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Ahead of you<\/span> is a vast pink sky and a teeming alien planet. Your copilot, Isao, asks you to cut the aircraft\u2019s engine. He wants to savor this moment: your first look at an entirely new world.<\/p>\n Jett: The Far Shore<\/em> is training you with this short exchange. It asks you to take your time, not just so that you soak up its beautiful vistas but because part of your mission to this alien planet is to observe and gather data on the planet\u2019s indigenous wildlife, just like an actual astrobiologist. The game\u2019s ethos can\u2019t quite be summed up as \u201cleave no trace\u201d (this is a story of space colonization, after all), but it asks you to tread lightly at almost every turn.<\/p>\n Terrestrial Origins<\/p>\n The idea for the game percolated for a long while. Jett<\/em>\u2019s designer Craig Adams and programmer Patrick McAllister trace its roots back to 2007, but an environmental ethos has been part of the duo\u2019s lives for many more years. In the late \u201990s, Adams enrolled in a university course on climate science before switching to art school (\u201cflaking out,\u201d as he describes it over a Zoom call). McAllister was a keen Boy Scout growing up. He describes one formative moment canoeing on the border of Minnesota and Ontario. On the US side was rubbish littering what should have been an idyll; on the Canadian side, a pristine wilderness.<\/p>\n In Jett: The Far Shore,<\/em> there\u2019s nothing but untouched nature\u2014but only once you migrate to the extraterrestrial planet. The game\u2019s introduction, viewed from protagonist Mei\u2019s first-person perspective, gives you some indication of what is happening at home. Factories spew fumes into the atmosphere, citizens stand with gas masks covering their faces. The mood is oppressive in every sense. Is this some kind of extinction event?<\/p>\n Once you get into the body of the game, the tone lightens. From screenshots, you might notice how tiny the aircraft you\u2019re piloting is. The camera is pulled back so far as to make you a speck in the environment. You skim across it gracefully, changing direction with a well-timed handbrake turn, all while managing the heat of your thrusters. There are plants called ghokebloom that, if you hit your booster at just the right time, don\u2019t just catapult you into the sky, but erupt into flowers that sparkle across the ground. Adams explains that this organism is inspired by the fungal networks that exist beneath forests, a discovery made by renowned scientist Suzanne Simard in the 1990s. She found that the fungi shift nutrients to areas that need it most so that symbiotic health is maintained with the trees above, a kind of sentient intelligence.<\/p>\n Decolonizing Space Colonization<\/p>\n Jett: The Far Shore<\/em>\u2019s attitude toward the environment is different to most video games. In No Man\u2019s Sky<\/em>, for example, once you land on one of its procedurally generated planets, it\u2019s never long before you start mining resources to level up your base or ship. Jett: The Far Shore<\/em> doesn\u2019t depict this kind of extractive gameplay, partly because humans in the game have already messed up their home planet and can\u2019t afford to do so again, and partly because it\u2019s simply not the kind of sci-fi story Adams wants to tell. \u201cOn some level, the wonders of the universe are just grist for the mill,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you end up with a design where you\u2019re just committing yourself to perpetual conquest and conflict, just repeatedly killing things and collecting them, it\u2019s going to distort a lot of things,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt\u2019s going to distort tone and meaning, and even on a pretty atomic level, it\u2019s going to distort your characters. We had an interest in having characters that the player might enjoy the company of, and that they might want to root for. We wanted these characters to feel like they were living the events of the story alongside you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n