Review: Waking Mars (PC)

Waking Mars is one of those games that started out as a really interesting premise and matured into an exercise in tedium. I hate, hate saying that about it, because when I first started playing, I was comparing to The Dig fondly in my mind and I really wanted it to keep being that awesome. The Dig was one of the first games I ever played as a young PC gamer, and it fascinated me not so much because it was a great game, but because it did such a great job of letting you play in a world that was actually believably, strangely alien.

Except the orange astronaut suits, which are totally Earth 90s.

On second thought, maybe the two games are more alike than I thought.

Spacesuits are much snazzier in the future.

Anyway, I loved the game's visual presentation, the conceit of connecting your character with other characters only through radio contact, the [SPOILERS] crushing loneliness and disorientation that results when that radio contact is cut off [END SPOILERS], and especially the gameplay. The gameplay gets you to actively observe and directly interact with the planet's creatures in a way that convincingly simulates discovery: you don't know how all the creatures and plants interact, but you need to find out because it's the only way for you to survive. And for once, survival doesn't involve blasting bad aliens with a screen that's 25% gun barrel.

What it does involve, though, is a decent amount of simplistic-y puzzle-solving and the Waking Mars equivalent of grinding. Early on in the game, when I was still all charmed by the atmosphere and presentation and story, and the ludic tasks were kept simple enough that I could breeze through them, I hardly noticed whether I was collecting enough seeds and creating enough life on the planet's surface. By the midway point or so, I had finished exploring much of the Mars underground, and the Fun Discovery Portion of the game had ended. The frontier was closed, and the Gather And "Puzzle" portion of the game began. I put "Puzzle" in quotation marks here because none of the systems you have to figure out are ever complicated enough that I felt sufficiently puzzled. Maybe if they had been a bit more complex, I would have actually enjoyed the second half of the game more. Maybe not. All I know is that once I figured out that Seed A goes in Hole B and Seed C goes into Animal F's mouth, and so on, I was then expected to spend about 3-4 hours of gameplay (roughly equivalent to what I'd played in the first place exploring the caves) collecting seeds and moving them from cavern to cavern, arranging them just so and not caring at all about a bit of it before the end of the game was accessible.

It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with the game's planting system; like I said above, it actually fit the setting and the presentation really well. It's just that you're expected to do so much of it that a game that's surprisingly, exceptionally beautiful in a lot of other ways eventually gets subsumed by the minutiae of moving seeds from place to place over and over again. There's apparently one ending to the game that you get if you play through normally, and a better ending that you get if you collect a massive amount of seeds and bring lots and lots of things to life with them. Guess what ending I got? It makes me wonder, though, if they already have alternate endings built into the game, why not also have a slightly shittier, but still satisfying ending for people who just want to enjoy the game, plant a few seeds, and then discover the conclusion of the story?

Especially if you can get it on sale, Waking Mars is a unique, at-times-fascinating game for its approaches to setting and narrative, and for finding a way to weld actual gameplay so seamlessly to its fiction. But it's not really a good game, in the sense that I can promise that you'll enjoy it for the entire time that it'll take you to get to the end of its engaging story.