The Promises of Mars

I am nothing of an expert in parser-like choice games and can’t claim any especial insight, but since I have written what I’m pretty sure is the longest article about them, I find my ears perk up when I play one, more alert to questions of craft than I am with any other subgenre of IF. The Promises of Mars offers a good amount to chew on on this front, with some high production values and interface conveniences that often help, but sometimes undermine, player engagement. I can’t help but think, though, that the reason my notes are full of responses to the structure, with comparatively little on the narrative or gameplay, is that the story and puzzles are a bit thinner than the rest of the game deserves.

In the interests of wrapping up with the meatier stuff, we’ll start with that latter chunk. The setup here is able enough, though not novel enough to be too enticing in its own right: the protagonist is a young woman (or older girl, her precise age I don’t think is nailed down) who’s volunteered as a troubleshooter if only to escape the tedium of living in a tunnel-bunker after a climate-collapse apocalypse. Your assignment is to investigate a carbon capture station on the surface that’s gone dark, and your explorations are interspersed with flashbacks to life below the surface, largely revolving around your relationship with your mom.

Despite the relatively standard setup, the sentence-by-sentence writing here is pretty good – I liked this description of what could have just been a throwaway “it’s a desk”, embedding some worldbuilding through a few well-chosen details:

"It’s a sprawling metropolis of scientific paraphernalia: the drum of a helicorder resting next to a thick ream of chart paper; narrow glass tubes filled with multi-coloured liquid; vases of what looks like peat; notepads and biros and strips of litmus paper; canisters of ammonia and dyes."

The plot, though, isn’t much to write home about; inevitably, there’s a bit of a twist, but it’s one you can see coming a mile away, and while the granular details of the station are nicely sketched, other aspects remain rather generic, notably the protagonist’s mother, who never emerges as a character in her own right – if she had, she could have added an extra note of poignancy to the game’s final choice, but as it is the endings likewise felt rather schematic. As for the puzzles, they’re exactly the kinds of things you’d expect from this kind of premise: there are tools to salvage, powered-down elevators to reactivate, keycards and keycodes gating progress, and so on, with none of them posing much of a challenge. This sort of busywork can function well to make the player explore, creating space for environmental storytelling to add texture and resonance to the space and its former inhabitants, but again, the game remains a bit too arid to take advantage of these opportunities.

So much for the content of Promises of Mars, which is usually 95% of what I care about in a game. But the presentation is sufficiently great to be worth highlighting, and in fact so good that I wound up having a lot of fun despite the overall ho-hum-ness of what I was doing. It doesn’t hit on anything other parser-like choice games haven’t tried before, but the way it brings together the interface elements creates visual elegance and a high degree of playability, and really could be a standard-setter for similar games. In addition to generous space for the main text and choices, there’s a big map in one corner and an inventory list in another. The map is purely geometric, but isn’t stuck with the uniform quadrilaterals of most parser game visualizations: streets and corridors are long rectangles, closets tiny squares, and the relationships between each are easy to visualize, which allows for intuitive translation when the text mentions doors to the right and left, say. Meanwhile, having the full map available from the start helps the player gauge their progress through each of the three chapters, and prioritize “clearing” areas before getting too far into unexplored areas; the fact that you can instantly backtrack to a visited location by clicking on its map representation also makes exploration a snap.

The always-available inventory is also nice and convenient, though I think one thoughtful piece of design actually errs too far towards ease of use: items only get highlighted, and therefore clickable, when it’s possible to use them (save for the always-available commlink, which acts as a diegetic hint-line). This takes just about all the guesswork out of the already-simple inventory puzzles, since as soon as you’re confronted with a challenge you’ll see your available options suddenly turn orange. Sure, there are a couple of places where you can make an incorrect choice, but these are either trivial (should you pick a lock with a screwdriver or a paper clip?) or unguessable (there isn’t enough information provided about what size tool you need to use to manipulate some pipes, so you might as well try a wrench as a ballpoint pen), and in either case simple trial and error will see you through in a matter of seconds. In my article’s analysis of parser-like choice systems, I wound up arguing that counterintuitively, you often need to add additional friction to avoid the player simply lawnmowering through all their choices, and this is one place Promises of Mars’ interface puts a foot wrong.

