Article from my series on indie games
Jazztronauts is a deeply meta kind of game that takes full advantage of its Garryâs Mod base: it uses the Gmod workshop as its playground and the story takes place within it as a âSource engine multiverseâ of sorts. I find itâs a great experience in online co-op with friends.
The story starts off with you playing normal Gmod. However, while playing some unremarkable Half-Life 2-styled map, a band of interdimensional cats show up, exploring the worlds of the Source engine. They recruit you to help with the mission: youâre going to help them gather junk from maps from all over the Gmod workshop. You will actually go out to real maps to steal props and level geometry!
Wait, otherworldly visitors that show up to offer you a job for a mysterious agenda? Am I back in Black Mesa?
Once you join the cats, they take you to the Bar Samsara, their hideout between maps. You chat with them to get to know them better and receive jobs from them to fetch certain quantities of certain objects.
You go over to the giant TV and channel surf on the real Gmod workshop for a real map that you want to visit. These are maps people made for other game modes, like Sandbox, Prop Hunt, or Zombie Survival. In one rare case, I stumbled upon a map that was specifically designed for Jazztronauts, called jazz_artemis, uploaded a few days prior.
Once you find a map you want to raid, you call over a trolley to take you there and the map starts downloading. Panels all over the bar also display stats about the map. Hopefully it has a lot of props to steal! You get in the trolley and honk the horn repeatedly to tell your friends to hurry up and get in.
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Jazztronauts feels like a wild take on a story mode for Garryâs Mod itself, given its persistent story and its awareness of Garryâs Mod and its player culture. It has a special, meta perspective on the game itâs built on, reaching through the fourth wall but never getting smarmy or self-referential about it. This game certainly could only exist as a mod on top of the mountains of content made for Garryâs Mod.
Jazztronauts is an earnest love letter to the Source engine and celebrates all of the things fans have made for it over the years. In fact, this is at the core of their objectives: they want you to collect stuff so they can build an interactive Source engine museum! Learn about brushes, the intricacies of crouch-jumping, and surfing! Now this is edutainment.
Is the gameplay of Jazztronauts thin? Yes. One of the cats even says to your face that this is âfetch quest hellâ. You run a long chain of fetch quests for objects that arenât even guaranteed to appear in the maps you visit. How many maps do you think contain Dr. Kleiner?
Nonetheless, my friends and I enjoy playing; we care more about the journey than the destination. We get to share our reactions to all the interesting things we find, and some maps have stuck with us. Months on, we still talk about the memorable ones: maps with awesome atmosphere, humour, wacky ideas from novice mappers, and inventive interactive elements. Jazztronauts has taken us on trips to see more of the Garryâs Mod workshop than weâd normally bother to. (If you really want, you can open the console and directly load a map that you know has quest items.)
Jazztronauts is like some fever dream interpretation of what surfing the web looks like inside cyberspace. Itâs like a StumbleUpon for Garryâs Mod.