mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

Happy Star Wars Day! Boy do I have a weird one this year.

Night Shift was not originally conceived as a Star Wars game, and it only sort of is one. Little-known British studio Attention to Detail were developing a game about a factory worker frantically running around fixing parts of a massive machine that keeps breaking down. They pitched it to Lucasfilm Games, who liked the idea but asked that it use their existing IPs. So ATD redesigned the game so that the harried, downtrodden worker is laboring under cruel taskmasters at "Industrial Might and Logic," and the factory is churning out mass-produced Star Wars action figures made of plastic derived from toxic waste.

I thought it was incredible that Lucasfilm would publish a game overtly satirizing the Star Wars marketing machine, so I had to check it out. Now having played it (well, as much of it as I could get through), what I think is more puzzling is that they'd publish a game that is so oddly designed and confusing to play.

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Night Shift, for some reason, is not commercially available among the many bundles of classic and not-so-classic Star Wars games that go on sale this time of year, but you can play it in your browser on the Internet Archive if you want. I think it runs a little fast there, though nobody seems to agree on how fast it was originally supposed to run, which feels somehow appropriate.