Orbital Cargo Division review

• Reviews by Pascal Tekaia
• Published:

A promising retro sci-fi adventure isn’t given enough space to fill up with more substantial content

Some of my earliest forays into the point-and-click adventure realm were courtesy of Sierra On-Line’s classic game collections, including one about a certain less-than-stellar interstellar janitor with aspirations to one day captain his very own spaceship. Roger Wilco’s particular brand of comedic shenanigans immediately appealed to me, while the graphical limitations of the time also instilled in me an appreciation of old-school EGA and VGA art styles. This doubtlessly factored into my immediate interest in Manuel Schenk’s Orbital Cargo Division decades later, a game whose presentation at once recalled those formative years I spent cruising through a pixel art galaxy. While a few surface-level parallels between the two games can easily be drawn, however, Orbital Cargo Division never really manages to soar much higher than that, remaining a superficial experience with some worthwhile ideas but an otherwise unimpressive execution.

The game’s early minutes do start off rather promisingly. A supply ship of the titular Orbital Cargo Division, the Chronos, has just arrived at an outer space mining station to deliver whatever one needs when living amongst the stars. You take on the role of the Chronos’s Captain Novak, who, along with his crewmates Zoe and Talli, is met with a station that’s eerily quiet and seemingly devoid of life; no welcome delegation to meet them upon boarding, no flight officers to check them in, no security personnel overseeing their arrival. But as the player, we’ve already been clued into what’s about to be revealed: the narrative is actually framed as a flashback recalled a day later, when Captain Novak is being interviewed about the events that transpired after their arrival, particularly concerning the dead bodies of the station’s erstwhile crew found all over the station.

It's an intriguing setup, and one that seems to suggest a space thriller about to unfold. But despite some grim thematic elements, the tone is fairly balanced between comedic and serious story beats. As the game opens, for example, the captain is busy putting his foot down, ordering either Zoe or Talli to grab a spacesuit and float over to the station to initiate the manual docking procedure; after all, he’s the captain here, and what he says goes. Smash cut to the outside of the Chronos, where Novak, now donning a spacesuit himself, sarcastically praises his crew for being reliable and oh so cooperative. The game embraces its spacey setting: the two hours it takes to complete it include floating through zero-G, piloting a bot around the inaccessible maintenance floor to repair the ship’s central elevator, and the opportunity to take a shuttle to a planet-side facility as the narrative unfolds. All the while, puzzles of the inventory-based variety must be solved to progress.

Unfortunately, even these additions can’t keep the game feeling fresh for too long. There’s simply not enough meat on the bone to satisfy here. The puzzles aren’t overly taxing and feel somewhat run-of-the-mill, with quite a few of them centered around locating magnetic key cards or numeric codes to unlock the game’s many sealed doors. Even with all that gatekeeping, it is quite possible to break the tale’s intended sequence flow. For example, Novak might comment on items he’ll need to scrounge up to repair the elevator or communications satellite before it’s even been established that these items do, in fact, need to be repaired to progress. Despite the puzzles’ limited scope, there was one that did stump me for a little bit, owing to an ambiguously named inventory item that made it difficult to know where and when to use it, and had me resorting to trial and error.

Orbital Cargo Division

Genre:	Comedy, Mystery, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Futuristic, Outer space
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

As Orbital Cargo Division barreled toward its conclusion, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the developer (who also made the fantasy-themed Nelson and the Magic Cauldron series) was forced to rush through the final few story elements. After the atmospheric early build-up, the climax is almost blink-and-you-miss-it fast and handled almost exclusively via hands-off animated sequences. One moment you’re still engaged in exploration, and the next you’re literally in the middle of the final confrontation, which is over mere seconds later. Credit where it’s due: the finale manages to infuse some more silliness, and there’s a fun twist that resolves the ultimate conflict just before credits roll, but everything else is so sudden and devoid of fanfare that it’s easy to forget there was even any payoff to the build-up at all.

The audio presentation is similarly an area where ambition might have overstepped its bounds. The criticism is leveled less at the limited sound design – there’s no music to speak of apart from title screen and credit roll themes, with the remainder of the game accompanied only by atmospheric effects – and more at the spoken dialogue. Don’t get me wrong: the fact that the game is fully voiced is admirable, but it seems clear that friends, family, and acquaintances of the developer lent their vocal talents rather than professional actors. Between the heavily accented mispronunciations (for example, on multiple occasions a “sweaty” spacesuit becomes a “sweety” one) and an overall sense of a first-take-stays-in level of quality, one has to wonder if pushing ahead with voiced characters may have detracted more than it actually added.

The graphics, on the other hand, represent an area where the game does meet its intended mark, though it may take a connoisseur of the genre’s early days to get the most out of the visual aesthetic here. Everything is presented in a heavily retro style, to the point that characters don’t have any facial features at all outside of a row of pixels for eyes, and conversations take place by having two characters vigorously bob their heads at each other. Environments, too, aren’t overloaded with detail, but what’s here is clean and easy to identify, and certain scenes like the ship’s bridge show a deft hand at combining simple yet atmospheric on-board color schemes with the satisfying depths of space. 

Final Verdict

I don’t wish to sound intentionally harsh toward Orbital Cargo Division and condemn it for what it isn’t rather than judging it on its own merits. I fully concede that some of my issues outlined above (the cringy voiceovers, for one thing) are down to budgetary constraints that a small passion project like this cannot conceivably remedy. One might even argue that this aspect actually lends the game a bit of character. However, there are other problems more deeply ingrained that aren’t as easy to gloss over. The overall adventure fails to provide much sense of satisfaction, either from tricky yet enjoyable puzzles or with a memorable story to see through to its end. Sadly, neither of these critical genre pillars are present to prop the title up, and what we’re left with is, at best, an inoffensive little game with a decent retro presentation and little else. With its short runtime and nostalgic appeal, curious members of the old guard may be tempted to give it a look, but those looking for richer, deeper sci-fi or gameplay likely won’t find much to hold their interest.

Pascal played Orbital Cargo Division on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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