JETT: The Far Shore Review – Comet me bro

JETT: The Far Shore, the latest game from Sword and Sorcery’s Superbrothers and Tokyo-based studio Pine Scented Software, doesn’t waste any time in its delivery of awe and wonder. A space adventure with an ambitious flavour, JETT: The Far Shore brings its awe-inspiring journey into the final frontier back down to terra firma with a layer of optimism and sadness for what has been left behind. It’s a game that captures wanderlust on a cosmic scale, providing both an epic scale of exploration and the serenity of charting the unknown.

Across its worlds, I was primarily in control of one of the titular Jetts of this game, an all-purpose combination of high-speed transport, acrobatic surveyor, and mobile quasi-religious science lab that was chasing a single goal: The discovery of the Hymnwave, that JETT: The Far Shore’s civilisation has spent countless generations and thousands of years in pursuit of, believing that this mystery on the other side of the cosmos will grant them salvation.

It’s an intriguing setup, hammered home by first-person sequences that expand on JETT’s narrative and remind you of the cost paid to come so far over millennia of travel across the stars. But where JETT hits you with philosophical moments that remind you of just how unfathomably massive all of time and space is when compared to the fleeting existence of a single individual, its actual gameplay is a haptic thrill to experience.

At least on PS5, thanks to the DualSense controller that is, as every slight tremor of your spaceship skipping across endless oceans, every shock to the system of major turbulence, and the perfectly calibrated resistance when you engage your thrusters, it’s all wonderfully felt in Sony’s next-gen peripheral. It’s a sensation that sadly won’t be available on the PS4 version of JETT, but if you’re planning to play it on PC, ditch the keyboard and grab one of these controllers instead as they are thankfully compatible with rigs.

Piloting in Jett is consistently engaging, with your vehicle initially having a simple array of abilities that are upgraded and expanded upon as the journey continues. From being able to fire your thrusters with well-tuned bursts of power to being able to dip, dive, and roll through the alien landscape, all of these systems are tied together by an engine gauge that encourages you to put the pedal to the metal but to never overdo it.

While that may sound like a persistently annoying feature, JETT handles it with technical nuance and style so that you’re able to constantly chain moves together without having to worry about overheating your engine, creating an oddly cathartic sensation of navigation. Movement is an absolute joy, broken up over the course of the adventure with moments of scanning, documenting the local ecosystem, and avoiding the more dangerous fauna present on the surface.

When you’re not in the mood for whizzing past verdant jungles and grey oceans hiding secrets, Jett’s other gameplay pillar is a heavy drop of lore that might be fascinating to some people eager to know just how science and religion can co-exist, and an absolute drag to anyone wanting to get back into the Jett for another round of close encounters of the turbo kind. Seeking out these data archives and interactions are mostly optional though, and vital to get a better understanding of the journey you’ve taken and Mei the protagonist’s place in it, an adventure that mixes grand ambition with soul-crushing loneliness in a world where the colour has been purposefully muted to hammer those themes home.

While the game has plenty to offer visually and narratively with a zen-like approach to high-speed discovery, it’s worth listening to as well thanks to a superb soundtrack by Andrew “SCNTFC” Rohrmann and contributor Priscilla Snow that captures the majesty of space and mixes it with alien sounds. It’s the kind of audio enhancement that makes you sit up and take notice with its gradual build, eventually exploding with cascading notes of harmony that feel simply epic to listen to. Symphonic suites deliver a soundtrack that feels like the strangest combination possible, cerebral and emotional, but it works to deliver absolutely beautiful and haunting themes.