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.