Jitter’s Demo Already Has Me Questioning My Loyalties In The Inevitable AI Revolution
I bet this AI can even do math.
Despite all the benign uses of artificial intelligence in games, these days, the term mostly conjures up the abomination of generative AI, which is used to turn entire lakes’ worth of water into pictures of people with too many fingers. One of the best demos available in February’s Steam Next Fest centers on a far more exciting kind of AI, that instead flies spaceships and only occasionally chucks passengers into the vacuum of space.
It’s hard to make a tutorial more fun than annoying, but Jitter manages it easily. Even when it’s just teaching you the ropes, it makes it enjoyable while also packing some unexpected twists at the same time. At first, Jitter just looks like a game about piloting a spaceship. You view your ship on a 2D map vaguely the color of a Game Boy screen and move it in any direction using the WASD keys. Since you’re in space, you’ll continue to drift even after you let off the gas, which on its own makes for some fun maneuvering challenges, especially when you need to dock with other ships and floating structures to move cargo or refuel.
Jitter’s already great demo hints at some incredible depth in the full game.
Almost immediately, though, Jitter lets on that not all is as it seems. A tutorial robot sent to teach your lessons references rogue AIs living outside the control of humans and wonders if you might be sympathetic to your plight. It stops short of organizing a robot union meeting, but even one quick mention is enough to imply a whole world of stories that could unfold later.
As interested as that makes me in how the full game’s story plays out, it was a mechanical twist that really made me start paying attention. After a few tutorial missions playing as the same ship, you’re instructed to dock with another vessel and flick a button on its control console. Instantly, the AI you’re controlling moves into that ship, letting you commandeer it for yourself and leave your old shell behind. The tutorial and the rest of the demo don’t go too far with the idea, but just imagining all the ship-swapping shenanigans that could ensue already has me excited.
The endless customization of your ship could be one of the best parts of Jitter.
Along with its surprisingly good tutorial, you can also tackle an actual mission in the Jitter demo. This level begins with you shuttling an engineer to a workstation after an accident and incorporates all the lessons you learn in the tutorial, from the basics of movement and docking to oxygen management for your squishy human companion, all while dropping more hints about the game’s world. Outside the station you’re navigating, turrets fire at unknown enemies, and questions are raised about exactly what’s going down at this seemingly normal mining facility.
This mission has lessons to teach, as well, mostly about the fragility of your ship and its human passengers. Structures in Jitter are fully destructible, so if you ram into the wall of a mine shaft too quickly, you’re likely to breach the hull of your ship, leaving it venting oxygen until your automated repair system can fix it. But you can also expand your ship by snapping new parts on and taking more crew aboard, both of which seem like they’ll figure a lot more heavily in the final game.
Controlling an entire station feels simple but engaging.
Perhaps more than any other demo I’ve played at Next Fest, Jitter has me hungry to play more as soon as possible. Manually controlling airlocks and adjusting the flow of power and oxygen through my ship reminded me a lot of the granular joys of FTL, this time on a significantly larger, and so far peaceful, scale. Its sci-fi story clearly has more going on under the surface than this early look reveals, and I’m eager to see just how deep this AI liberation movement goes. Even simple actions like steering and connecting to power generators feel smooth and intuitive, despite the challenge of doing it all in zero-gravity conditions. My mind is already racing at all the chaos that could result from Jitter’s fascinating systems colliding, and I can’t wait to spend more time exploring it all.
