The Fermi Paradox: Early Access Impressions

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The Fermi Paradox is a choice-based narrative game where you gently guide alien civilizations along their path of existence. This in of itself sounds a bit ‘high-concept’, but the development team at Anomaly Games does a fantastic job of weaving interesting self-generated story beats with the philosophical choices that often ends in destruction.

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Within The Fermi Paradox, you start off with a few planets that require your oversight. After a few simple choices of uniting tribes or harvesting plants, some very tough choices begin to emerge. Within each society, there are several categories that require your attention - Tech Level, Population, Resources, Harm Potential, and Ethics. Each of these help sustain and characterize your society, and as a byproduct help craft the civilization - for better or worse. Maybe you boost technology a bit to evolve into the Industrial Age, or you pump up your resources so that your civilization can thrive for thousands of years. Unfortunately, trying to balance these categories and your moral compass proves much more difficult than just clicks on the mouse.

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As you expand through the game, you’re collecting several Synthetic Flares (basically a meta-cosmic form of currency) that allows you to spend some to create (mostly) positive outcomes for that civilization. One example that comes to mind is the possibility of extinction on a planet. There are three options: Follow the trajected course (+0 Flares), Quickly hasten the change (-20), or Complete extinction (+20). Decisions like this come at you quickly, and luckily there’s no time limit for the internal monologue you’ll have on how to proceed. This civilization, I had spent a bit of time fostering and molding it into a technologically advanced civilization with a healthy population and a utopia-esque society. However, I failed to allocate enough attention to the resources category and before I knew it, we were in the midst of self-destruction. Moments like this are not rare in The Fermi Paradox, and I love that.

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These moments, or events, vary to balance all possible scenarios that a typical civilization could encounter. Evolution events, development events, and extinction-level events were the ones that I kept on seeing, and felt like they often seemed repetitive. Luckily, there are over 400 different civilization-development events, some whole categories I still haven’t seen yet.

While I was playing through the first time, I was a little overwhelmed with balancing everything. I had five civilizations at one time plus several expedition spaceships and it was proving more and more difficult to adequately care for all of them. Instead, I eventually made the hard choice to sacrifice a few to flourish the others. This culling of entire worlds was at first super awkward, but once I grew out of my single-world perspective and focused on a more granular scale, I then felt much more ok with it.

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Despite the difficult choices getting thrown at me, I was also in awe of the fantastic 2D art that portrayed the various alien species and banners for the major events. Some species were humanoids, others were more arachnid looking, and some were even sentient flora. There were even dinosaurs, but I’ll let you explore that one on your own…

With all this, I am very excited to see the final product of The Fermi Paradox. Though there are some hiccups with quality of life options during this Early Access phase, I am confident that Anomaly Games can pull it off before the final product is released on PC. Now if you excuse me, I’m going to create a few more civilizations.

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Previewed by Harry Loizides

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