A brilliant game to fire up in an idle moment and go on an adventure. Takes a few tries to get to grips with all its systems, but once it clicks, there's an addictive quality to building your ship and handling what's thrown at it.

This game is often at its best when things go wrong. When the enemy is catching up with you, everything's on fire, and you've got two crewmates running around doing the jobs of four. The ability for each journey to be different is part of what makes it special.

I also enjoyed the balance between real time action and the ability to pause and take stock. It allows you to assess increasingly chaotic situations and have time to make decisions. The soundtrack is also excellent. I often listen to it in my own time, as it has a great balance between tunes that evoke the fun and exploration side of a wide open galaxy, and the increasing intensity of battle.

finally managed to destroy that goddamned Rebel Flagship (normal difficulty) for the first time since buying the game in 2014 (after over 100 attempts), I'm gonna tag it as completed but I'm nowhere near done with this game, the replay value makes it so insanely addictive and it's genuinely such a challenging, albeit pleasant experience, because of the satisfying gameplay loop, presentation, top notch OST, etc (+ if you're a masochist, you're gonna love this game).

5 estrelas porque com certeza entra na lista de jogos que marcaram a minha vida.

FTL is great. It makes sad to call this an 'Old' Indie game, but I guess 12 years ago is a long time now.

It's a space-battle micro-management rogue-like, which is a mouthful but that's the only way I can really describe it. You manage a bunch of bars and systems to blow up enemy ships before they blow up you. It is just simple enough to not be entirely overwhelming to me, but I can see if other people might not enjoy that level of complexity.

To be critical, the game is ridiculously difficult. It's a struggle to beat the game on Easy difficulty, and it's made even harder by using the newer advanced systems. I know of a number of people who have put 20+ hours into this game and haven't even come close to beating the Easiest difficulty. The final boss is definitely a huge difficulty spike that I think could be toned down a bit.

It also, with help from Binding of Isaac, really put Roguelikes on the map in the indie space. But maybe that's revisionist history - I was still in my adolescence back then, so maybe the genre has always been popular.

Ben Prunty absolutely kills it on the soundtrack and I'm so glad they brought him back to do the Into the Breach soundtrack. Love his work.

A really ingeniously designed neo-roguelike/strategy game, and one of the few games I've ever seen people write elaborate chess-style treatises about & argue about the efficacy of different strategies ten years down the line.

It's quite complicated, and is to a certain extent not quite what it looks like on the box--I myself was a little caught off guard by the winning strategy being "murder as many people as you can, if at all possible personally"--so I don't blame anyone who can't get into it. But for me, it really scratches an itch that nothing else ever has, in that it really makes you feel like the commander at the bridge, giving orders to divert power from engines and slamming your fist down on the arm of your chair when that one-in-a-million shot hits you anyway, but where it's also a game that's at its heart about slow, carefully thought-out tactical and strategic decisions, rather than the combination of reflexes and split-second gut decisions games where you're running a ship are usually like.

FTL is a game I think I could play forever. I've played a lot of roguelike games, but nothing scratches that itch quite like FTL does. Every procedurally generated system, enemy ship, and reward feels like it could lead to a hundred different outcomes. And that feeling is not misplaced. FTL is built in such a way that no matter what path the player takes on their travels to the Federation capital, it is unlike any other playthrough. Every new run I find myself thinking what I want to do differently this time, whether I want to play with boarding crew or a missile guzzling warship. The weapons you find, the crew you enlist, the systems you upgrade all are all easy to understand and modular ways to improve your ship's chances of making it to the end of the game. But in combination, these upgrades always end up making your ship look unrecognizable by the end of its journey. You may start as a defensively oriented engi ship orbited by drones with a mantis member onboard to protect its frail crew mates. By the end that ship may become a boarding vessel, sending drones to kill the enemy's crew alongside a mantis to run after any stragglers running for the medbay. Not that they'd make it as your lockdown bomb coats the entrances shut. The point being, that FTL is a game in which the player has unlimited freedom with limited options. No matter what each run throws at the player, they can turn it into a viable strategy and create a run that won't ever be replicated.