The crazy space station management simulation Startopia and the crazy hospital simulation Theme Hospital are two of my older favorite games, so I was very happy with the concept of Galacticare, a crazy space station hospital management simulation. And you know what? It is great! From the first reveals and previews, I thought maybe it was going to happen to crazy, but it hits its tone, has some really impressive levels, and bugs in previous builds have been squashed (like how you can manually disperse small parasites that get into your hospital). I can see this becoming a favorite comfort game for me.
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All in all, it’s a good comfort game because you can already master a reliable formula for building a good hospital from the second level and rarely have to deviate from it. There are times, particularly in some of the less stellar levels, where it becomes almost boring. Writing is tiring, but inevitably there are large stretches where no one talks to you. The penalty for building a good hospital is watching it run successfully while you wait to reach the next plot milestone.
However, I’m exaggerating here, which is something you wouldn’t actually expect from a doctor. In Galacticare, you are the hospital director of the titular medical company and are tasked with running hospitals as private contractors for various alien companies. You build rooms to meet various health and wellness needs, balance your expenses with your income, and try not to kill too many people. “I have a private healthcare provider?” I hear you cry. “Why this can never lead to bad outcomes for patients!” Well, luckily it’s a video game, and in Galacticare, the terrible risk to life and limb is only part of the treatment, because in the grand tradition of Theme Hospital et al. The machines and diseases are all on a scale of frightening.
This feature is something Galacticare absolutely nails. The Bone Lab, for example, is a giant machine that’s part dog, part American football helmet, and it crushes broken bones and prints new ones directly into patients. Projectile medicine requires a long room because it houses a machine that shoots medical munitions at patients. Another enjoyable pun is the parasitology treatment room, where the treatment machine is a biomechanical hybrid octopus doctor or Doctopus to remove parasites. Patients will suddenly become afraid of space, have tentacles sticking out of their heads, covered in green slime, or looking like they’re made of lava. They’re all wonderfully animated and it’s fun to sit there for a while and watch a new treatment machine unlock it for the first time, or follow a new type of alien patient to see what it looks like when they’re there sit down very strangely and strangely -y.
There are also many different types of aliens, and they have slightly different needs, which you can address when building your hospital, such as making sure the biodeck in Startopia has different types of plants to keep everyone happy. The Tenki are cheerful little guys who, as engineers, resemble capuchin monkeys. That’s why they love it when their rooms are upgraded with machines that make their doctors more efficient or learn faster. My favorite are the Kouber-Balys, the solid unit types. They walk on their hands and use their grasping feet as well as their hands, and because they are larger than the average bear, they prefer wide corridors and rooms and low hospital congestion.
Such considerations are a nice detail to have in mind when planning your hospital. If there is a level where there is no Kuober Baly versus one where there are many Kuober Baly, the layouts will end up being very different. You can also make good use of teleport pads and consider where you place your reception desks. You actually end up thinking a lot more like a city planner than you did in Theme Hospital or even Two Point Hospital. And that’s not even taking into account the characteristics of your doctors, which can include good characteristics, like not having to take as many breaks, but also really bad ones, like intentionally embezzling or hurting patients.
Despite all these variables, Galacticare is very easy to analyze, and it’s pretty easy to tell when there’s a big queue in a room or check why you’re not giving a fourth star on your hospital rating (it’s probably seating or vending machines). Machine cover, these are big things). But even with all the things that could happen, if you get rid of at least two reception desks and two diagnostic rooms early on, you won’t run into major problems for a while. It’s a shame to fast forward through Galacticare because you miss so many of the nice animations, but that’s something you’ll end up doing a lot.
However, it handles the levels well. Each story level has a great hook that plays with the room setting. In an early film you treat actors to some kind of intergalactic Fyre-fest, and then you take part in a huge (and I mean huge) vegetable-growing competition, while later you set up a hospital in a prison where every patient and doctor is a Clone is of an evil scientist. Many of these have a huge, evolving backdrop as the festival moon explodes or your giant medulla grows larger and floats in space next to your hospital, and they are captivating and delightful in different ways, while offering different challenges. One of them, for example, is located in a train station and is very narrow.
Everything is narrated by HEAL, your somewhat grumpy AI computer helper, and Medi, the brave sidekick Medibot, an avatar of the little robots that clean and repair your hospital, and both are really very funny, but not in an annoying way. It’s hard to pull off, and I think Brightrock Games did unusually well. I don’t think it’ll convert anyone who doesn’t like the genre – in many ways it’s more of a love letter to games that no longer exist, rather than reinventing the wheel – but it did do some very fun things . If this type of management game is your thing, then you will really like Galacticare.
This review is based on a copy of the game provided by the publisher.