Pegasus Crew: Pleasure Planet
Among the less well-known Athenian schools of philosophy are the Cyrenaics, who believed that the point of life is present pleasure. Their founder, Aristippus of Cyrene, is supposed to have said, upon entering a brothel: “The danger lies not in entering, but in being unable to come back out!” While this has somehow not become one of the famous wisdom sayings of the ancients, it is nevertheless quite apposite to Pegasus Crew: Pleasure Planet. The danger lies not in entering, but in being unable to come back out.
I was mildly apprehensive of this entry, because a story that is set on a ‘pleasure planet’ has a certain probability of being someone’s excuse to write immature brothel scenes. I need not have worried. This game is class act. As much of a class act as any game can be that involves an intrusive full-body medical check-up involving mechanical tentacles. Which Pegasus Crew proves to be ‘more than you might have expected.’
We follow Astrid, an escaped brainwashed space marine, and her companions Locke and Chicken as they enter the pleasure planet. Our choices have an influence on how Locke, Chicken and the people of the planet see us; and I think certain scenes play out differently depending on the current values. For example, if you let Locke decide what to do in the probability building, he will make a more mature choice if his relationship with you is high enough. (There is, unfortunately, no way to check the current relationship values, and also, more unfortunately, no way to save the game.)
These characters are quite delightful, and the situations they get involved in are short, crisply written, amusing, and sometimes slightly touching. The worldbuilding is inventive. The music is fitting. What’s not to like? If I had to be critical, I could point out that everything fits a little too neatly: the end of the game hands us a lot of puzzle pieces to these characters and their backstories in quick succession, which lacks verisimilitude and doesn’t allow them to have the narrative weight they could have had. This is mostly a matter of timing, and I do not resent the rush – a longer game might have had more room to breathe, but would also have been, well, longer. The final message, at least the one I arrived at, is hardly novel, and could have been predicted from the beginning. You must find your own purpose. But that’s what I get from following Nietzsche rather than Aristippus. Pleasure was offered me on a golden plate, and instead I chose to walk out of the brothel.