Positech published the third installment of Democracy a few weeks ago. But, instead of taking a break, they have quickly returned to the fray with their latest and original production: Redshirt .
The independent study is taken from the sleeve a social simulator with a mechanic that we have rarely seen, but that will be extremely familiar to us. To understand the premise with which they invite us to enjoy their title, it is necessary to understand the meaning of the term that gives the game its name.
Redshirt This is how all those secondary characters are called, who do not fulfill any role other than making cannon fodder. It is all those characters allied with the protagonists of the story, who appear practically the right time to die violently and unhappily.
With this resource, the writers or writers try to show us that a great danger looms over the protagonists, using the redshirt as an example. Less in the work of George RR Martin, where everyone can belong to this category.
The term comes from the famous Star Trek space saga , where it is common for secondary characters to appear accompanying the protagonists, dying almost at the beginning of any mission. Since they used to wear a red shirt as a uniform, this was conducive to being known as redshirts.
And that’s where the Positech game wants to place us, in the role of one of these characters whose only end seems to be a horrible and explicit death. But calm, that finishing finados is not going to be the main objective of Redshirt . The game takes us to a space station, Megalodon-9, in which we enter as a new recruit.
There we will be doing different jobs, improving our skills and growing professionally, carrying out missions on the ground and interacting with other inhabitants of the station. This last aspect is one of the most important in the game, and responsible for our inclusion within the genre of social simulators. The way of relating, is what provides originality: The social network SpaceBook .
SpaceBook is, as you can imagine, the equivalent of FaceBook in Megalodon-9 . It is a page in which the different inhabitants of the space station can exchange messages, post thoughts and moods, stay to carry out different events and, of course, flirt.
Maybe nobody can hear your screams in space, but I can surely read your comments on SpaceBook … and that’s why it has become a fundamental tool for station workers. As soon as we get aboard
Megalodon-9 , we will create our own profile for the social network, this being the equivalent in Redshirtto the creation of our character. We must choose sex, alien species, different elements of our physical appearance, … the usual in these cases.
Then, Redshirtallows us a certain level of configuration of the game by adjusting some parameters that will define the general behavior of the inhabitants of Megalodon-9 , towards us and also with the rest of our colleagues.
Each day we will have a series of actions, before having to go to our obligatory break. This leaves us space to perform an action in SpaceBook before having to go to our workplace, then comes the resolution of our time performing our tasks in the space station, and conclude with a few other shifts to act in SpaceBook . As you can see, the social network is the center of our movements in Megalodon-9.
The cost of these actions is different depending on their type. Virtually all status updates, indications that we like a publication, private messages, requests for friendship or to change a relationship … cost a single action. Then there are the events, whose cost varies
depending on the complexity of the same, and online purchases, which also have a single action point as cost. Once we have exhausted all our points, we will have to go to sleep or use Karmacréditos – Megalodon-9 currency – to get more shares.
