Heavenly Bodies Review (PC)

As common folk, we rarely see the other side of the cosmos. A telescope can show us a billion stars—a spectacular space shuttle launch, even. But, if there’s one thing that it can’t reveal to us, it’s the events that orbit the inside of a spacecraft. In a book, it fools us into believing that everything is a slick and coherent piece of work, and that astronauts are the all-seeing professionals of intergalactic science. But in Heavenly Bodies, it tells us a different story—a tale that isn’t quite as elegant or heroic. It reminds us that, just on the other side of the galaxy, gravity is a harbinger of chaos, and astronauts are mere subjects in a ruthless game.

For the record, Heavenly Bodies isn’t the best place to call home if you’re an avid space enthusiast. Unlike your common sci-fi adventure, it doesn’t make you feel like a competent astronaut, nor does it humble you as you carefully navigate the far reaches of space. Rather, it forces you to believe that you’re a complete moron. And it does this by making every single task an absolute nightmare to solve. See, Heavenly Bodies doesn’t hand you the power to swagger your moon boots around, but instead tasks you with operating two arms simultaneously with two separate controls. It also asks that you work with other soulless puppets to complete various technical jobs, several of which require all of your limbs, and more patience than a brain surgeon. But, more on that shortly.

If you’re familiar with games like To a T, Baby Steps, or Manual Samuel, then you ought to feel right at home with Heavenly Bodies. Similar in design, the game invites you to board a space vessel, embark on an epic intergalactic journey, and to explore perilous places that harbor countless puzzles and problematic components. As a cosmonaut, you have to operate all of your limbs to navigate a zero-gravity field of stars, and sift through a collection of stress-inducing objects that serve only to deflate your ego. And yes, this is a rage game. Thanks for setting the trend, Bennett.

While Heavenly Bodies is designed to be atrociously frustrating even at the best of times, there is a great set of bones to it. From the outside looking in, it’s a perilous experience that has all of the makings of a disastrous rat race. But at its core, it’s a surprisingly entertaining affair that manages to balance out its bad eggs with some genuinely interesting features and creative puzzle sequences. Take the setting, for example. While it is comically and visually daunting, it does, in all fairness, bring a lot of technical polish to the table, with some great level design and a solid seventies-inspired touch.

The mechanics, being at the heart of the experience, are a loose canon. As you don’t have one problem, but a handful that bend to a world without gravity, you have a lot to deal with. With nothing but your arms, you must outmaneuver floating obstacles, latch onto footholds, and complete seemingly ordinary routine tasks, all whilst working with your companions to prevent the worst possible scenario from happening. To that end, you don’t have a lot of leeway. But what you do have, thankfully, is time. And that’s the saving grace in this world: the fact that you have the power to make the same mistakes several times over.

If there is a point to Heavenly Bodies, it’s to prove that intergalactic maintenance can be a doddle. In the case of the campaign’s floaty operational exploits, you have a series of challenges to overcome, most of which require you to orchestrate daring missions, as well as assemble equipment and other technically advanced solar instruments. On paper, it sounds easy. But if there is one thing that Heavenly Bodies isn’t, it’s an easy game. Nothing is bolted down, and everything that you touch is perfectly (and annoyingly) capable of knocking you back to your original position. It’s your job to confront gravity (or a lack thereof) and to see that Earth’s plans for spearheading an innovative space program comes to fruition. Again, a lot easier said than done.

Needless to say that you can have a lot of fun with a game like Heavenly Bodies. Provided that you can muster up the strength and patience to see beyond the epic failures, you can quite easily spend a good deal of time here and simply bathe in the lunacy of it all. It’ll probably make you sweat bullets and lose your sanity, but if you can stick with it long enough, then there’s every chance that you’ll find something that’s worth holding out for here. Will you lose a couple of friends along the way? Maybe. Will you spend twenty minutes shouting the word “PIVOT” at your companions as they carelessly float through space? Absolutely.

Verdict

For what it’s worth, Heavenly Bodies is a strangely addictive game with a great concept. It’s a frustrating game, as is it one that likes to put you through the worst possible situations in order to test your mettle. But, it’s also a weirdly entertaining experience, more so with friends who, like you, have the same odds of being sucked into an intergalactic whirlpool after failing to pivot in the right direction for the twentieth time. If you can find the comedy in that, then you should enjoy embarking on this outrageous sci-fi expedition.

As far as rage games go, Heavenly Bodies finds a good middle ground to weigh its anchor. It might not be as straightforward as your typical physics-based party game, though it is a lot more sophisticated than, say, Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. To that end I’d say that, if you did manage to bring old Bennett to the apex and reap the bragging rights, then you shouldn’t have an issue with taking one step further, to the far reaches of space. It’ll make you appreciate gravity, at least.