CAN ANDROIDS SURVIVE sees you struggling to overcome enemy fire, a brutal lunar landscape, and your limited resources as you make battlefield deliveries.
Set in the same universe as CAN ANDROIDS PRAY, the game tosses you into an active warzone and tasks you with getting supplies to Starbound Alliance bases. Being a machine, no one seems to care all that much if you survive the journey. Well, they care in that they hope you bring them the stuff they need. As for your own life? Not so much. Which is rough, because you’re in danger from a lot of stuff as you rush around trying to drop off equipment. Enemies will shoot at you. The landscape itself is filled with all kinds of damaging stuff. You also have limited fuel and ammo, which you may have to expend in creative ways to stay alive. It’s a rough job to do.
The sheer danger, as well as the added pressure of dwindling supplies, turns each delivery into a frantic rush that’s easy to get caught up in. It’s always impressive when a game peels that sense of self away, making you feel like you’re inhabiting another character from the sheer ferocity of the dangers you’re facing. Hurtling through these landscapes and trying to keep intact, all while expending what little stuff you have for any advantage, left me terrified for my digital life. It got me to bring this human fear into a machine, forcing me to consider the weight we put on the devices that we rely on to keep us alive every day.
It’s not always as dramatic as a lunar shootout, but what other frightening things do we push on machines? While a machine (arguably) can’t feel, how often do we see glitches in our programming? Unintended things a program might think or do based on what we’ve taught it? What might a machine think in this instance that we wouldn’t expect? CAN ANDROIDS SURVIVE asks us to consider these thoughts (among others, as the writing you’ll find has plenty more to ask), and perhaps feel something more towards these poor machines we keep rushing into gunfire.
CAN ANDROIDS SURVIVE is available now on the Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store, itch.io, and Steam.
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