My favorite bad game

Let’s talk about PlanetBase, it’s probably my favorite bad game.

The premise is quite simple; Real-time base management game about small group of settlers building a colony on a new planet.

PlanetBase is seemingly quite complex, you have bunch of statistics to keep track of, the usual suspects: Power (electricity), oxygen, food, water, biomass, metal etc…
The longer you play, more unique units you will encounter and need to manage.

So what makes this game so bad?

It’s hard, like very very hard.

And it’s not really hard because you are bad, it’s hard because you don’t know how to play. There is something pretending to be a tutorial, but it has very little to do with how well you will be able to manage your colony.

You know, I usually don’t like achievements for surviving first night in a game, but here I god damn deserve it.

Most runs of the game start and end with the first night and even if you survive the first night and somehow manage to keep buildings powered, anything can break your production chain at any point of time.

Oh, you run out of water? Too bad.
100 people in the colony you have been building for last 5 hours will die in next few minutes.

You wanna save it by building more water pumps? Well, sucks to be you. Your workers are not entertained enough to work.

Doesn’t matter, that they will die of thirst, they are just not gonna move their asses.

PlanetBase’s AI is incredibly frustrating to work with. Workers will work according to completely nonsensical rules and just not do the work if you give them too many assignments. They just leave it there and yeet themselves to watch TV instead. That’s not a metaphor btw…

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I can only guess what makes the game so frustrating. Probably some combination of bad tutorial, sinusoid-like difficulty scaling and non existing transparency of information.

Something bad is probably happening with your colony and the moment you find out is waaay to late and hours of your work go to hell.

So why do I like it?

Well, I am not sure.
I do think it’s pretty bad, but it’s also very fun. I kind of enjoy trying to build the base again and again.
It’s surprisingly fun to read theories online in how to build the optimal base, while no-one really sees into the heads of our little AI colonists.

It’s probably closest to strategy rogue-like game.
Start by choosing where your colonists land and then do your best to manage resources so you survive for as long as you can.
When I think about it, I probably like it because I like rogue likes.

Trying to do your best with bad cards you have been dealt is fun in itself.

It’s bad and it’s fun. Sometimes games are like that.

Nothing wrong in enjoying myself something that I think is bad. Constantly consuming only great and above stuff would end up making everything a bit bland.

I think we need to see and experience bad art to really appreciate the good one.

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/403190/Planetbase/