Earthless Preview - Finding a New Home in a Roguelike Galaxy

Early access to the Next Fest demo was given by Team17. Thank you!

I have played many roguelike games in my years of gaming and have loved them ever since I started. The concept of going through randomly generated levels, constantly losing to unlock new items and progress further, is an addicting one I can't shake. Ultimately, I tend not to be as surprised because I play many of them. I still enjoy them, but they don't stand out like they used to. Yet, against all these odds, Earthless just clicked for me, and I love what I see so far.

I got to try the game out at Gamescom, courtesy of developer Blackbird Interactive and publisher Team17, and talk to them about their upcoming title. From my discussions, I could tell both teams' passion for making sure Earthless realizes its full potential, and I am excited to see how it's coming along. But, in a sea of deckbuilding roguelikes, this game sparks something I don't see as often in others like it.

Earthless - A Loop That Makes Sense

The core gameplay of Earthless is similar to other deckbuilding roguelikes in existence. You go through a randomly generated landscape with different events and encounters and choose your path from one end to the other. In the battles, you will have a random set of cards from your deck, each with different effects. Some will buff you or give you shield/armor, while others will have different attacks. If you win, you get rewards and usually a new card to add to your deck or artifact to give yourself passive improvements.

And that's where similarities end. Starting Earthless, you will choose a faction and a specific ship ability. Then, you are thrust into the map, armed with your starting deck. The combat is a bit different as well. Instead of solely relying on cards, you will also be able to move around and see where enemies will be attacking. It is a nice combination of Slay the Spire meets Into the Breach. You will need to balance your placement, along with your energy, to plan your attacks and win each battle carefully.

Some of the events that you can go to that aren't direct encounters, can also affect the morale of the different parts of your team. Upgrading parts of your ship comes from one of 5 leaders on your team, each in charge of a different job: Science Officer, Chief Engineer, Gunnery Officer, Communication Officer, and Navigation Officer. You can select one of them, which chooses a different upgrade and increases the morale of their team. Some events have you choose options that could increase or decrease the different team's morale too.

But my favorite aspect about Earthless is how the loop makes logical sense. While some games have an explanation for why you keep going back into the same area, not all of them make a ton of sense. Rogue Legacy comes close, with your offspring going into the castle, but Earthless one-ups it.

The story of the game starts with our Sun dying, which prompts humans to evacuate Earth and find a new home. Instead of one ship taking off, thousands of them are going in different directions, hoping to find a habitable planet. So, as the captain of the ship, you are guiding your team through a map to find a place to call home. When you die, you don't somehow respawn. You take control of a different captain of a different ship with a different crew. Not only does this explain the variety of different locations you will see in a new run, but it makes logical sense why you are doing something similar over and over again with some different events.

This is small in the grand scheme of Earthless, but it's something that, when I was told, I felt this was different than a lot of what I have seen before. I am a sucker for logic explanations, and the team did a fantastic job finding a way to explain the gameplay loop.

So far, I love the gameplay, story, and logic that is injected into the game, so with all of this, I went ahead and checked out how the game runs on the Steam Deck. And, for its current state, I am pleasantly surprised.

Earthless Next Fest Demo - Steam Deck Performance

Ahead of time, I was told by Team17 that there isn't any Steam Deck support, but since I couldn't resist, I decided to boot it up anyway. I was not expecting perfect performance or even stable framerates, but I wanted to see exactly how the current build is holding up. Luckily, for the most part, it is doing very well.

In the main menu, there was almost no drain, which continued into selecting the faction and starting ship. But this changed as soon as the map with the different pathways you could take came up. This hovered around 45 - 51 FPS with fluctuations in the graph, but I never saw it go below 45. This means capping at 40 is definitely possible to keep a stable framerate.

Then, we have the battles. Most smaller battles ran at a solid 60 with no issues, but the bigger ones did tend to dip a bit. Other than one moment where the framerate dipped below 40, it stuck above and could be capped at 40 to keep things smooth.

Unfortunately, there is no controller support, so the game will need to be played by moving the cursor, but I didn't find this to be much of an issue. I didn't make a controller configuration because this is a demo, but it isn't so bad to use the touchpad to move the cursor around and the right trigger to select whatever you are hovering over.

I also got word from Team17 that Steam Deck support is something the team is working on for the early access release next year, so a lot of these controller issues, and hopefully optimization, will come when needed.

Overall, I am excited about Earthless so far. It feels like a great take on a wonderful genre with fresh elements to keep it from feeling stale. There is also logic to why there is a "loop," which I absolutely adore. And with how it's running on the Steam Deck so far, I have a lot of hope for how well this will run! Hopefully, controller support will come when early access is launched. Even if we have to lock to 40 FPS to run at a stable rate, this will be a fantastic demo to try out next week!

You can wishlist Earthless now on Steam, and make sure to try the demo for yourself in a week!

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