The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ring Runners Flight of the Sages

If you caught me on a good day, when my memory actually works and asked me which game from my childhood I wish I could play as a child again with all the full delight of childhood I wouldn't answer Baldur's Gate, Sonic the Hedgehog or Final Fantasy IV. I'd likely answer either Herzog Zwei or Inner Space. Inner Space is something of a rare gem, a cute little "indie" title that offered an experience that mixed many genres, but was more or less built around Star Control style action with a rogue star fighter sort of deal instead.

Ring Runners reminds me a great deal of Inner Space, which isn't too surprising given there's probably some shared DNA in their ancestry, though I'd be surprised if the developers or anyone on the planet besides me has ever heard of Inner Space.

Regardless, after an hour of playing Ring Runners I had escaped from some essentially unknown facility that was never explained, which explodes, given a good ship, lost the good ship and was then assigned to pick up garbage for a while. Then the garbage king arrived and, in the garbage ship, forced me to do battle in some sort of trash related gladiatorial games. I had previously turned down the difficulty to get through a mission that felt bizarrely out of sync with the game's earlier difficulty in the hopes I could figure out later what I was doing wrong, but couldn't turn it back up, so I was sort of thinking if I had to spend another five minutes doing garbage gladiatorial games I would probably fall asleep at the keyboard.

The gunning in the space ships stuff is amusing enough, though not great, but fighting people in an arena in a garbage collecting cruiser is just fundamentally not something I ever want to be doing on easy. Or at all, but on easy I'm being punished for not understanding the one mission. So I dug around the options and found no way to turn the difficulty back up, but did find out I was playing 'the tutorial'. I thought to myself, of course, it's using missions to explain to me the mechanics, but certainly this will open up a more interesting, Inner space like experience right? Let's just skip the tutorial.

And then it just started vomiting increasingly larger piles of dialogue at me until I closed the program - Actually, I alt-F4'd, since you're not allowed to close the ring selecting map screen that doesn't really make much sense to someone who skipped the tutorial because it involved fighting in a garbage ship. And yes, I'm blaming the developers for that. You get one mission with the goofy garbage collecting ship to explain the mechanic - Not three in a row!

Ring Runners looks like a game I would have enjoyed immensely as a 12 year old, but the writing is really wooden and the inertia based 2d ship combat even after an hour of playing just felt jarring and way too zoomed in. I swear I've played Star Control 2 (Ur-Quan Masters) recently, on a notebook keyboard no less, and I had way less difficulty with the controls in that game than this one. I understand that if you continue to apply thrust in a direction in zero gravity without anything to cause friction or what not around you, you'll eventually have to apply an equal amount of force to negate that inertia but that's not a fun gameplay mechanic. At least I think that's what they're going for when you spin your ship three hundred and sixty degrees, apply afterburners and still ram into an object. You actually do have air brakes in space but that just begs the question as to why flying is such a damn chore if you're going to follow physics some of the time?

Also there's just too many buttons. I had less buttons in UQM, but felt more in control of the ships I was flying.

Anyway, in conclusion, I played Ring Runners for an hour and found it interesting enough that I'm not griping about the play time but it really didn't grab me at all. Quite liked the music though, and some of the more peaceful bits were super zen. The game felt pretty good when I had the sweet ship at the start, but then it took it away, put me in a garbage scow and then ... Do I need to keep going? Why would you do this? Why would you program in a mission to collect garbage?

You can tell they really wanted to jam dialogue based on the length of the title. Just go with Ring Runners! What's a sage? No, never mind, I don't want to know.