Little Rocket Lab and the Cutscene that Has to Exist

[mrsluigivargas]

Little Rocket Lab is a game in which a girl named Morgan, who you play as, is trying to build a rocket with her aunt in the town she grew up in to continue the project her late mother had been so dedicated to. About two-thirds-ish through the game, Morgan decides, despite having a long, busy day and being told to rest, to sneak out of the house to the rocket silo to finish assembling the next phase of the rocket. Where she proceeds to accidentally start a giant fire that burns down a chunk of the silo and also almost kills her if not for Toasty (her robot companion) running in and saving her. Toasty literally dies doing this, by the way. It’s a whole thing.

Anyway, you have to fix Toasty so it's alive again, and then you have to repair the silo, and then after all of that the next morning Morgan and her aunt get a letter in the mail. It reads as follows:

llonka and Morgan,

I'm very sorry to let you know that due to the recent fire, the county has forced me to put a temporary ban on further work on the rocket.

I know you have worked on this project for years. However, until we can meet to properly assess the risks, I need to put safety first.

There will be a townhall meeting in one month to vote on the future of the silo. I'm sorry, Morgan. Rest assured I'm doing all that I can as mayor so that you can continue your work.

Carter

And then the game timeskips a month ahead, to the morning of the meeting. 

Morgan is stressing out like “oh i’m gonna have to do a whole speech defending myself and oh god i’m so nervous my mom’s rocket is on the line here” and your Aunt’ like “don’t worry 🙂 I’ll be by your side, it’ll be okay! 👍🏻 Good luck! 🫶🏻” and there’s that little bit of suspense leading up to the meeting because although you probably know based on the tone of the game that yes, Morgan is probably going to get to finish the rocket, because that's the entire point of the gameplay, it’s still kinda like “oh how’s Morgan gonna get out of this one…? The COUNTY is involved! :o”, you know?

So she goes to Town Hall, and the cutscene activates, and the camera pans to the front of the room and all the townspeople are immediately staring Mayor Carter down like “why the fuck are you shutting down the silo.” And Carter’s like “listen, i — we’re just having a meeting, like. I don't wanna shut it down either!” Well, he doesn't say that last bit but he already implied in the letter that his arm was getting twisted about it.

Which means the mayor is holding this meeting for a thing he doesn't really wanna do, and everyone in town is like “why are you doing this. we’re not doing that” and he’’s like “uhhhhh”. He says he didn't expect so many people to show up, even, which is very silly, but he’s overwhelmed all the same. (His wife takes over the meeting for the rest of it. After literally asking him “what are you trying to do here?”) And then everyone talks about how awesome Morgan is, and then the silo isn't shut down.

Thus the idea of shutting the silo down is barely even nodded at, in practice, let alone given any room to present a challenge to the story or characters. It was dead on arrival. And that makes this cutscene a giant nothingburger, to me. 

However! Is it actually a nothingburger? In the grander scheme of things, it might not be.

Because on one hand, looking back from this cutscene, Morgan has a character arc about coming back to the silo and the small town she grew up in with her mom and being like “I’m gonna build this rocket because it was my mom’s dream; i’m gonna prove that I’m just as good at engineering as my mom was” and blah blah blah and then she so desperately wants to prove herself that she fucks up and starts a fire and kills Toasty and destroys portions of the rocket. And that catastrophe is the catalyst for her aunt to be like “no, Morgan 😞 You're not supposed to be here to prove yourself 🙂‍↔️ Your mother didn't make this rocket to prove to anyone she could do it or that she was a good engineer 🤗 She made it and all her other machines and factories to ✨help✨ the town, to be a part of this ✨community✨ and that’s what you 🫵🏻 should be doing too! 😀” and Morgan’s like “Damn…you’re so right” and etc etc etc. So this cutscene is the endpoint of that arc; it's the part where all of the townspeople reaffirm that lesson and lift her up. Like yes, the townspeople love Morgan; what Morgan has done, even if she’s trying to do it to prove herself, has positively affected the community so much that they will shout at the mayor about it when he even vaguely insinuates they have to shut the silo down because it’s something she cares about.

And looking forward, what happens after this cutscene is that since the fire wiped a bunch of your progress (it doesn't actually wipe your progress but they talk about it in the game as if it was a huge setback in rocket construction) all of the townspeople are like “hey, we’re all gonna rally around you and your rocket explicitly, now. Like, we were supportive before, but now we’re literally going to let you set up factories in our homes so you can get infinite supplies of materials for whatever you need!” And sure, most of the materials aren't very helpful BUT STILL! The sentiment is there! This is the final push, the final Act of the game, Spring Year 2! We’re gonna do it, we're gonna make all the 15,000+ components or whatever, we're gonna do cool things, we're gonna finish the rocket! 

…But also the cutscene still feels like we should be able to excise it and change nothing about the story. There’s no tension where there should be, considering that this is the turning point for so many things. Maybe because it’s the immediate aftermath of the climax? But then it would make sense to carry that tension for just a little longer, no?

