Review: Waking Mars

There have been many movies and games that have depicted life on mars. Some perhaps less alive and some from another dimension, but they all took place on mars nonetheless. I suppose when it comes to alien life, Mars is our next port of call, at least in our solar system. Since we’ve already looked on the moon, the Red Planet is the next most habitable planet that we can hope to find anything on. We’re still decades away from the technology to get there in any reasonable time, but Waking Mars depicts a ‘what-if’ scenario of the possible not-to-distant future of 2097 (but when haven't we said that before?).

With evidence of alien life discovered, a team is dispatched to venture into the depths of a massive cave system to make first contact. Deep inside, the explorers discover a developing alien ecosystem that has lain dormant for countless millennia. With the aid of a nifty jetpack you must navigate to the depths of the caves to find out the source of the alien growth.

Originally designed as an iOS game, Waking Mars received a PC release late last year. The side-scrolling puzzle platformer makes navigating the rocky caverns easier with a jetpack and requires that you carefully develop the alien ecosystem to your own needs to increase the biomass and open plant barricades. While you won’t be blasting everything in sight, that doesn’t mean you’re safe from danger. Some of the local flora is not as safe as you might expect and environmental hazards are your biggest threats. You’ll collect seeds and manipulate the growth of the environment by planting them in particular spots of fertile soil. The game slowly introduces additional plant-life that you can breed and further increase biomass. By the end, you learn the secrets of the ecosystem and why it’s here in the first place.

I don’t play very many space gardening simulators these days, my green thumb has been itching for some extra-terrestrial agriculture. The premise itself is simple enough, but requires some deep thought to actually master, which was quite enjoyable. The slow introduction of various new tools to solve those deeper problems was perfectly paced, though it would have been better to not introduce you to rooms that you couldn’t solve easily without said tools. I spent a good portion of my time fighting an uphill battle in a room I thought I was supposed to have passed to continue the game. The problem with an ecosystem simulator, is that it does just what a good ecosystem should, operate without you, sometimes to its own detriment. I had several rooms that would actually start killing off the ecosystem I had very carefully and painstakingly developed.

The progression of the story also became very confused at some point, with the first half of the game being a linear journey; it suddenly throws branching paths and optional quests into the mix. At that point, you can just head straight towards the exit, but miss out on some of the most important aspects of the story, which seemed a shame. It relies on you to have a genuine curiosity to find out the truth and with it having built a decent story up until that point it feels like the game is giving up on itself. A real shame, because the game does so well up to that point. The characters are well voiced, though their dialogue occasionally breaks the mood. The AI character ART was also an interesting addition to provide support during your exploration, but after a while it was grating and annoying and seemed to grow worse as the game went on. Occasionally the characters begin talking in scientific terms, and in the early game they do well to simplify it so you can understand, but by end game you’d need to be a space alien botanist to understand what they are talking about. Does that job even exist yet?

I definitely applaud the game for its unique idea and implementation, but the rest of the game pales in comparison. Considering the game was developed for mobile, the graphics are smart, but simple in design. It reminds me of paper cut-outs, similar to ‘And Yet It Moves’, but just trying much harder to not look that way. I got seven hours out of Waking Mars, which is pretty decent for a $10 game and although the rest of the game is pretty lackluster, the concept was new and enjoyable to experience.