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“Do not forget to turn the system off before touching anything,” says my astronaut colleague over the radio. I grab the faulty power transformer without listening, and am immediately electrocuted. Worse still, I have to hammer a quick-time button to recover. This is what it is like to be Jerry, the janitor of a cheap and poorly maintained space station. Jerry is being tasked with repair work beyond his job description, learning the ins and outs of an escape pod’s machinery from his co-worker via radio. This may come in handy, as the station is about to explode. Tin Can is not a new game (it came out in 2022) but it is on sale as part of Steam’s space exploration fest. And I enjoy a space game that makes me panic while alarms go off everywhere.
We haven’t covered it before, but it’s basically My Summer Car in space. Or perhaps Gravity starring Sandra Bullock, but funnier. The escape pod is notoriously troublesome. During the tutorial your colleague jokes that it is barely worth the effort of keeping the heap of junk maintained. “I would rather die than have to escape in this thing,” he says. Well.
It is full of small moments of comic misjudgement. My fellow space employee asks me to install some components back into the oxygen generator, slotting circuit boards and pumps into an intimidating drawer full of machinery. “You can’t get it wrong,” he says.
I fumble with the loose switch and drop it on the floor. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a janitor.
But it’s possible the game is stealthily teaching me science. The engineer colleague talks all about the correct ratios of oxygen to nitrogen in breathable air, for example. But it’s the tension of needing to survive that really hammers home the knowledge about pressure bars or nuclear decay. You learn a lot quicker when faced with the practical concern of, you know, not dying.
The requirements soon stack up. When the main computer is down there’s no way of knowing which exact component is faulty within the pod. So you have to glance at a bunch of little monitors for cryptic four-letter codes, then resort to flipping through a clipboard manual to identify those error codes and understand which do-hickey is causing trouble. It is hugely cumbersome. I love it.
Like I say, it’s on sale, so you can suffocate for half price. But there’s also a demo on Steam that will take you through all the basics I describe here, and have you switching little buttons on and off with the reckless abandon of a toddler in the front seat of a station wagon. Go on, embrace a few mistakes. If you don’t accidentally turn off the gravity at least once, how will you know to avoid it in the future?