Distress

Your rescue-pod crashed. The Ensign is dead. Your Lieutenant is wounded, near comatose. Survive.

The urgency of the situation is pressed upon you immediately. There are no McGuffins, there is no time for distractions and herrings of any colour would not survive in this atmospher.

Your pod has crashed on an unknown planet. Your crewmates are incapacitated. Survive.

This is the immediate urgency Distress puts you in. No promises, no McGuffins. Survive, without even any herrings to eat.

There's a very cramped, dark atmosphere to this game. the contrast between the wide open yet inaccessible desert landscape around your tiny circle of light makes it truly unnerving to leave the initial crash site.

You have a wounded crewmate who needs care and protection, but you know that you have to leave to search rescue.
I was torn by this situation, truly feeling the dilemma as the player. I scuttled around the crash site for many turns and tried to leave everything as safe as I could before venturing out toward...?

All the way along this grim adventure, things keep happening that are outside of your control. When played according to the game's standards (instead of following a walkthrough), this means losing (dying) more than once. I very strongly recommend doing it this way. Each playthrough will give you new information, be it on the background of the mission, or just on the timing of events. It's worth at least one or two playthroughs to get the details on your spacecraft's unexpected detour into this planetary system.

While on this topic: it's also worth taking your time out-of-game to search for the names of your crewmates in an encyclopaedia of your choosing, and then running to the nearest library...

The biggest difficulty with the puzzles is that the entire game is timed. SAVE on important breakthroughs and expect to run through a few times. RESTORE or (preferably) RESTART gives you the peace of mind to experience the story to the fullest. I still recommend that you play the game straight through a few times, regardless of the outcome.

A very immersive scifi thriller.