Heat Signature review (Suspicious Developments, 2017, PC)

It’s been near enough six years since I last played Heat Signature. I start a mission, I run in, thinking I’m hard, and immediately get pasted. I’m halfway through a save and I have no idea what I’m doing. I start a new galaxy and am reintroduced to the game’s main mechanic: pausing during combat to vworp gadgets and shoot guns at rooms full of guards.

Somewhere in between, I find an old dev log where lead dev Tom Francis describes Heat Signature as a puzzle game (I can’t recall the specific one, but it’ll be in this Youtube playlist). I find this quite odd at first, even resist it, but I remember the exact moment that I got where he was coming from - a point of no return.

I’ve taken an assassination mission, and have been using a Rechargeable Slipstream to make time move slower for everyone else and sneak my way to my target. I stop around the corner from my target, pause to choose my wrench - no - longblade - no - silenced pistol - no. Oh, I haven’t brought anything with me that can kill my target.

I am next to a window, and one of the puzzle-like ingenious solutions I remember from six years ago is to lure a target near one, and then break it, sucking you both out into space. But, like I say, I don’t have anything. It’s time now to pause the game for five minutes and think it through. Just as I despair that I’ve come all this way for nothing, I also remember that, if you’re not careful, running towards a window just as your Slipstream runs out will cause you to smash straight through it.

Up until now, I’ve always done this by accident, but now I think, ‘what if I lure the target there, teleport back down the corridor, slipstream so I can run towards them while dodging their bullets, and…’

It’s official. Heat Signature really is really a puzzle game, and, even now as I reflect, I feel delighted to have figured that out. It’s not a roguelike with a repetitive gameplay loop: it’s procedural, infinite, problem solving.

Armored guards, or special enemy types like the Tracker, who knows where you are at all times and will shoot you unconscious on sight in a split-second, aren’t obstacles that say ‘you can’t do this mission if you don’t have X or can’t afford Y’, they’re challenges. ‘Navigate these things with whatever you have on hand’. Play chicken with Heat Signature.

You’re also frequently forced to change up your playstyle, as characters’ progress towards unlocks gets slower after each mission, so if they don’t end up being captured or bleeding to death in space, you’re essentially forced to retire them and start over.

And that’s where the puzzling, improvisational, and emergent fun starts. This character won’t be able to use the item shop, that one will be dead in ten minutes. This one’s a terrible shot. You pick your next character out of a lineup, and can dismiss any who don’t take your fancy, so, in truth, you can dance around these limitations and just roll someone who’s painfully average, but to play Heat Signature like this is to play Heat Signature in an inherently dull way.

Torturing yourself and picking the characters with the most negative traits, or imposing your own limitations, forces you out of that rut of using the same rote strategies. Sometimes I play as a ninja throwing shortblades (I gasped when I figured out you could do this), sometimes I dual wield silenced pistols, and sometimes I insist on doing no harm.

Forcing yourself to tackle the game’s infinite puzzle generator differently by making your own discoveries sends it stratospheric. I had 100 hours of playtime on Steam when I learned that crashbeams disable guards’ abilities to trigger alarms - and felt free to crash and teleport around them. I figured that out for myself, and it felt like ballet.

And I’m still foraging through this absolute gift of a video game - items like ‘The Everything Gun’ (exactly what that entails), that you can complete missions without boarding ships (just thrilling, when the penny drops), and tongue-in-cheek seasonal events (‘Space Halloween’).

Somewhere in those dev logs, your man wants you to ‘play Heat Signature forever’. At 163 hours logged, I’m not opposed to this, and you shouldn’t be either.