What kind of music can you expect from a 4X game? As far as historical 4X games go, I predict a mixture of triumphant philharmonic music and fun period scenes, like wandering between the main floor and the gift shop in some imperial museum. If it's a fantasy game, I think of choirs silently roaring or singing dog Latin or Welsh. If it's a sci-fi game, I think of choirs and synthesizers.
I haven't heard any choirs in Hard Void yet, although I may have encountered a synth. As for the trailer and demo, they are dedicated exclusively to heartbreaking techno. Sounds like 3am in a club I haven't gotten to yet, back when this kind of thing was in vogue. I imagine the bouncer looking at me. Damn, the bouncer has some really funny pupils. Friends, I'm afraid the bouncer might be Lovecraftian.
The trance soundtrack is what interests me about Hard Void. Another option is to take a point of view during a conflict. In battles, the image moves from your fleet in the foreground to the enemy in the middle distance, following each salvo onto the target. It's stylized and a little ridiculous. It goes against the grain of how today's 4X games typically present combat. This reminds me more of Infinite Space on DS and horizontal shmups.
The rest of the presentation is familiar: a zoomable star map with planet and fleet icons. The menus are functional, with tight abbreviations and some crude details at the time of writing, such as research options appearing behind other windows. It may look empty, but there are some amazing close-up details: the planets are dirty rolling surfaces with habitats sprawled across them, and colorful 3D ship models with fancy effects like warp bubbles. The spartan atmosphere of the other places pairs well with the moody, cerebral music.
Finally, there are cosmic horrors. Interestingly (and possibly a reference to Warhammer 40,000), this relates to the game's faster-than-light travel methods. According to the backstory, multiple species on different worlds simultaneously discover various FTL technologies, from the classic warp drive to “subspace engines” and “wormhole generators.” This accelerates the race for dominance in the galaxy. However, this also risks attracting the attention of the Ancients.
There are technologies that you may not want to explore because the mind can't handle too much reality. During my short visit to Steam demoI had a choice whether to tell my people about certain cosmic encounters or hide it all to preserve morale. Unfortunately, I didn't get any further than this because the tutorial crashed and I had to restart my computer. There's also tempting talk of multiple dimensions – as you move through screens you'll switch between them in parallel.
If you've already succumbed to the siren call of this forbidden story, rejoice, because Hard Void is now available in Early Access on Steam. According to developer jezoxdev, the key inspiration for the game are Master of Orion And Stellaris. You can certainly see this pedigree in the choice of alien races (including little gray men and lizard people), the promise of procedural narrative events, and the robustness of the ship design options. Jejokdev also calls himself a physicist, which makes me even more curious about the mixture of FTL and Cthulhu. More weird 4X games made by real physicists, Series I.
