Space Venture PC Review

For those of us of a certain vintage… the heady days of adventure gaming when Sierra reigned supreme are looked back on with great fondness. The “Quest” titles were legends and almost guaranteed a fun time. King’s Quest, Police Quest and Space Quest. Though those days are long gone… some of the minds that brought us those fantastic games have been working away to bring us a touch of that old adventure gaming magic. Two Guys From Andromeda, of Space Quest fame, are doing just that and bringing us a new (sort of) Space Quest game. Whilst not actually part of the series… it is essentially a distant relative and whilst Roger Wilco might not be (entirely) in the game… his presence is felt in various ways throughout.

In Space Venture you take on the role of Ace Hardway “Life Support Systems technician”, aka a space plumber (because the role of hero janitor had already been taken… obviously). With your trusty robot dog (and tool box) Rooter you will find yourself spinning off into misadventure from almost the very beginning. I have mixed views about Space Venture, some good, some bad… but at the end of the day it was a lot of fun being back in the minds of the creators of Space Quest. So what are the pros and cons of Space Venture?

Firstly, the good. The game is what you might expect an adventure game to look like when updated for more modern computers (a bit more on that in a moment). We get fully 3d modeled characters and more depth to environments. Speaking of the environments, arguably the best throwback to the original Space Quest games and something that always made them a lot of fun to play is the easter eggs. Tips of the hat to the original Space Quest games, visuals and signs that make pop culture references (there’s even a reference to Chewbacca mum/mom)… it’s the stuff that will have you scouring the locations for a lot longer than you need to be there just because there are so many small references to find. It’s nice to have spoken dialogue now too… whilst some of the Quest titles started getting voice acting, due to storage limitations of the day (ahh floppy disks) we generally had to read all the speeches. With the vast amount of data available now, Space Venture has been able to voice its quirky cast of characters and they’ve got some familiar voices lending their talents.

Now onto the not so good. The controls can be quite clunky… there were moments where I was quite sure I knew what I was supposed to do… tried to do it and didn’t have any luck… thinking I was wrong I’d go and try something else only to come back and find that I must have simply clicked slightly in the wrong spot… but that yes I was right with what I needed to do. I also found the controls would sometimes lag or be a bit screwy when entering a new area. Though these aren’t game breakers… they are extremely frustrating… especially when some puzzles require a decent amount of clicking. The visuals are a bit interesting… whilst they certainly show modernisation over the originals… they now (ironically) look aged. I suspect a big part of the problem here is the development time frame (the game has been cooking for over ten years now). They aren’t horrible… but they are definitely not modern and at times can look a bit overly rough. You could write some of this off as adding a nostalgic charm for the originals… but it would be nice to see a really modern visual update. The UI and your “phone” are quite clunky as well, sometimes simply not responsive… other times just not really working until you try again. Again… It doesn’t break the game but it can be very frustrating.

Final Thoughts:

I would love to have new versions of all the classic Quest series games… a new King’s Quest, Police Quest, Heroes Quest and indeed Space Quest. Space Venture definitely scratches some of the itches but also falls a little far of the mark. It’s not overly long (even with some frustrating late game problems to solve)… but the pop culture references and easter eggs plus the overall vibe do make it worth considering for fans of the original Space Quest games. It is still technically in Early Access so there’s a chance some of the issues will actually be fixed before it is officially released. As it is, given it’s not overly expensive… it might still be worth a look for fans of the original games.