Mini-review: Redshirt

My friends were very excited to tell me about the game Redshirt, a new game for Mac & PC by Positech, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who knows me: the game combines the plot of Star Trek with the interface of Facebook. If only there was a soundtrack by Weird Al and voice acting by Tom Hiddleston (that’s right, Benedict Cumberbatch is OLD NEWS), you’d have the game of my dreams.

• REDSHIRTS: all of the excitement of Facebook, IN…. SPACE….

In Redshirt, you play a character of your own design, working your way up the corporate ladder of terrible jobs on a remote space station. There is something sketchy happening on the station—people are disappearing, things are breaking, and people are dying on away team missions much, much too frequently. Your role, however, is to befriend the correct people, satisfy your girl/boy/genderless alien-friend by liking their statuses enough times, plan events, and suck up to potential bosses—and if you do all that, maybe you can make enough money to not starve, and also meet someone who can get you off this crazy station.

Once I figured out how the game worked, Redshirt was pretty fun. It’s funny to deal with the situation that most of the “exciting” action happens off-screen while you are attending safety seminars and writing messages. There are a lot of options, which is impressive: there’s a ton of variation in the messages you send and receive, and a lot of openness to the plot, which probably explains the $20 price tag—it’s re-playable (or re-startable, if you accidentally piss off everyone on the station, which I did, every single time). There were a few bugs that were pretty annoying, and sometimes it seemed like people were getting mad at me for no reason—but that happens to me on real Facebook, too, and I think the frustration factor sort of added to the environment. I enjoyed Redshirt, and I thank my friends for recommending it, and knowing me all too well.