izigame.me

It's an engaging distraction. Reasonable variety of stuff to see.

Upsides: fun graphics. Simple gameplay with few consequences. Get to watch huge piles of pixels go KABOOM! It's relaxing. It's even relaxing thinking through the right order to take things apart to recover every component.

Downsides: I'm 50, and the continuous hammering along seam after seam after seam is giving me RSI. Also, at a certain point, it truly becomes repetitive.

Extra Points: Before buying this game, I'd played Hardspace: Shipbreaker. In that game, you also break ships, but it's in space. And here's the thing: In H:S, there's also a story. You're essentially an indentured servant stuck with a "company store" that ensures you will NEVER get out of debt. And despite being in space, trapped alone in your little habitat, you end up making friends and rediscovering the idea of unions and workers' rights. I won't spoil anything further there, though you should absolutely play the game.
But here's the thing: Ship Graveyard Simulator recreates, with a degree of accuracy that indicates a lot of time and research, the sounds, tools, tech level, and safety level of a place like the Alang Ship Breaking Yards in Gujarat, India. It's kind of beautiful, really. Everything, that is, except the part that H:S does, which is to speak to the insane dangers of the work and the terrible costs to the workers. And...okay, I absolutely get it. I have my escapist stress-relief games. And they could have created that here, too, with just a little fiction on top of what's there. But they didn't. They reproduced the people, their environment, their voices.
But they made it safe and happy. Fall four stories in a hail of loose ironwork? No prob. Walk away. The worst thing that happens is if you get too close to a *radioactive hazard,* you wake up back in your bunk. That's the price. No emphysema from particulates. No lost limbs. No skin cancer. No lead poisoning. 'S'all good, dude. Grab your hammer and keep swingin'! There's money to be made!

So, yes, I like this game. But it also truly bothers me in a weird, subtle way. The designers could just as easily have created a game that either did what H:S does and speaks to the issues it portrays OR made one that says, "Alang used to be horrible, but now you have an exo-suit that protects you from the worst dangers, so we're able to safely clean up the messes the rest of the world can't handle." I'd have been happier if they had. There's a big part of me that loves hearing the voices and the music, but that same part's sad because I know the rest of the story.

So, play the game. Relax. Enjoy. But also, grab H:S and read up about Alang.