Tin Can Studio
PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
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VIDEO games keep getting bigger and bigger. I don’t mean the size of the industry – , it beats the film and music industries combined. No, it is the scope of new games. It feels as if each title in a series aims to outdo the last, to the point where players can spend hundreds of hours lost in a vast virtual world.
My record is probably 150 hours in the epic fantasy game Skyrim, though I am at pains to point out that was over a period of a couple of years, given it adds up to almost a full week of gaming. I do have a life outside games, I promise.
Anyway, it is understandable that developers and publishers keep feeling the need to best themselves in an effort to come up with a new marketing bullet point, but this desire for breadth overlooks the joy to be had in depth. Rather than creating a surface-level simulation of an entire world, what happens if you try to model a single space in exquisite detail?
That is the approach taken in Tin Can, a game that puts you in charge of a spaceship’s rapidly disintegrating escape pod. You can crack open the pod’s many engineering systems – everything from the lights and oxygen supply to a small nuclear reactor – and tinker with the components, swapping them around and cannibalising parts in a desperate attempt to stay alive.
The pod is so complex that it comes with its own manual, which you can either read on an in-game clipboard or, in a nice touch, as a PDF downloaded to your real-world phone. And you will need to – the ship’s onboard computer will only tell you about problems by spitting out obscure error codes, leaving you to look them up in the manual as you try to figure out a solution. Imagine trying to set up a printer, but with added virtual mortal peril.
OK, that description might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I had a brilliant time with Tin Can. The feeling of picking through spare parts, trying to identify the problem against a ticking clock – and you can set how long a mission lasts before you are rescued – really makes you feel like you are hard at work in that escape pod.
When replaying the game, some elements change randomly, such as which spare parts you have on board, or which systems fail – which adds to the feeling of always being on your toes.
There is also a certain element of making your own fun in the space provided, by pushing buttons just to see what happens. This could be as mundane as disconnecting all the pod’s lights and sitting in the dark, or opening the outer door and watching all your oxygen explosively decompress as you realise, yes, there is a reason not to do that.
The only negative thing I can say about the game is that I don’t like the start of each run, where you have 30 seconds to scramble around some storerooms and load up your pod with parts before it ejects. I can see that the idea is to try to make you feel more in control each time, but, honestly, it is a little bit tiresome and feels like a roadblock to starting the game proper.
That is a very minor complaint, however. With developer Tin Can Studio consisting of just a few people, it is clear it has thought deeply about how to achieve a lot with very little. Sure, the voice acting is amateurish, but it is hard to care when you are tinkering with a fantastic toy.
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PC, iOS
The simple 2D graphics of this spaceship simulator hide hidden depths, as you have to manage oxygen, power and more to survive. My favourite thing to do is open the ship’s airlocks to extinguish fires – just make sure the crew are safe first!
