But the team behind Jett, including Canadian designer Craig Adams, are consciously flipping some of the genre’s tropes on their heads. Instead, it tells a story about environmentalism, climate change, faith and the future.

“This game … is kind of a record of myself and Patrick kind of just honestly reckoning with our concept of what’s to come,” he told Tapestry. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson is hoping to send rich tourists into the upper atmosphere. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wants to move all kinds of heavy industry from Earth into space.

Its narrative also actively questions what space exploration might look like, even as enthusiastic discussions of space exploration have percolated back into the headlines in recent years. That’s to say nothing of Tesla’s Elon Musk, who dreams of going even further, to building human settlements on Mars.

In Jett, players take on the role of Mei, a scout who has left her home planet, ravaged by industry-fuelled pollution, in search of a new home for her people. She explores a newfound planet, its surface mostly covered by a vast ocean, aboard a tiny ship — the titular Jett. “In fact, the code name that we had for years was simply The Future.”

“Maybe there’s people naive enough to buy into the singularity of colonizing Mars or whatever these idiots talk about. But no, we’ve got a finite amount of planet, and it’s increasingly finite,” he said. It’s an “irresponsible” version of a spacefaring future, according to Adams.

“I think a big part of the appeal is probably that it’s like a clean slate, which incidentally, is a metaphor used for colonization in the early modern period, too,” he told Tapestry host Mary Hines. Parallels to European colonial era Ted McCormick, a history professor at Concordia University in Montreal, has similar criticisms. He sees some clear similarities between the modern space race and another so-called era of discovery: early European colonialism into Africa and the Americas.

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