The wacky space station management sim Startopia and the wacky hospital sim Theme Hospital are two of my favorite older games, so I was very excited about the concept of Galacticare, which is a wacky space station hospital management sim. And you know what? That’s great! From the first reveals and previews, I thought that might change also crazy, but it rings true in tone, has really remarkable levels, and bugs in earlier builds have been fixed (much like you can hand-slap little parasites that get into your hospital). I can see this becoming a comfort game for me.
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All that said, the reason this is a good comfort game is that you can master a reliable formula for building a good hospital by about level two and rarely have to deviate from it. There are times, especially in some of the less flashy levels, when it gets boring. The writing works hard, but there are bound to be large parts where no one is talking to you. The punishment for building a good hospital is sitting back and watching it run successfully while you wait for the next milestone to be reached.
However, I’m getting ahead of myself here, which isn’t really something you’d want from a GP. In Galacticare, you are the hospital director of the titular medical company, tasked with running hospitals as private contractors for various alien businesses. You lay out rooms to meet different health and wellness needs, balance your expenses and income, and try not to kill too many people. “Am I a private health practitioner?” i hear you cry “Why it can never result in bad patient outcomes!”. Fortunately, this is a video game, and in Galacticare the dire threat to life and limb is all part of the treatment, because in the grand tradition of Theme Hospital et al. they are all machines and diseases on a sliding scale of terrifying.
This feature is something that Galacticare absolutely nails. The Bone Lab, for example, is a huge machine that’s part dog, part football helmet that mulches broken bones and 3D prints new ones directly into the patient. Projectile Medicine requires a long room as it houses a machine that shoots medical projectiles at patients. The parasitology clinic is also delightful puns, where the treatment machine is a biomechanical hybrid octopus doctor, or doctopus, which removes parasites. Space-fear patients appear, with tentacles curling from 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 for a while and look at a new medical device when you first unlock it, or watch a new type of alien patient to see what it looks like when all the weird and aliens sit down. -y.
There are also many different types of aliens and they have slightly different needs that you can address when building your hospital, much like making sure the bio deck in Startopia has different types of plants to keep everyone happy. Engineers make Tenki happy little chaps similar to capuchin monkeys, so they love it when your rooms are upgraded with machines that make your doctors more efficient or learn faster. My favorites are the Kouber Balys who are massive unit types. They walk on their hands and use their prehensile feet as hands, and since they are larger than your average bear, they prefer to keep the corridors and rooms wide and the congestion of the hospital low.
These kinds of considerations are a nice wrinkle to have when you’re planning your hospital. If there is a level without Kuober Bala, vs. the ones that will be many, the layouts will end up being quite different. You can also make good use of teleportation pads and think about where you put your receptions. In the end, you’re actually thinking a lot more as an urban planner than you did in Theme Hospital or even Two Point Hospital. And that’s not even adding the qualities of your doctors, which can include good qualities like not having to take as many breaks, or downright bad ones like intentionally embezzling or harming patients.
Galacticare is very easy to analyze, despite all these variables, and it’s pretty easy to see when there’s a big queue in the room, or to check why you’re not giving yourself a fourth star in your hospital rating (probably seats or selling machine coverage, those are big things). Still, despite all the things that could happen, if you drop at least two receptions and two diagnostic rooms early, you won’t run into much trouble for a while. It’s a shame to fastforward on Galacticare because you’re missing out on so many nice animations, but you’ll end up doing a lot of it.
It does well with the levels though. Each story level has a big hook that plays with the spatial environment. Early on, you’ll be seen healing acts at some sort of intergalactic Fyre Fest, then entering a giant (and I mean giant) vegetable-growing competition, while later setting up a hospital in a prison where every patient and doctor is a clone. evil scientist. Many of them have some huge, evolving backgrounds, as the festival moon explodes or your giant pith grows and enlarges, floating in the space next to your hospital, and they’re engaging and variously adorable while offering various challenges. One is located at the train station, for example, and is very narrow.
It’s all narrated by HEAL, your slightly grumpy AI computer sidekick, and Medi, the spunky Medibot sidekick, the avatar of the little robots that go around cleaning and repairing your hospital, and both are very funny indeed, but not in an intrusive way. that’s annoying. It’s hard to pull off, and I think Brightrock Games did an unusually good job. I don’t think it’s going to convert anyone who doesn’t like the genre – in many ways it’s more of a love letter to past games than a rebirth of the wheels – but it did some very fun things. If this kind of management game is your jam, then Galaticare will serve you very well.
This review is based on a copy of the game provided by the publisher.