Heat Signature: The Definitive Review
Always. Be. Crashbeaming. Glitchtrapping. Shotgunning. Wrenching. Subverting (extreme range, self-charging)
There was a golden period in the early-to-mid 1980s where British child-friendly Scifi was in wild abundance. It was a kind of post-Star Wars era of spacey propaganda. NASA probes were revealing the Solar System, the promise of the Space Shuttle hadn’t yet disintegrated after launch, and TV was full of it; from Captain Zep and Ulysses 31 to the perennial Dr Who, Blake’s 7 and The Adventure Game, the media was overflowing with this kind of thing. And it crossed over into print with suitable ease - we had an embarrassment of riches, from the eternally great 2000ad to the TTA books to gamebooks like Be An Interplanetary Spy or the (actually brilliant) Falcon: Time Traveller series, it was almost impossible to avoid building a profound love for all things Scifi if it came with a peculiarly British flavour. Even games got in on the act, with Elite1 having its own (and really good fun) novella. It was with this background that in 2017, I found myself delighted to be playing Tom Francis’ superb stealth heist playbox, Heat Signature. Just from the character names alone, it felt as if it had timeslipped into our realm from that glorious 80s cultural explosion.2 The fact that it was systemically complex was the icing on the cake. This is a game that’s framed very tightly as almost an improvisational puzzler, yet with the freedom and range of tactical possibility to offer huge amounts of exploration and expression. And all awash in that gritty Caves of Androzani Brit Scifi flavour.
Heat Signature was a game I followed closely up to release. Tom had been previewing various aspects as he showed off prototypical segments on social media. It looked amazing. The idea alone, of piloting a little pod to board larger ships to complete nefarious tasks, was utterly tantalising. When I finally got my mits on it, I was thrilled to find it overdelivered on my expectations. Finally! A thinking man’s Hotline Miami in a Brit-Scifi universe. These things are rarer than proton decay, so to find it played so brilliantly was a true chef’s kiss moment. Although for me, I took the cowardly route of turning off Permadeath. Despite the game’s warning of a less interesting path, I found it turned the game into the best kind of collect-a-thon, wherein I was taking advantage of rare items in the game’s hub-shop and in-mission loot to build an absolutely killer inventory of gadgets. For Heat Signature is all about the fucking gadgets. I am more than sloppy enough to have likely found myself lumbered with bargain-basement bullshit and zero credits had I kept Permadeath in place. Instead, being pinged back to the hub (and keeping my gear) whenever I fucked it all up meant Heat Signature steamrolled like a deliciously casual RPG. It built into a leisurely curve of acquisition that utterly delighted me. Going back to it for this piece, I checked my stash to find gear that would blister the minds of anyone starting out and daunted by the bigger ships. Extreme range subverters, self-charging crashbeams and glitch traps, silenced concussive shotguns. All despicably useful in the pursuit of the game’s missions. It’s far too boring to list out what those things actually do - rest assured they’re a lot of fun because like the game, they’re fucking brilliant.3 They’re the tools of your trade as you board a ship and set about the tasks you must complete. Kill someone, kidnap someone, rescue someone. Steal some object, take over the ship. It’s a nicely tight set of objectives and each mission only has one of them. No cascading complications here; the task is clear and singular. Given the right tools, you could conceivably attempt a twitchy Hotline Miami run at some of these, but really the game is one of observation and planning, and finding just the right angle to avoid line-of-sight down long corridors - but with just enough leeway to get the fringes of a shotgun spread to take out a troublesome guard. Heat Signature is all in the planning and the abuse of the space bar to freeze time. But it’s also in covering your bases - knowing where you’re vulnerable, and what contingencies to account for when you inevitably make mistakes. On top of all that, of course, is the pod. The fact that there’s a phase of boarding your pod and travelling to the target spacecraft seems almost redundant given how great the interior gameplay is, but the pod has plenty of its own joy to give once you master its controls and understand tactical uses for it. But really, the piloting aspect performs more as a ritual, a kind of rite of conceptual validity. By forcing you to travel manually to each ship, you’re more versed in the atmosphere of being the kind of character the game assigns you to be. A darker take on Han Solo, or the kind of shadowy operative you’d find in the background of a dystopian Blake’s 7 hubworld.
