Time From Earth
The final game for the first ever Pixel Ghost Week™ on Playdate Unofficial is Time From Earth, a narrative Pulp game about a voyage to the stars. You’re an intern on a ship traveling to four new planets to find one that can sustain human life because we’ve basically overpopulated and destroyed the one we have now. Seems kind of dark, but, like all Pixel Ghost games, it has a message of hope and love.
The game is broken up into twelve days, and the game saves in between each day (along with going back to the title screen?) so you can come back later. A day isn’t more than about ten minutes long, and you’ll spend your time going around the ship, talking to everyone, planting vegetables, and helping fix any problems that arise. There are more problems than it feels like there should be? A mystery! You can also look at the giant tree that provides a lot of the ship’s oxygen, and there’s a viewing area where you can see the stars. Even though looking at the stars had no immediate benefit, just like petting the dog… I did it every single day. It makes you feel something. Small? Human.
The science behind the game might be a little iffy, but I’m not a professional scientist so it didn’t bother me too much. How fast was this ship going to hit four planets in twelve days, though? That part does seem unlikely, especially if this game is set only 30 years in the future. We haven’t even put a person on Mars yet.
And one thing I do know is that if we’re going on a space mission to four hopefully Earth-like planets, there’s no way we’re calling them Planet #1, Planet #2, Planet #3, and Planet #4. They’re getting – at the very least – some silly nicknames among the crew. Like, “Well, looks like Barbenheimer was a bust, let’s head on to Mordor.”
The crew characterizations were my favorite part, though. There’s the chef that makes a variety of vegetarian dishes. There’s a historian that’ll tell you a fictionalized version of the future that feels almost too optimistic right now. The captain, doing her best. The engine man. The guy in charge of plants. Everyone has their own useful specialty, just like a real space mission. And you, the intern, just trying to help out and earn some college credit maybe. Seeing them grow to like or at the very least accept you over the course of the mission was nice.
Since it’s only a 12-day mission, the stakes didn’t feel as high as some other sci-fi media I’ve experienced like Interstellar or Xenoblade Chronicles X. One lady misses her cat, and some of the crew members miss and finally start to appreciate the Earth in a way that it’s implied they didn’t before. Even when the engines don’t work as well as they should, there’s never real peril. Space is a setting where one small mistake can have catastrophic consequences. In Time From Earth, you just fall a little behind schedule.
Like other Pixel Ghost games, though, the message is what’s most important. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the failure of the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” ad campaign that was drilled into the heads of schoolchildren when I was younger. Wonder if that’s still a thing? I didn’t understand at the time (and from what I could tell, no one else did, either) that these were the steps you should take in order. First, reduce your use of single-serve and non-biodegradable styrofoam, and then reuse your plastic milk jugs as planters in your garden. Recycling is good, but should be done after you’ve made your best efforts to reduce and reuse first. Now, our recycling is sent to China on a giant boat, sent back because they already have too much, and dumped into the ocean. We did the things we were told would save the planet, and it didn’t. So now we’re off to find another planet to colonize, to destroy? Is that right? Do we deserve it? These are some of the questions explored in Time From Earth.
I went to this place in Denver a few months ago called The Inventing Room. It’s like a Willy Wonka-meets-science food experience, and… it wasn’t great. Most of the food was freeze-dried something and then also dipped again in food-grade liquid nitrogen to make it really cold so you steam out of your mouth. Scares the kids, kind of fun, but also kind of dumb. But there were some parts, where we imagined the kinds of foods we’d still have left in 100 years, that stuck with me. Meat? We won’t really do meat. It’s terrible for the Earth and not really that great for humans, at least the way it’s currently farmed and processed. Fruits and vegetables will be limited to a small assortment of easily grown superfoods. There will be a focus on foods with a long shelf life. What I’m saying is that the future doesn’t always look that great, but we’ll probably keep surviving. Carl Sagan said, “The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.” I still believe that, even with *waves arms all around* this going on every day.
Pixel Ghost makes games that are optimistic. When I see something like The Last of Us sweep award shows, make a ton of money, and be used as the only example of “games as art,” I get bummed out. I don’t want to play The Last of Us. It’s so depressing. I want games like Time From Earth, where it recognizes that humans have flaws and different ideas and determination and a willingness to do what it takes to make the world better for our children’s children. It’s a simplified sci-fi story in a limited engine on a console that only has a one-color screen, but it says a lot about humans. It has typos and line breaks in the middle of words, and I went out the wrong door on the last day and glitched the game out so badly that I had to reload my last save because it wouldn’t let me talk to the person I needed to. But so what? I played, loved, and wrote about all the Pixel Ghost games in a row because they have something to say, and that something makes me want to be a better person. Thank you, Ollie! I hope you never stop making games.