What music do you expect from a 4X game? As regards historical 4X games, I predict a mixture of triumphal philharmonics and noodly period skits, as though wandering between the main floor and the giftshop in some museum of empire. If it’s a fantasy game, I think of choirs blaring wordlessly or singing doggerel Latin or Welsh. If it’s a sci-fi game, I think of choirs and synth.
I haven’t heard any choirs so far in Hard Void, though I may have encountered some synth. As regards the trailer and demo, it deals exclusively in heart-battering techno. It sounds like 3am in a club I wouldn’t have been old enough to get into, when this kind of stuff was in vogue. I can picture the bouncer glaring at me. Gosh, the bouncer sure has funny-shaped pupils. Mates, I fear the bouncer may be Lovecraftian.
The trancefloor soundtrack is one thing that interests me about Hard Void. Another is the perspective during conflict. Battles see the view zooming from your fleets in the foreground to the enemy in the middle distance, following each salvo to target. It’s stylised and a bit preposterous. It resists how today’s 4X games generally present combat. It reminds me more of Infinite Space on the DS, and of horizontal shmups.
The presentation is otherwise familiar, with a zoomable starmap of planet and fleet icons. The menus are functional, with cramped abbreviations and some rough bits at the time of writing, like research options appearing behind other windows. It can seem bare, but there’s surprising detail close-up – planets are dingy rolling surfaces with habitats stretched across them, and there are mottled 3D ship models with fancy effects such as warp bubbles. The spartan vibe elsewhere feels like a good fit for the dreary, mind-pulping music.
Lastly, there’s the cosmic horror stuff. Intriguingly (and in a possible nod to Warhammer 40,000), this is tethered to the game’s methods of faster-than-light travel. According to the backstory, several species on different worlds discover various FTL technologies simultaneously, ranging from the classic warp drive to “subspatial engines” and “wormhole generators”. This precipitates a race for dominance of the galaxy. It also, however, risks getting the attention of the Old Ones.
There are techs you might wish not to research, for the mind cannot bear too much reality. During my brief stab at the Steam demo, I had the choice of whether to tell my people about certain cosmic encounters, or cover it all up to preserve morale. I didn’t get much further than that, sadly, because the tutorial broke and I had to reload. There’s also tantalising talk of multiple dimensions – going by screens, you’ll be switching between them in parallel.
If you have already succumbed to the siren call of this forbidden lore, rejoice, for Hard Void is out now in early access on Steam. According to developer jejoxdev, the game’s key inspirations are Master Of Orion and Stellaris. You can certainly see that lineage in the choice of alien races (inc little grey men and lizard people), the promise of procedural narrative events, and the robustness of the ship design options. Jejoxdev also describes themself as a physicist, which makes me even more curious about the FTL/Cthulhu mash-up here. More weird 4X games made by actual physicists, sez I.