Heat Signature’s play is a combination of understanding procedures and creatively mitigating them. Use a subverter to turn a defence turret against the ship’s crew. Place a glitchtrap in the right corridor to teleport tricky enemies into space. Crashbeam a Defender to turn off the shields of guards within range of it. You juggle your gadgets as you go, and adapt as situations unfold. All of this is discovered through failure in the most part, hence the leisure in turning off Permadeath. But really, it’s a beautifully balanced set of interlocking systems in cohort with a modular map structure that allows procedural generation to absolutely shine. Heat Signature is almost a hymn to the virtues of having everything generated, with sublimity falling out of that glorious melee with surprising regularity. Commonly it combines incredibly useful gadgets with just the right situations for them, then adds chaos when you get it wrong as you procedurally generate the escape plan in your head. Likewise the universe structure and the ship layouts, all generated uniquely for your pleasure to create a living space for a ludological richness that’s all too uncommon. Like the very best of the best, the game rewards both curiosity and creativity in your approach. But such is the rare, under-appreciated status of the game itself. Heat Signature is yet another seemingly forgotten gem in the eternally savage flux of the indie sector’s relentless deluge. Like a similar Scifi great, Objects In Space, the greatest tragedy is in how easily these kinds of conceptually and thematically brilliant - and mechanically superb - games get lost or forgotten purely because of the sheer volume of the new and the brightly spangled. Hence me championing Heat Signature today.
I can’t blame Tom Francis for moving straight into Tactical Breech Wizards and making a brilliant isometric tactical-strat-puzzler, but I can lament the fact that indie obscurity can be overcome (to some extent) by indulgent and flagrant sequelisation. What I mean by that is I would very much like to play Heat Signature 2: The Signaturing and I have plenty of ideas of how such a thing would evolve. The expansion seems dryly logical: add invadable space stations, more stuff, clothing for modifiers, formal RPG character development and so on. I think of a step into first-person ImSim shoes and get seriously giddy. But the fact remains that by itself, Heat Signature is still really, really good. Captivatingly so for me, who’s desperate to finish up this piece so I can jump back in and have a few runs. Much like Hotline Miami, it carries a plausible sense of having been possible for decades and in a real sense, that illustrates how timeless great game design really is when you see it. I can imagine Heat Signature working on an Amiga or VGA PC perfectly well, save the graphical bells and whistles perhaps.
I’m not sure if that timeless quality was ever Tom’s intention, but at least he did a GDC talk about Gunpoint and Heat Signature, disclosing how the wondrous, precious jewel that it became fell out of the rapidly iterative design process of someone who’s really good at this shit. A mark of that talent is found in the game’s warm generosity; the mission select screen offers you a suite of missions across a range of difficulties and for the most part, the mission parameters are laid out for you to inspect and assess. Obviously the more difficult the mission, the greater the rewards, but there’s plenty to be had from going through easier fodder to accrue a bit of average kit alongside piecemeal cash payments. A key aspect in non-Permadeath is how the characters affect the game’s narrative arc of liberation; complete too many missions and you don’t convey the same morale boost to liberation efforts, which eventually grind to a halt. A lovely design touch, this makes you pick up the lesser-famed newbies and take on runs with diminished goodies to choose from to keep the faith burning and you on your toes. After all, a self-charging extreme range subverter is a lazy choice, if we’re being honest. The beauty of Heat Signature is that you could probably do without it if you really tried, and yet it’s so much fun when you have one. That tension, and the fact that the game is such fun whichever side of the fence you fall on, underlines the game’s virtue. And yeah, we’ll likely never see a sequel, no matter how awesome such a thing could be. But then, Kubrick and Verhoeven never did sequels either. You know who did? Ridley Scott. And look how that fucking turned out.
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There’s definitely an element of Elite’s callous approach to humanity in Heat Signature. The target capture missions and airlock ejections all summon memories of Elite’s escape pods, having a fuel scoop to pick them up and suddenly getting a stock of slaves.
The thing Heat Signature most reminded me off was an obscure gamebook called Have Your Own Extra-Terrestrial Adventure. Published in 1983, slap bang in the middle of this golden wave, it told the story of a cyber-noir future-rogue on a mission to track down an interplanetary criminal, with the reader selecting entire chapters instead of paragraphic chunks. Written in the first person, it opens with a discussion of the character’s gadgetry concealed within jewellery and garments. This immediately echoed with Heat Signature’s equipment fetish and delighted me no end. Have Your Own Extra Terrestrial Adventure is uncommonly mature in some of its tracts, being a step away from the gaudy, puzzle-heavy delights of Be An Interplanetary Spy. It had a mood and atmosphere more complex and adult than it needed, much to its credit. That atmosphere definitely translates into the cruel-future Heat Signature vibe. Cool as fuck front cover, too.
For a deeper demonstration, I actually made a moderately embarrassing YouTube video of some runs, all the way back in 2018.