To get the review portion out of the way: Heat Signature is a really, really god damn good game from Suspicious Developments (who previously made the also really good Gunpoint). It’s basically Hotline Miami restructured as a mission based roguelike with a randomized unlock tree. If that sounds like a solid game idea, it is, and the game does it extremely well. It’s less than a month old and it’s 15 bucks.
Nothing is perfect though, and having just completed a 20 hour run of the game (which slaughtered most of my free time during the last week and a half), I have some thoughts on the parts that could have used a bit more attention.
Some pretty big end game spoilers are at the end of this post.
First and foremost, I talked about this on Twitter a bit but, the Foundry Brick could use some attention. It’s kind of busted and in desperate need of a nerf. It’s incredibly fun, but once you really know how to use it and what it’s truly capable of, it can trivialize almost every single mission in the entire game, including most versions of the faction Strongholds. That’s not great.
The first and really obvious thing you can do with it is use it for assassination missions. Dock with the main airlock have a quick view of the ship layout. Your target is always at the far end of the ship. 80% of the time they’re in a room along the outer wall of the ship. Smash that room and they’re instantly dead. Mission accomplished.
If they’re not in a room on the wall, 80% of the rest of the time they’ll be in a room one layer in. Smash the room between that room and the outside and the target is sucked into space where they asphyxiate. Mission accomplished. (This also means that if they’re on the outer wall and you miss by one room, you’ve still got them.)
That’s all intended use and totally fine. It’s the ship’s gimmick. The problem is that it has a second, less obvious ability and that’s the one that breaks the game. When the Brick attacks the enemy ship, it creates doors. It is difficult to overstate how powerful this is. The ability to create a new door at the far end of the ship allows you to skip almost all of the ship’s challenges.
Assassinations are easy, as explained above. Need to steal an item, though? You could skip to the end and just make sure you don’t destroy or lose the key to open that security door. Or you could destroy the room on the other side of that door, dock with the treasure room and walk in. Need to capture someone? Just make a door a few rooms away so you don’t kill them or let them get sucked into space. (It might be possible to catch them if you do, but resetting your ship probably won’t give you enough time to pick them up before they die.) Need to hijack the ship? Make a door near the ship’s pilot and take them out to disable the alarm, and the whole mission just got way easier.
You can ignore most clauses and other challenges, too. Brick attacks inherently respect the Enigma clause. Avoiding rooms with people in or near them lets you handle Bloodless missions (most of the time; if a guard is on an ill timed errand in the area, they’re going to die). Warzones just do the work for you (as they would with any ship).
And there’s the real problem: the game has very few answers to the Brick. The only missions you categorically can’t handle with a Brick smash are those with Ghost and Silent clauses, since you trigger an alarm. Short alarm response times have a similar effect, outside of assassinations. Heat detection shields will also mess you up, as they would any ship that isn’t a Tick or Coldfire (you can make it work in theory, but good luck), except that barely matters since I saw exactly one of those in my whole 20 hour playthrough. And your new entry doesn’t have an airlock door for you to hide behind, so if an enemy spots you when you show up, you’d better have a plan (or immediately take off again). That’s pretty much it, though.
How do you rectify this? The door making power just needs to be less reliable. My first instinct is to have it so two of the four factions’ ships just be immune to it. You can hit them and destroy a room, but you’ll never be able to dock with the newly exposed areas. It’s possible that Foundry ships already operate this way, but the faction ships all kind of blur together so I’m not sure. Either way, Foundry ships should be immune to their own nonsense. I’d suggest Offworlder ships also resist Brick attacks. You could have the Brick do a different “element” of damage than Warzone attacks, or you could just let Warzone attacks do the same thing.
The effect of this would be that the Brick would become unfeasible for non-assassinations on those kinds of ships. (You could still have the neighboring rooms have their content pulled into space but make the exposed areas “heal” to prevent further nonsense.) It would also begin to make the factions more distinct.
