Shields are down. Weapons are down. Engines damaged, sensors wrecked, and cockpit a blazing inferno, my poor little ship is getting pummelled. The enemy ship is hanging out there in space, haughtily superior, all guns and drones and shiny shields.

My crew dash from compartment to compartment, fighting fires and repairing systems frantically, trying to wring enough power out of the ship for one last shot. Maxim tries frantically fixes the weapons console before asphyxiating – I’d previously vented the atmosphere out of the room in a desperate effort to repel some boarders. Notch, the only one of my original crew left, dies in a fire in the engine room. Left on his own, Geryk can do little except watch as my once mighty ship is taken apart piece by piece. He stays at the helm, a look of grim determination on his face, until a well-placed missile splits my cruiser apart in a fiery blaze…

FTL isn’t a game – it’s an 8-bit arena where battles are fought, victories are snatched and heroes are made. Superficially, of course, it’s a top-down, low budget indie spaceship roguelike, with only a few screens to its name. But take the £6.99 plunge and look beyond the simple graphics and interface and you’ll find a game with depth, replayability and more epic story potential than any AAA title.

There’s virtually no official story in FTL, but that just means that all the drama happens in the gameplay. The most memorable stories aren’t cutscenes or mo-capped dialogue sequences, they’re the ones where you scrape through a whole sector with one hull point remaining, or the battle where you win against all the odds, and limp, crew decimated, ship on fire, to the next jump – only to come face to face with yet another powerful enemy. Rock, Paper, Shotgun have run a whole series of diary-style entries about the dramas (and inevitable fiery deaths), so it must be good.

The interface is pretty stripped-back too, but hides surprisingly complex gameplay. Your ship is a flying balancing act, with a central pool of power that you can redirect towards shields, or weapons, or other equally important subsystems. A good engagement means shuffling power from system to system based on your enemy’s capabilities, focusing on your target’s weakpoints and moving crew to where they’re needed most. I like to think it also means shouting at the screen, demanding more power from the engine room, but your mileage may vary.

You can muddle through the earlier levels without too much micromanagement (or shouting), but when you reach the fabled Sector 7 your ship needs to be upgraded and organised to stand a chance – and even then, it’s surprisingly easy to bump into a single enemy who can lay waste to your best plans.

When you do die – and you will die – death is permanent, and you have to start from scratch again. It’s devastating to lose a ship and crew you’ve become attached to, but hey, there’s a whole new universe to explore every time. As a randomly generated world, there’s always a chance of encountering some cannoned-up flying fortress that kills you on your second jump – and combat can sometimes feel a bit pot-luck like that – but the payoff is a new and exciting journey every time, where you have no idea what’s around the next nebula.

If you can’t tell, I really, really like this game. I’d never have played it were it not for a chance recommendation from a friend, and I’m very glad I did. And for all its charm, depth, and ability to make me write about spaceships like a teenage Trekkie who’s just discovered slash fiction, it’s only £6. Get it!

You’d think after the years of games about murder, warfare, genocide, alien invasion and all that jazz that a game about prisons could slip by without comment, but no.

A preview of Prison Architect, a sim-management game where you have to design and maintain a prison, drew all kind of interesting comments like:

“I’m honestly shocked at the pass this game is getting from the press. […] I don’t see much of difference between making this game and making Theme Auschwitz.”

i saw dasein on RPS

Um. Really?

Many modern games are violence-filled, narrow-minded murder simulators in which you gun down hundreds of enemies and innocents alike in the course of a level – so what makes a game about a prison so controversial?

Maybe it depends on your attitude to prisons: are they places where evil people should go to die, or are they places where people who are a danger to themselves and others be kept while they’re rehabilitated? Do people who’ve broken the law deserve a second chance?

Should your virtual prison be a hellhole where the strong prey on the weak, or a place where even the most depraved child molester can feel safe?

Most modern games don’t give you that kind of moral choice. GTA has a big, open world where you can just about choose who to work for, but there’s no moral judgement about what goes on – you can shag a prostitute in a dingy alley then beat her to death with a bat and steal her money and the game passes no judgement.

Mass Effect lets you make decisions about what to say to who, but the far-flung nature of the setting means that those decisions only really matter in the game; there’s nothing to make you think about how what you did might affect other people in the real world.

FPS games are even worse; you’re generally a one-man killing machine scything down hordes of Germans, Japanese, Russians or whatever flavour of generic Arabic-looking “insurgents” are the enemy du-jour with nary a thought for the consequences of your actions.

You’re literally only following orders, a theme that’s personified as much in the endless unimaginative linear corridors and set-pieces as it is when your cipher character receives his next objective via video comlink from four-star General Brasstacks McShouty. You shoot people because that’s what you’re there for; stopping to think will only get you killed.

Maybe modern shooters would be better if you had to think about whether cluster-bombing a small town is a good thing, but it seems like a lot of people have a blind spot for war when it comes to unacceptable behaviour. If the too-close-to-home setting and theme of Prison Architect makes you stop and think about what you’re doing – and what that would mean in the real world – then great.

The story – the why – of games is very easily pushed out by gameplay. When you’re shooting virtual insurgents in the wilds of Afghanistan it’s easy to lose sight of why you’re even there in the first place; much like in real life, I‘d imagine.

I’m all in favour of games that actually make you think about things, or push you out of your comfort zone, as long as they’re still fun. Games have potential to be so much more than the facile, thoughtless sofa-bound entertainment that modern games so often are.

It’s encouraging that Introversion, the small indie dev behind others games like DefCon, have form for making stylistic, thought-provoking games about difficult subjects. If Prison Architect can make people think again about a serious subject like prisons while still being fun then I’m all for it.