HEAVENLY BODIES

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space

- Alexander Perrin

A board this space station, taking even one small step is far from easy. There’s no gravity, after all, leaving your character bobbing uselessly in their orange spacesuit. To reach the next room, you need to steer each arm independently using the thumbsticks, grab hold of something solid with the triggers, then pull and release to launch yourself forward. In theory, anyway. More often than not, you will be rewarded instead with the sound of your helmet clonking softly against the doorframe, or the sight of your entire body crumpling into a wall.

“A slapstick space sim” is how lead programmer Alexander Perrin describes Heavenly Bodies. “You’re given this cosmonaut who has been training ten years for this, and now they’ve been launched into space, and given hundreds of millions of dollars of space equipment to assemble and maintain. But ultimately they’re at the mercy of someone who can’t even comprehend what it’s like to be weightless.” And that, as Perrin says, is inherently funny.

A single nudge in the wrong direction can send you spiralling out into the void

Like QWOP or Octodad before it, Heavenly Bodies mines humour from the friction between intent and outcome. Getting a leg trapped in the airlock, or pulling a lever only for it to snap off – well, you have to laugh, don’t you? But, as lead artist