Kind of an interesting case study in how games can very clearly and irrefutably be 'about something' while also fucking up the thesis so badly as to seem self-condemnatory.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a pro-union story that comes across as a propaganda piece meant to make unions look terrible, in much the same ways Starship Troopers is to fascism but accidentally as opposed to deliberately.

Shipbreaker begins on that precarious 'okay' platform that so many games end on and sadly doesn't get better. You, a faceless cog in a machine who follows orders, sign a contract with an inhumane megacorp that gives them the right to kill you and clone you indefinitely. You're then shunted into a gameplay loop which bottoms out at fine and doesn't really get better.
You play a game of Operation on some abandoned ships, ranging from simply dismantling it as one would dismantle a twink to carefully pruning out hazards so that you don't immediately die when you splitsaw is 1% off the mark and hits a ship-wide fuel line. It's... alright I guess. It never really goes anywhere interesting once you get the core upgrades and it unfortunately straddles the miniscule line between "indepth" and "braindead" that makes it fairly forgettable.
Unlike similar games it does tack on new challenges, but at their core they're just rehashes of things you've seen before: Something you need to exercise caution towards when removing from its location, something that you shouldn't touch with the saw or it'll explode, something

But I'm not here to talk about gameplay, I'm here to talk about writing, and Shipbreaker has a lot of issues.

Shipbreaker's stance towards manual labourers is strange and not because it's bad or unrealistic, but because it's one of the rare positive takes on them in the medium. Manual labourers are, speaking from experience, a proud and sardonic bunch who are fully aware that they're doing dangerous and [LITERALLY] back-breaking labour but also view it as a craft that they have become proficient in.
Shipbreaker agrees with this assessment, being one of the first games to acknowledge that people who do dangerous manual labour might genuinely love what they do and see it as a point of pride. There’s no irony or humour to it, it just is.

The problems stem from how this interacts with Shipbreaker's stance on unions, which is a messy and incoherent jumble of garbage written by what I can only assume is someone who's mostly worked office jobs and knows instinctively that unions are good but hasn’t bothered to understand WHY.

For starters, Shipbreaker's setting is every single stereotype about bad cyberpunk/sci-fi settings thrown into one. It throws the word 'overpopulation' around a lot which is a pretty bad indicator of the writer's politics. A company named LYNX helps people get off shithole-Earth but ropes them into ludicrous contracts that saddle someone with obscene debt and also kill them, because the contract includes a line about consenting to DNA harvesting for cloning purposes.

It's very hamfisted, and the rare moments the parody lands at all are the ones where they just pull something from the headlines, like CEOs getting off scot-free no matter what.

LYNX are absurdly evil, irrevocably evil, an entire capitalistic meat grinder unto themselves.

And your allies, the union, are okay with them.

Shipbreaker is a grand example of what ‘bad writing’ actually is, because in the writer’s negligence the game comes off as being both anti-union and pro-capitalist meatgrinder. I don’t think the writer intended this, it’s the only read I can take away from the game.

LYNX, to repeat myself, are super evil. Amazon’s real life evil multiplied exponentially forever and ever.

The in-game union don’t have any real issues with it. The union and its members know full well that the suffering they endure is deeply systemic, so fundamental to the machine that the entire thing is entirely unfixable. It views human lives as resources to the extent where they just kill new staff and clone them endlessly, claiming them as property

Shipbreaker’s story unfortunately betrays its characters, and they’re only really concerned with how it affects them. The climax of the story is less about the gang being upset about the world they live in and more about how annoyed they are at their middle management. They go on strike once and it works… kind of? Overtime is ended, middle management is gutted, the corporation nukes slavery clauses/statements from the contracts and…

Okay, the cloning thing is something I really need to focus on, because it explains a lot of what I dislike about this game.

This game opens with you signing the LYNX contract and immediately dying, with your clone being thrown out into space to start working. The end of the game has the Space UN intervene in the situation to outlaw cloning. Why wouldn’t they? It’s deeply immoral and exploitative tech that’s worse than the Artificial Intelligence technology the setting has already banned - tech which is (I assume, I may be giving the writer too much credit) deliberately used to highlight how awful cloning is. It’s a no brainer that it’d get nuked, right?
…Yeah okay so the Union actually loves cloning tech, so they go out of their way to ensure it’s kept around for them specifically. They essentially get a monopoly on the torment nexus.

Also everyone who caused this shit gets off scot-free.

…Sigh, god.

The real issue with this game is that a lot of the plot points can be defended with “but it’s realistic”, and that particular defense is mostly irrefutable.

I love unions. I am a devout proponent of worker solidarity, but I’m not naive enough to think everyone who gets involved with unions cares about every worker that’s like them. A lot of people only join up for self-preservation’s sake, giving nary a thought to others because they’ve secured their bag. This is sad, but it’s unfortunately human nature. So I guess on some level, the Shipbreaker’s Union being obsessed with self-preservation to the point of amorality isn’t unbelievable. Shit dude, farmers do it in real life all the time.

Likewise, yeah. In real life, companies get away scot-free all the time. They are the modern feudal monarchs, able to take losses but never truly lose. Really, a lot of what LYNX do in this game has already been done by either Activision, Amazon, Nestle or any Lithium mining company. Of course it’s believable that the Shipbreaker Union strike doesn’t actually hurt them in any meaningful way, and that they arguably benefit because none of the people involved were ever alive to mount a defense on account of clones.

It doesn’t help that both the gameplay and the narrative point out that nothing really changed. You ‘won’ some minor concessions, but you’re still stuck doing work where dying a horrific, undignified death aboard a silent lifeless spaceship results in little more than a new body being cooked up and sent out.

My ultimate problem, I suppose, is that the experience of Shipbreaker’s story simply compounds why “realistic writing” is such a pitfall. It is neither cathartic nor engaging to experience this story. Neither are the frustrations, inconsistent writing, and accidentally-awful protagonists intended. It may mirror reality, sure, but the end result is that the game comes across as waffling.
You ever see someone go to make a political statement at an award show but they freeze for a moment as their lost paychecks flash across their eyes? This game has the same cadence and hesitance. A game that wants to say “WOO! UNIONS!” but stumbles so much that it comes across as a hit piece. Let unions win and they’ll monopolize evil technology and happily shack up with the industrial hellmachine.

…The gameplay itself also runs counter to the story. Characters will repeatedly assert that they are not faceless cogs in the hellmachine and they are humans capable of autonomy and feeling.

You aren’t, though. You, the player, are a faceless personality-less cog in the hellmachine who does what they’re told. You are such an inconsequential cog in the machine that you can refuse to strike and the game still proceeds as if you did. It’s quite the dissonant experience to have the NPCs talk as if you’re actively sabotaging LYNX while you’re standing on the bridge of a ship, knocking out the frame of a window so you can do your job as you’ve been doing the entire game.

I wouldn’t recommend you buy Hardspace: Shipbreaker. If you read my reviews you probably have enough dignity to not want to subject yourself to what’s ostensibly a white midwesterner paraphrasing a union newsletter to you.

If you do have it, just mute the game. Put on a playlist or a good album - I recommend Wasted Mind, a legendary pop punk album - and enjoy the gameplay. It might be mid, but ‘Surgeon Simulator on ships’ is pretty cool, though Space Engineers might tickle your fance more.