Orion Arm Remote Extreme

I just exited Blue Sky Simulations’ Sim Seed 32568, aka Orion Arm Remote Extreme. It’s billed as a plausible reimagining of the final half-century of a husk planet that the folks over at Explore Unltd found a few standards ago and excavated.

I’d like to start by saying it was so real! It was my first time using this company’s sims. I was astounded by the color, sound, and taste features. They really lived up to their name with a tastebud palette that rivals real life.

The True Amnesia feature worked fairly well. There were occasional deja vu moments and other fabric tears and rips, and some weird stuff during sleep buffer cycles. A buffer cycle that takes up a third of the in-game time is a bit astonishing though, I gotta say. I know the True Amnesia feature wasn’t Blue Sky’s invention to begin with; they bought it off Tropical OasSims and I don’t think did much if anything to improve on it. Guess you just need a larger buffer when you’re working on planet scales.

On to the negatives. This is a big one: this ending was total trash, even for the Extreme end of the genre. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to voluntarily exit this one when things started to really go sideways. It’s a good thing I didn’t know how low the stakes actually were thanks to the Amnesia. The pain features had me totally taken in. I felt such an intense sense of depression as everything went to shit around me, like I was losing my grip over my sanity when so few other people seemed to see what was going on or want to do anything about it. Is this a feature or a bug?

One of my biggest gripes is that I didn’t get anywhere near those bunkers that Explore found. I was in the dominant civ, but you really should spring for one of the Ruling Elite avatars, or not play this one at all. Lots of the bunkers aren’t even housed inside the dominant civ, but some islands on the other side of the planet.

I totally get wanting to make one of the most talked about features rare in order to increase replay value. But it’s hard to want to do a replay of a game that invented all these really cool animals that go extinct while you’re there, far away from you so that you never even got to see most of them. Was that just lazy coding and rendering?

And then there’s all the Sexually Transmitted Infection features. What sick fuck spent all their time making those? What do they possibly have to do with a plausible reenactment of everything that turned that into a husk planet? My avatar got one of the less serious ones, but it hurt like hell. Honestly, I kind of wonder if this game is mislabeled and belongs in one of the Hell categories. At least that would be more honest.

Blue Sky advertises thirty-eight possible ways the sim will end. They’re random though and nothing you do will make any difference in how that ending comes about—probably, they say. And I know one of the allures of this sim is trying to have some kind of effect on the outcome. Maybe someone who shells out some serious cash for one of the Ruling Elites will manage to do it? That kind of assumes they will even want to; it seems like those avitars’ stats skew towards the psychopathic. I’m not the only one making this comment. People should have more options than different ways to asphyxiate or burn to death in a nuclear holocaust.

Me, I was smack-dab surface level of one the main cities when it all went down, so I was instantly obliterated. But as the credits rolled, I saw some shit man. Who knew you’d be better off being instantly obliterated than in one of those bunkers? Turns out you’ll just be boiled alive and that seemed way worse.

How did you like this sim? @ Me over on the SimForums, same screen name. Were you one of those bunker characters? I especially want to hear what you think.

Thank you for your review of our Sim Seed 32568, aka Orion Arm Remote Extreme.

We’d like to point out that this is, as you say “a plausible reimagining of the final half-century of a husk planet.” By default, any ending that doesn’t involve the end result of “husk planet” wouldn’t be very plausible, would it? It also wouldn’t be very Extreme.

But we only have so much control over the Contrived Consciousness on this one, so as you say we can’t guarantee that a result where the seed doesn’t end in megadeath doesn’t exist. We can guarantee that we’ll pull you out of any CC hallucination that isn’t plausible, such as your avatar glitching and teleporting to the stratosphere.

Our philosophy here at Blue Sky is—and I’m sure you’ve heard this one before if you’ve played any of our other Sims—that consciousness is the universe experiencing itself. Husk planets like Orion Arm Remote are examples of the universe experiencing suffering and death. By recreating these and having people experience it as close to first-hand as possible, we are staving off the worst tendencies of the universe. All the while providing audiences an entertaining experience! Come see the vividness of beauty despite terror! So we thank you for your service to your fellow sentients and hope the adventure was instructive, leading to prevention of this type of megadeath again in the Known Galaxy.