What I expected to happen in this cutscene is that the County that told Mayor Carter that he has to consider shutting the silo down would have had a face attached to it. Like, if this was some kind of small-town feel-good Hallmark holiday movie or something, there would be a person in businesswear walking in arms crossed, like “I heard there was a big catastrophic FIRE ☹️ This silo is DANGEROUS 😠 You should shut it DOWN 😡 And this is the meeting where I tell you that 😏” And then everyone in town would turn to them in unison and goes “NO. FUCK YOU. GO AWAY.” And then the County person guy would go “oh 😨 shit fuck okay jesus christ god i’m going i’m going bye” and then the townspeople would clap and cheer and rally behind Morgan as the rest of the existing cutscene goes.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that the nebulous “the County” is a never touched upon or commented upon sphere of influence in this entire game so far. The scope up to this point has been this small town, a ship that comes in daily with e-waste, a train that comes in daily with ore and coal, a university at which one of the characters goes to school and another is affiliated with, and the train from “the city” you (Morgan) came into town on. So to hear that there is now a The County™, a mysterious shadow hovering above us and making decisions outside of our scope is just. Weird. 

I dunno, I find myself comparing this to Fields of Mistria a little, where there is very clearly the nobility in the manor north of town and are affiliated with The Capitol, and The Capitol is sending supplies or you have to send supplies to The Capitol so overall there’s a clearer “There’s a Capitol! Somewhere! That is relevant to us, if not immediately!” right from the outset. There’s a bunch of Food Judges from The Capitol that come down to the inn, some characters have family in The Capitol…like, it's integrated into the setting. And to be fair, Fields of Mistria doesn't have a plot point similar to this one in Little Rocket Lab like at all, but even still…

And even having The County™ portrayed as it is in this game does also invite the sort of pitfalls and weird shit that comes with a Small Town vs Big(ger) Government conflict, because how else are you supposed to take this plot point if not with that framing? Probably fully unintentional on the devs’ part, but still something interesting to keep in mind.

And you don't even see The County™! Carter clearly doesn't wanna shut the silo down, so why are we having this meeting!!! What is stopping him from just forging some paperwork and being done with it! Or going “oh yeah I’ll TOTALLY investigate the silo” to The County™ Officials only to come by the house and tell Morgan and her aunt “hey, The County™ wants me to investigate the silo or whatever but we’re not doing that because we all know we’re good, lol” 

But in the letter he sends you, he’s like “I don't want to shut the silo down, but I have to consider doing so as a Mayor and Authority Figure related to the Government; I do have to go through this process of asking the townspeople if they want to keep the silo or not!” And then the townspeople are yelling at Carter as if they don't know that and as if they actually think he’s gonna shut the silo down, like! What is happening! He doesn't even invoke The County™ to defend himself! Why is he being positioned as a vague antagonist? And not to be that bitch but as the only Black man in the fucking game, too??? PLEASE! We just returned his old wedding ring to him! We had a heart-to-heart about grief and everything!

…Anyway I don’t know how I would make this better, lmao.

Like obviously the letter is sent because it makes sense that the Big Fire that everyone in town talks to you about because you almost died in it not only has character arc consequences and social relationship consequences but also Higher Power consequences. It probably made the fucking local news, hell. And Toasty fucking dying is the immediate consequence to Morgan fucking up while this second, medium-term consequence is the chance for Morgan to reaffirm the lesson she just learned from The Incident. So that plot point stays.

I think my idea of having The County™ have a face to it would bring it more in line with what I expected of the cutscene. But then it becomes Outsider vs Insiders -> Small Town vs Big(ger) Government, again. Also, you now have to add a new character to the game, which is its own bullshit; this is an indie game, just a couple guys working on it at most — maybe just only one main developer? — so it's not like we’re gonna ask them to do shit like that. Even in Fields of Mistria when the food judges come up from The City its three NPCs that already exist in the game, they're just reused (which is hysterical, btw. I love it).

I dunno how else to do it. You need that cutscene, because a bunch of arcs fall apart if you don't have it, but that cutscene itself is NOTHING. And I think that’s fine, it's not bad, it's just like????? And I don't think there’s really a way to resolve it without adding a new character or an extra 10 minutes of story that also probably don't need to exist, so…

I dunno, it’s just fascinating to me. This is really the only complaint I have about this game, btw. Awesome game, otherwise.

…Actually I lied the other complaint I have is the entire thing with Scrubs. Like why are we — maybe I read too much Murderbot Diaries, but — sure the robot’s a washing machine, but that doesn’t mean you have to fucking typecast it into being a washing machine. Like every time you talk to it Morgan’s like “Are you gonna do my laundry now?” and Socks is like “FUCK OFF” (presumably — it speaks in windings) and everytime’s Morgan’s like “🫢 woahhhh!” or “oh…🥺” and it’s like Girl. What the fuck.