Beyond The Chiron Gate is a text-based roguelike game created by John Ayliff
, his follow-up game after Seedship.
In the mid-23rd century, humanity discovered the Chiron Gate in the solar system, the key to a galaxy-spanning Portal Network that was created a million years ago by the seemingly-extinct Gatebuilders. The player takes command of Earth's first interstellar starship in a quest to find the fabled Gatebuilder homeworld, managing and upgrading both ship and crew as they go. But it won't be easy, as the galaxy is already something of a mass grave, and the star systems you'll explore contain many hazards to your ship and crew. Worse yet, the Chiron Gate will only function for 20 jumps, leaving you a limited window to collect the data you'll need to locate the Gatebuilder homeworld and keep the Gate network from shutting down.
It is available on itchio here, as well as on Android and iOS devices.
This game provides examples of:
- Absolute Xenophobe: Occasionally, the remnant ships or space stations you'll discover aren't derelict... and they have absolutely no wish to see intruders like you messing around in their star system.
- After the End: The entire galaxy feels something like a post-apocalyptic environment, as you'll encounter the remnants of countless extinct civilizations, both terrestrial and Gate-traveling.
- Alien Invasion: Some planet-level extinctions you'll discover can be the result of hostile Gate travelers.
- Alien Sea: You'll discover the occasional ocean on planets. As often as not, it won't be water.
- Aliens Speaking English: Occasionally aliens and derelict AIs will greet your crew in English, lampshading it by claiming they learned the language from your ship's chatter.
- All Planets Are Earthlike: So very harshly averted. Almost every planet you'll find is lifeless, many worlds have too much (or too little) heat, too much gravity, too much atmosphere, too little stability, or something else that can potentially harm your astronauts, and even the planets that do have life usually have it living in an atmosphere that humans can't breathe.
- Ancient Astronauts: Sometimes, pre-spaceflight races (extinct or otherwise) will have recorded myths about "visitors" from the stars. Sometimes these are one of the Gate-traveling races and sometimes they're just myths.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The final fate of the Gatebuilders, one possible fate for extinct Gate-travelling races... and the best possible ending for the player's crew.
- Benevolent A.I.: A derelict ship or base might have an AI that is still functional... and it might even be polite to you.
- Benevolent Precursors: The Gatebuilders made the Gate network not just for themselves, but for the civilizations that came after them. If you can reach the Gate Nexus on their homeworld, their wraith-like descendents will try to help you fix it.
- Body Armor as Hit Points: Armor upgrades for your ship don't actually block or reduce damage. They only make it possible for your ship to survive more hits before exploding.
- Bottomless Fuel Tanks: Averted. In the larger star systems, you'll need to keep an eye on how much fuel you're using to travel between (and land on) planets.
- Critical Existence Failure: Averted. Both your crew members and your ship follow a "three strikes" rule — three instances of damage or wounds will end them. But crew members will get worse at their jobs as they rack up injuries, and each instance of damage to your ship wrecks something (landing gear, interstellar drive, medbay, etc), which will cause problems for the rest of the current expedition.
- Cutscene Power to the Max: If you get driven out of a star system by a xenophobic active ship/station or survive the Gate Nexus finale without wrecking your ship, you don't use any fuel getting to the gate.
- Derelict Graveyard: Over a given run, you'll encounter remnants from at least half a dozen races that traversed the Gate network before you. Most of these races will be long extinct, and even the few who remain extant will have left abandoned ships and bases on planets they no longer care about.
- Early Game Hell:
- Some star systems have rampant asteroids, stellar flares, and/or nebula as special hazards, capable of threatening your crew during the whole expedition. Your first expedition, where you can't pick your star system and have only level 1 crew members, can have more than one of these hazards, resulting in a very rough (and possibly short-lived) opening.
- Your first few expeditions will be blind to some degree, as you need upgrades to know if a star system will have hazards, organic life, extinct natives, or remnants from other Gate travelers.
