Review: Jett: The Far Shore’s Elegant Exterior Disguises a Frustrating Center

The characters at the center of Jett: The Far Shore are scouts who’ve left their dying world behind and traveled hundreds of years in stasis to prepare a distant planet for colonization. After the hulking Mother Structure comes to rest in the planet’s orbit, the mission’s overseer sends down scout ships and then the mechanical Ground Control spire to serve as the base of operations while the crew gathers data. But strict scientists these are not. The signal that they’ve followed to the new world, the hymnwave, is the center point of their people’s religion, where many of the details were foretold (to varying degrees of accuracy) long ago by a prophet-like figure whose image occupies a central place near the dining area.

Mei, the player character, is an “anchorite,” a particular devotee of the religion. She is, as a result, the first to board the Mother Structure and the first to go down to the new planet. But the others are also believers, as demonstrated by an early scene involving the crew praying over food. Throughout, these individuals all speak with a formal, single-minded devotion to their cause, aware of the stakes and their position as contributors to a larger whole.

This mystical angle is what gives Jett: The Far Shore its distinct flavor, further expressed in a smooth, muted art style that depicts alien vistas that wouldn’t seem out of place on the cover of a prog rock album. The game is often gorgeous to behold, radiating a specific sense of place and history through a coherent culture that feels distinct from yet not unlike our own, as if we had made it to space before the world began to turn away from religious customs.

Unfortunately, this sense of mythic austerity also leads to a lot of needlessly esoteric choices for the control system, down to first-person walking sequences with turning speeds so sluggish that the D-pad has shortcuts for 90- and 180-degree turns. You’ll spend most of your time in your scouting jett, a two-pilot ship that floats above both water and solid ground in two navigation modes: the glacial default without thrusters and the perpetual motion that results from turning them on. In both modes, you can put strain on the thrusters to hop up in the air over obstacles or, in the second mode, boost to full speed as long as you don’t overdo it, keeping an eye on the instability meter that warns when you’re about to overheat.

The flying does feel more natural over time, especially as you gain the ability to store stabilizing vapor for later use when you fly through the clouds of it that are spewed from fissures and looping plants. But the control system itself never really, well, soars. That’s because Jett: The Far Shore keeps asking the player for levels of precision that feel antithetical to such a fiddly flying system. When ferrying heavy objects or navigating more narrow, twisty paths, you’ll need to opt for the molasses default speed that lacks the momentum to clear some of the rockier terrain. For one, you can turn on the thrusters sans heavy cargo, but they tend to just bounce you between the rocks and damage the ship in the process.

To be fair, some of the game’s unwieldiness feels intentional. It’s as if the developers at Superbrothers have discarded a tighter sense of control in order to evoke the difficulty of traversing rugged and unfamiliar terrain. The camera, too, sacrifices a more legible zoomed-in perspective for a view that makes your jett appear minuscule on screen, as if to communicate the scale of the alien planet as well as the scouts’ unfamiliarity with it.

But other choices seem incomprehensible and indefensible, like making so many of the useful plants look the same or the absolutely lousy UI, which is an eye-straining assortment of equally small, unassuming icons and text that blends easily into the scenery. Sometimes it’s even difficult to tell which direction your jett is facing. When a story event fails to trigger properly, you’re left with the uncertainty of whether the game has broken, whether you’re genuinely overlooking some infinitesimal detail, or whether you’re just stuck in one of several moments where the game expects you to just fly around for a while until something happens.

Regardless of intent, the curious result is a game that’s at its best when it’s engaging you as little as possible. The art and sound design are easiest to appreciate when you’re simply taking in the mysterious story and its open-ended questions about belief and apparent destiny through a cutscene or a linear walking sequence, and the flying feels good when your only goal is to reach some distant point, leaving you free to weave through vapor deposits in wide-open spaces. Beautiful and elegant though it may seem on the outside, Jett: The Far Shore too often lets its stylistic tics drag the experience into varying degrees of frustration.

The game was reviewed using a code provided by popagenda.