Which is my second issue: the factions have different aesthetics, but it was only very, very late that I realized that certain guard powers only appeared on certain ships. The glitch dash only appears on Glitcher ships, but as far as I was concerned it didn’t really matter. It was just another thing that showed up sometimes.
A good way to address this would be to handle both of the previous issues at once, by making the outside of the ships themselves something to prepare for. Foundry and Offworlders can resist the Brick. Glitcher ships can run heat shields that can make it harder to dock without a Tick or Coldfire. Give Sovereign ships a ton of windows, possibly with a bonus view distance, giving a small advantage to the Tick and Coldfire, but also the Angel (for when you inevitably get launched out of the ship by stray bullets).
This could affect enemy AI as well. If Sovereign ships are loaded with windows, give their guards an attribute that make them immune to being sucked into space (which would double as a limitation on Brick assassinations), and have them intentionally shoot at windows if they think they can eject you from the ship. Have Glitcher guards target explosive fuel tanks and then retreat to safety. Having guard gimmicks specific to individual ships, like heat sensors or armor, is good, but giving them intrinsic attributes would make the target factions a specific consideration when weighing if you want to do a mission.
It is possible that all of these things might prove too daunting to a new player. If that proves to be the case, you could restrict these faction attributes to missions rated Hard or above and leave Easy/Medium missions as they currently are.
Here are those end game spoilers.
A final issue I had was with the ending. Normally I probably wouldn’t care, since roguelike games are never about the ending and always explicitly about the journey. (You got the Amulet of Yendor. Great job! Game over.) But the specific way the ending was presented suggested that a final chapter of the game should have been available.
(Refresher: Sader Fiasco, who’s been something of a guide through the whole game, was actually working for an unnamed fifth faction who invades and takes everything over. It is reasonable to interpret this as wiping out all your hard work.)
The ending is definitely reasonable, but it distinctly feels like it’s a “bad” ending, but the final dialogue tree doesn’t even give you the option to be upset. You might be fine with the outcome or even embrace it, but reading over other how others felt, it seems like a lot of people, myself included, would very much like to give these new guys a bloody nose.
I would definitely love an extra chapter to be made available if some kind of criteria is met. That might just be liberating enough stations, or it could be linked to completing defector missions (which would give them more of a purpose…but could also be really annoying).
I don’t even think it’d be that hard to implement. The main expense would probably go into making a new ship tileset, but the missions themselves wouldn’t have to change; they’d just all be really damn hard. Assassinate or kidnap important officers. Steal their mission critical equipment. Hijack their shuttles. The new enemy guards can be the same as the ones you’ve fought before, except now any pair of attributes can show up at once. Previously you’d never have to deal with armored guards with glitch dash, but here they are! Compensate for the higher difficulty by making it easier to grow new characters by giving the new missions higher payouts. Determine the power of the payout multiplier by how many stations you’ve liberated, representing the strength of your unified front.
In terms of writing, not a whole lot would need to change either. Fiasco is a mercenary. She wants to be on the winning team. She can’t officially endorse your efforts to ruin her client’s efforts, but she can decide it’s outside the scope of her contract to stop you. (After all, you’re not any of the other factions. Really, you’re just a bunch of anarchists, aren’t you? Nothing to be done.) Maybe personal missions can become more expensive since she now has to work around her client (appropriate with higher mission payouts), but otherwise things can keep going as they always have.
Fiasco says in the ending that the easiest way to start a revolution is to convince people there already is one. Players should have the opportunity to prove her right.
All told, I think Heat Signature, like its stylistic cousin FTL, deserves to get an Advanced Edition that upgrades all these little things. Given that it’s unlikely for this game to enjoy FTL’s runaway success (because nothing will), it probably won’t be feasible for Suspicious Developments to sink a bunch of creative resources into extending a game they’ve already released. But if were, it could turn a game I extremely enjoy into one of my favorite games, period.