of the rebels, it is easy for a player to fall into a routine of moving throughout the sectors and gathering supplies without critically analyzing their own place in this space conflict.

The area in which this tension becomes most clear is the scrap reward system. Scrap is the most important resource your ship can collect and is the driving force behind all upgrades your ship can get. In many events throughout the game, the player can choose to rob civilians or harm noncombatant rebels for more scrap. FTL not only incentivizes the player to choose the “immoral” decision, but almost requires it if the player wants to succeed. FTL is not an incredibly easy game to beat, even when you choose all the rewards that give you as much scrap as possible. A playthrough of FTL where the player chooses all the morally superior decisions is near impossible, especially on the higher difficulties.

A game of FTL has two possible outcomes. You either destroy the flagship and crush the rebellion, or die and the rebellion succeeds. Although as a player, your every instinct is to beat the game by destroying the flagship, the more closely you look into the world surrounding the game, the clearer it is that the “good” ending is to be destroyed by the rebels. Yet, even armed with this knowledge, a player will always be driven towards completion and destruction of the rebels.

FTL tells a dark and important story right under the surface of its beautiful and adventure filled veneer. It tells a story of an oppressive regime, yet without looking in depth we see the story of a hero fighting against the morally reprehensible rebels. It tells the story of ruthless agent bringing damning knowledge to destroy a righteous cause, yet we see the hero doing what is absolutely necessary in order to do what they know is right. The civilians and rebels that were killed in the process just for more scrap are just casualties of war because in game we never face any repercussions for acting with complete amorality. Perhaps the fact that so many of people have played through this game without ever truly considering the moral reprehensibility of their actions is a demonstration that even on the wrong side of a conflict, it is altogether to easy to see yourself in the right.