The Promises of Mars

The Promises of Mars is another difficult one to rate. From a technical standpoint, it is competently designed with great ease-of-use and an interesting choice of colors for the UI. However, the gameplay gets tedious and minus the atmospheric writing, the story and character elements feel very barebones.

The Promises of Mars is a lot like Dead Sea in terms of gameplay. Find item A, bring it to location B, get item C, and the game moves forward. There are some quality of life features here, such as an interactive map you can click on to instantly travel to any accessible location, as well as the game highlighting usable items at each location. Still, a highlighted item may not always solve the problem, and sometimes, you will need to figure out which of the eligible items you should use to get past your next obstacle. There are some puzzles which break up the repetition of the usual itemfinding, but none were too difficult. The orange and black color scheme is also pretty fitting.

Unfortunately, it felt tedious after a while, and the story and writing just wasn't able to hold it up. There is strong atmosphere in the writing, particularly in the earlier chapters as you look at the ruins and think to a life before, but this started to wear off as I approached the final chapter. The plot is pretty much just navigating your way to a reactor, and there is little character writing as the female protagonist robotically clears one section after another in this drawn out IF obstacle course.

Towards the end, I felt like I was playing a fallout game and trying to clear some overcomplicated puzzle in a maze-like vault which had long overstayed its welcome. When you finally get to the ending portion, you are given a choice regarding that reactor you worked so hard to reach, but the ending scenes are brief and leave a lot to the player's imagination.

I wasn't able to obtain a key item at the start of the game, and spent a good bit of time running around randomly and hitting the same location again and again without effect, before restarting the game and somehow being able to obtain the key item on my next attempt. I also encountered a buggy message during the game, although it didn't prevent me from finishing it. Otherwise, I didn't find any other bugs.

It's not a bad game, but I think the plot, writing and gameplay really needed more variety to support a game of this length. It was good at first but started to feel draggy towards the end. This is another game where I was also just struggling to decide between three or four stars. This would have been a 3.5 if IFDB allowed it, but I'll round it up.