The Sun at Night is a 2D action platformer developed by Minicore
Studios and attempts to provide an alternative reality portrayal of a dog named
Laika. Laika was a real dog with a pretty tragic story, she was involved in the
space race of the late 1950s and 1960s between the Soviets and the Americans.
After the success of Sputnik 1, the first satellite launched into low orbit
around the earth, the Russians wanted to test the impact of spaceflight on
living creatures. Laika was a stray dog taken from the streets of Moscow then
trained and selected to be launched aboard Sputnik 2. Laika was the first
animal to orbit the Earth, but at the time there was no planned re-entry and
Laika’s return to Earth was never expected. The Soviets claimed that after day
6 of the mission after her oxygen ran out or, as the Soviet government claimed,
was euthanized prior to this. The face is that Laika died within hours after
launch due to overheating.
This real life tragedy makes for compelling subject material
and Minicore have decided to answer the question of “What If?” What if Laika
makes it back to earth? Would she seek retribution? Would she be hailed as a
hero? Would she have changed the face of the Cold War? There’s real scope here
to tell create a powerful experience through a game and to highlight Laika’s
story.
The game begins with you being shown a very short video of
Laika crash landing on Earth. I only became aware of the backstory after
watching some videos of the developers on their Steam Greenlight page, there’s
no scope for this in the game. No explanation of who you are or what your
overall goal is. Armed with Laika’s robotic suit, laser beam and full grasp of
English in hand. You move forward, well, kill everything she comes across
really. It’s a confusing change to what should be a tragic story, the first
scene of the game opens with you shooting a seagull out of the sky with your
laser beam, only to be found by a travelling soldier and to jump straight in
his truck.
The mechanics of the game work well. I played with keyboard
and mouse but it will run perfectly fine using a 360 pad. The controls are
pretty smooth, overall combat feels rewarding and it is a pretty challenging
game. Laika can use a force-field type shield that will block incoming damage
and regenerates over time. Fail to use the shield and Laika will be mincemeat
quickly, generating the feeling that Laika is pretty weak and defenceless
without the shield. Which is nice, because she’s a dog, not a Super-soldier,
it’s the right method to take. There’s a pretty large upgrade system and the
game is open enough to not hold your hand and send you down tunnels. You can
explore to your heart is content but it’s always pushing you in the direction
it wants you to go in.
The artwork works well, Laika’s appearance and the majority
of the NPCs are well realised and apart from enemies, are mostly unique. The
animation can sometimes leave a lot to be desired but it’s not enough to be
game breaking. For example, Laika’s blaster attack moves as smoothly as you
would expect. The weapon has a 360 degree range of fire and this leads it to
clip through Laika at strange and unusual angles. Also the enemies die and fade
out, leaving nothing behind. The way the game is developed can sometimes have
you kill an enemy off screen, not see that you’ve killed this character and
then when you go looking find that it was dispatched of and has disappeared
without a trace.
To complement the upgrade system there is a consumable known
as Nano, this can be converted to health packs and shield packs among other
things but is more of a pickup from the ground than a drop from the enemy. I
never felt that I was really progressing until I was lucky enough to find this
in random areas of the world and not be rewarded for killing that big old bad
boss. It would also help with the feedback that you had killed an enemy if it
left this behind. The Nano system is a two sided sword as it lets you chose
what’s best for the task at hand and how your inventory is shaping up. I rarely
used the shield packs and found that I was mostly using Nano for health. As the
game progressively got harder I was using more and more health packs to the
point where there was no real option. Nano = Health.
The chiptune music fits compliments the overall tone of the
game and really drives the atmosphere of each area of the game. It’s not really
hard to do right, but it’s nice to know when an area is safe and when the
difficulty just shifted up a gear. The sound could be drastically overhauled in
my honest opinion. All of the Soviet guards die in an echoed groan, and the
transitions between scenes are just not that believable.
My biggest concern when taking into account the emotion of
Laika’s real story has is that you are expected to instantly sympathise with
her character. This was a horrible thing to happen in real life but when you
give her a laser beam gun and have her go toe-to-toe with genetically modified
tigers and bears I don’t really see the difference? I don’t see why I should
feel sorry for Laika but not for the tiger? They’ve turned a selfless,
dependant creature into a savage killing machine with no emotion. It just
doesn’t add up at all. I’m frustrated as there’s so much scope for this story.
When the developer could have had us control Sputnik 2 by making its onboard
computers become self-aware and have us micromanage the trip back to Earth,
trying to save Laika at every moment, that’s a game I can buy into.
Unfortunately I can’t help but think that “The Sun at Night”
is trying to be cool and edgy. It was initially known as "Laika Returns” a
much more descriptive title, and I’m left wondering why it was changed? Its
overall mechanics work fine, but the story and method of delivery are way off
the mark. Unfortunately, there’s nothing unique enough here for me to want to
come back to “The Sun at Night” and that’s a shame, as the material they chose
to work with is very strong. It’s the Indie Dante’s Inferno. Strong material,
way off target game.
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