- Energy Weapon: These are wielded by non-derelict ships.
- Experience Points: A crew member earns XP when they pass a die roll for a task or when the crew makes a discovery of any kind.
- Fling a Light into the Future: A series of flingings. In the end, you reach the Gate Nexus and learn the Gatebuilders originally created the Gate network to help civilizations after them explore the galaxy — light number one. Then you learn that the network tends to fail over time, but other races in the past visited the Gate Nexus to reset the network for future travelers — light number two. Now it's humanity's turn to fix the network themselves — light number three!
- Generation Ships: One type of derelict ship that you can find.
- Hive Mind: One possible feature of alien races. Usually a result of cybernetics, but it can be natural as well.
- Human Popsicle: Sometimes offered as an option to save a wounded crew member.
- In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves: Many of the extinct Gate-travelling races brought their own destruction upon themselves, typically via civil war or simply growing so vast and economically-hungry that they collapsed when there was nothing left to consume.
- It's Up to You: Justified, as the Chiron Gate will shut down after 20 jumps, and it's better to have a single focused crew making the most of every jump than to try to throw hordes of exploration ships at every possible target.
- Late to the Tragedy: You'll discover many extinction sites, ranging from Gate-travelling races to sentient races that never developed spaceflight to ecosystems that never evolved sentience. All you can do is have your crew investigate and collect the data for whatever apocalypse — internal war, alien invasion, plagues, climate change, overpopulation, asteroid strikes, cosmic gamma ray bursts, etc — ended these guys.
- Mechanical Lifeforms: It's possible for Gate-travelling races and even the Gatebuilders to be generated as robotic. And they can also be generated with histories that involve overthrowing their organic creators, uploading their minds en masse from their original organic bodies, or warring with other Gate travelers.
- No Biochemical Barriers: It's possible for crew members to catch alien diseases, and they're more lethal than their earthly equivalents (requiring only two steps to kill an astronaut).
- One-Hit Kill: Most forms of harm require three separate hits to kill a crew member. But there are rare challenges which, if failed, can instagib even a fully healthy crew member. The final Gate Nexus sequence has several.
- Pacifist: Your starship starts with no weapons and never gains any. If you encounter hostile alien ships, the only things you can do are either flee or try to talk them into standing down. (You can sometimes resort to violence when your crew is on foot, though.)
- The Plague: Both alien and terrestrial infections can afflict your crew, and blowing the die roll to cure them can infect the would-be medic as well. Plagues can also be a cause of extinction for dead civilizations or ecosystems on planets.
- Planet Looters: One category of Gate-travelling races.
- Portal Network: An interesting example. You can travel between the Chiron Gate (Earth) and another star system, though only once per system, as humanity doesn't fully understand how the Chiron Gate works and in fact the entire gate network is failing.
- Random Event: The core of the gameplay, as the discoveries and threats you encounter are both drawn from a large (but finite) pool.
- Randomly Generated Levels: Because of how the Chiron Gate works, you can never visit the same star system twice. So every expedition is to a completely new (and procedurally-generated) star system.
- Random Number God: Both your greatest ally and your worst enemy in this game.
- Single-Biome Planet: Justified, as very few planets even have what could be called a biome. And with the few that are life-bearing, your crew aren't there to colonize, but to search for discoveries that will help you with the more important goals of upgrading your ship and locating the Gatebuilder homeworld.
- Starfish Aliens: Not all the life you might meet will talk back, and some of it managed to evolve in ways that would be unthinkable on Earth.
- Tempting Fate: A hallmark of this game. Even when you're getting wrecked during an expedition, there's always a temptation to keep pushing your luck, because the next planet or asteroid could be hiding a valuable derelict to study or a discovery that will unlock an upgrade for your ship.
- Trippy Finale Syndrome: If you make it to the Gatebuilder homeworld, the final challenge of the game happens in the Gate Nexus, a trippy space disconnected from the normal universe.