It’s one of the few such missteps, and again, combined with the well-written prose I enjoyed my time with the game: for all my critiques, they mostly just boil down to finding the story not especially exciting. But funnily enough, an unexciting story that’s well-told can still be very satisfying, even in as narrative-focused a world as IF.

This was a longer, thoughtful Twine game with a clickable world map and heavy inventory use. The inventory occupies a side bar, and different elements light up in red and become clickable when in the appropriate location, allowing for some complexity.

The story is about a future where carbon dioxide is so prevalent that the air is poisonous to humans. Everyone lives underground while above-ground scientists work to purify the air. The purification plant has stopped working, though, and so you, a young girl, have been sent to the above-ground lands to try to get it working again.

The writing is melancholic and wistful. Simultaneously, I was excited by the writing style but found it hard to focus on. You have to click to make each line appear for some pages, which wasn’t too bad, but the slightly slower pace and the desolation of each passage made it easier for my mind to drift away from the game.

Mechanically, you basically plow through the map (I love being able to click directly on the map to skip to a room I’d been in before), and there are rooms with obstacles and rooms with obstacle removers (like locks and keys, for instance). There is a timer of sorts (your oxygen tank) but I think it’s cued to story beats and not to your actions, which is great. Near the end there are some trickier puzzles, but the puzzles in general aren’t too hard, allowing the story to take center stage.

I think this game nailed the atmosphere it was going for (no pun intended). The design UI is great. Something about the whole project didn’t draw me in fully, but that’s a completely subjective experience, and I did find it above-average for an IF-game.

This game immediately impresses with its excellent presentation. On the title page, the pixel art and beautiful orange and grey colour combination gives a striking first impression. This continues into the game itself, with a well-designed UI featuring separate map and inventory panes, plus nice font choices and typography (I’ve since downloaded Lekton for myself). There are options to change font and font size, which I always like to see. There is a lot of attention to detail put into the design, which makes for a pleasant and immersive experience.

This is a puzzle game set in an scifi future where the population of Mars has retreated underground following climate catastrophe. A large part of the gameplay is based on exploring, collecting items and using items; but there is a major focus on narrative also. There is a lengthy introduction, the narration of the protagonist’s progress through the city is interspersed with memories of her sparse life in underground bunkers, her observations on the abandoned streets as someone whose only experience with things like hot dog carts and playgrounds is through her mother’s stories.

I’ve played several parser puzzlers this Comp, and it’s had me thinking about how a choice-based interface can create a different kind of vibe and experience. The result here feels very smooth and directed. The player makes decisions such as the order in which the protagonist (referred to only as The Girl) explores locations, what to examine, which item to use to solve a puzzle. At times the game itself takes over, having the Girl act on her own. These moments (from small sentences where she finds and take items to longer ‘cutscenes’) are narrated in the same voice as player-driven actions, which makes the puzzle-solving and the storytelling feel nicely intertwined. For instance I appreciated how the comms link to Command is a diegetic hint system, but the Girl also uses it on her own initiative when the situation calls for it, like reporting a system failure or asking to unlock a door (which naturally doesn’t work).

But sometimes the game is too smooth, to the point of reducing the sense of challenge. At one point the Girl finds a storeroom and cycles through a list of tools: angle grinder, drill, pliers, and so on, before landing on a folding ladder. “That could be useful,” she thinks. She takes the ladder." The cycling text is a neat effect, but it also felt a little too convenient, erasing the potential puzzle of deciding for myself which tools to take. Later on the Girl comes across a passage blocked by debris and makes this observation: (Spoiler - click to show)“Another apartment block […] has a second storey balcony — if she can reach it, and then climb to the next balcony over, the Girl might be able to circumnavigate the wall.” Again, instead of asking the player to find a way forward, the solution is handed over right away.

In a way it feels like the Girl has more agency than the typical text-adventure protagonist. She’s capable and clearly knows what she’s doing, instead of being subject to the player’s flailing. That’s a cool effect, though it does mean less is left in the player’s hands. Still, I was glad to see the puzzles ramp up in complexity by the endgame.

The prose itself is melancholic and well-written. the ending twist is perhaps too obvious, but the story engaging and thought-provoking. I do wish there had been more space for the Girl’s introspection; what we do get is effective, but it feels like there was room for more depth.