Hardspace: Shipbreaker review: Solidarity in space

digitaltrends.com:

 Hardspace: Shipbreaker may be a science-fiction game set in outer space, but it’s as down to Earth as a Woody Guthrie song. If you don’t walk away from it questioning whether or not you’re getting treated fairly at work, there’s a chance you might be one of the bad bosses that it dissects.

First released in early access back in 2020 (and now reaching its 1.0 launch alongside console ports), Hardspace: Shipbreaker has an unusual, remarkable premise. The first-person game tasks players with reverse engineering spaceships in a zero-gravity shipyard and salvaging every last scrap of metal. If that sounds more like a job than a game, you’re right. Beneath its oddly satisfying hook, the sci-fi title pulls apart modern labor issues like one of its intricate ships — one OSHA violation at a time.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a mesmerizing anti-puzzle game that isn’t afraid to tackle serious topics like workers’ rights and unionization, even if it has to be a little repetitive to accomplish that.

When Hardspace: Shipbreaker begins, players quickly come face to face with the most crippling form of disempowerment: Debt. It turns out that getting a job with the solar system’s mega-powerful Lynx Corporation comes with a whopping price tag that leaves new employees over one trillion credits in the hole on their first day on the job. While “shipbreakers” make a daily wage from dissembling ships, 100% of that money goes towards cutting down a debt that barely ever seems to dwindle. It’s a darkly comedic premise that doubles as a smart inversion of gaming’s old “numbers go up” hook. The lower the number, the better.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a workplace comedy of errors.

While breaking down ships is a tedious job in the game’s universe,