What happens in the first two minutes
· 4 min
Episode one is a hundred and twenty seconds long. Here is all of it.
0:01 — "Cleared for departure."
A planet is behind you, large and slightly off-centre, drifting the other way. Your ship sits near the bottom of the screen and fires on its own. You have two controls, left and right, and that is the entire input for the next two minutes.
0:07 to 0:13 — rocks, one at a time to begin with
One rock, in the middle. Then two, one down each side.
They are not aimed at you. They arrive in fixed lanes and drift, and the whole skill of the game is reading which gaps are going to still be there when you get to them. Early on the answer is always yes, which is how you learn what a gap looks like.
0:19 — the first thing that shoots back
A single picket drone.
It is small, it holds a position near the top of the screen, and it fires roughly once every two and a half seconds. It is the least dangerous hostile object in the game and it is deliberately alone, because this is the moment you find out that some of the shapes shoot.
Eight tenths of a second after it appears, the radio says: "Contact. It sees us." Not at a fixed time — the line is hung off the arrival, so it lands just after you have noticed the thing it is about.
0:34 — a wreck goes past
A derelict hulk, drawn further back than everything else, drifting sideways at its own speed. Nothing about it is interactive. You cannot shoot it, land on it or read it.
Roughly one thing in every episode is like this. It is there so that the window is not only full of things trying to reach you.
0:41 to 1:07 — it gets slightly harder, three times
Two more pickets, holding station together. "Two more, holding station."
Then a raider scout — bigger, more hull, a heavier gun. "That one is bigger."
Between them the rocks keep arriving, in threes now, and about three quarters of the way through the episode they quietly get tougher: the same shape takes an extra hit. Nothing announces it.
1:26 — something transmits
Seventy-two per cent of the way in, a beat fires that is not a rock, not an enemy and not scenery.
It is a signal, and at this point in the voyage almost none of it survives the distance:
▓▓▓ ▓▓▓ ▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓▓ ▓▓ ▓▓
Seven blocks where seven words should be. It has been transmitting for longer than anybody has been listening, and the only thing that improves it is going further out. Later legs return more of it. That is the actual plot of the game and this is its first appearance, eighty-six seconds into the first episode most people will ever play.
1:48 — "Clear. Four crossings to Mars."
One last picket, and the closing line does not fire on a timer. It waits until you have actually cleared what is in front of you, and then tells you how far there is left to go.
Two more rocks after that, and it ends.
That is the shape of every episode: rocks, something that shoots, something to look at, a line of radio, and a fragment of a transmission that is slightly clearer than the last one. Eight of them exist so far.
What changes across them is the light. This one is lit like a warm afternoon because it is the closest to the sun anyone gets, and every leg after it has less background and more stars. Further out you also stop flying alone — the ships you can buy are sold at Ceres, two legs from here.
Fly the first one. It takes two minutes and you cannot lose anything by dying.