According to Aspera Reviews
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What is it? A massive Mars colonization and terraforming management sim with novel narrative elements.
Estimated payment: $30/£24
Developer: Tron Industries
Publisher: Primal Fury
Comment time: AMD FX-8350, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, 32GB RAM
multiplayer game? No.
Association: http://per-aspera.vg/
On Earth, they tell me we have too much carbon in our atmosphere. So when I was terraforming Mars at Per Aspera, I thought maintaining CO2 levels shouldn’t be a big problem. I have a lot and I need it as oxygen so I started seeding GMO lichens on the surface. Lichens convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and everyone wins. I think it will control itself well.
Around when the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere hit 50 – dwarfing the 20% we have on Earth – I realized I was very, very wrong. Spontaneous fires are starting to break out in every factory and mine on the planet because even the slightest spark can ignite the air.
Maybe the science of transforming Mars is more complicated than I thought.
That’s the premise of Per Aspera, a novel combination of a planetary science simulator, a hardcore management game, and a dynamic narrative experience. You play as a newly awakened artificial consciousness, the AMI, whose job it is to establish an autonomous colony on Mars in order to prepare the planet for a permanent human presence and ultimately transform the planet into a planet suitable for “earthman” life. AMI’s story is voiced by a star-studded cast (Troy Baker, Phil LaMarr, Laila Berzins, Yong Yea, Lynsey Murrell, and Nneka Okoye). It’s a series of branching moral choices – some simple, some complex, all filled with uncertainty – running alongside an otherwise pretty standard city-building management game. The choices are guided through a variety of short stories, a larger central mystery, and several different game endings.
do it like artificial intelligence
Most of Per Aspera is about panning around the beautifully rendered Martian terrain sphere and listening to a pretty good chill setting and upbeat techno soundtrack. Your view is AMI’s, a stylized vector interface with lots of soft edges and sans serif fonts. It worked fine for me, but people with low vision may need to disable the depth of field effect and shadows.
You investigate minerals and build mines to recover resources like aluminum, carbon, silicon, or buried water. You also build factories, turning these resources into finished materials, like electronic components or mechanical parts, and then into more buildings and equipment, like workers or maintenance drones. Sometimes you narrow down and allocate resources to larger projects in space, such as mirrors or asteroid capture. However, resources are limited, so you’ll need to constantly expand and explore the Martian surface to renew your supplies. Wrong build order? That’s likely game over. Scarcity is Per Aspera’s number one concern.
You may realize that you only have a few dozen tons of aluminum and only 700 tons underground. To get more, you need to expand your base. This means adding new grid elements, new maintenance centers and worker control stations to reach and include deposits. This is a sometimes tedious process. Terrain might get in your way, but the AMI automatically draws the best road paths with smooth animations.
Per Aspera is a “blink, 3am” game.
This is one of the most demanding strategy management games I’ve played in a long time, not only in its complexity but also in its split-second action. While playing, my fingers constantly swipe between the WASD pan camera, game speed numbers, and function keys to activate power, maintenance, drone traffic, and survey results overlays. Per Aspera is a “blink, 3am” game. (Worth noting: you can’t remap keys on release. The developer has committed to this in an update.)
You’re constantly planning what to do next, managing your inventory of goods, reviewing your reserve resources, setting up extensions, and trying to prove your options are future-proof. You’re also catering to your colonists – they’re very fickle, picky, and frustratingly unpredictable. All it takes is a day to miss a supply delivery, and a few thousand of them will pack up and return to Earth, presumably waving to their replacements on their way through the spaceport.
Did I mention fighting too? It’s a lightweight real-time strategy battle where you build and use swarms of drones against towers just like the enemy. It’s okay, but the difficulty and complexity are not high, and there is no requirement for normal difficulty. It really just serves as a story element — and a management to keep up with.
(Image credit: Tlön Industries/Raw Fury)
Al Calaba!
Careful pruning of unwanted buildings is an ongoing task, as is planning for new endeavors. It can be hard at first, as a resource-scarce death spiral can require you to either abandon blockbuster progress or start over. For example, I quit a game because of a lack of electronics production: not enough electronics to quickly make repair drones, no repair drones to keep electronics factories running, and no electronics factories to drive expansion. It adds some tension to the early parts, but once you have a sprawling network of multiple bases, these supply bottlenecks only slow down an already pretty slow endgame.
All city building happens on top of the terraforming layer, and you can balance elements in the Martian atmosphere and terrain for specific effects. Don’t add too much oxygen or you’ll have frequent fires, as I found to my dismay. Don’t raise the temperature too quickly or you’ll bring liquid water, sediment that drowns precious resources and/or your base under a new ocean. I drowned a base when I underestimated how far sea levels would rise after a pure ice asteroid hit the surface.
(Image credit: Tlön Industries/Raw Fury)
Terraforming is fun, but also dangerous – like resource management, it’s easy to get yourself into unbearable situations. There are all sorts of ways to approach this problem, with all kinds of bizarre proposals from sci-fi and real-world scientists. The campaign is done, and while it’s a bit laggy late in the game, I’m really excited to try out more ways in the non-combat, non-narrative sandbox mode. That was after 30 hours of playing.
Technically, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes between the automatic pathfinding of resource management and the simulation of a planet’s changing atmosphere. There must be some weird bugs with pathfinding, colonist movement, and order prioritization. Per Aspera never strained my hardware, but once I had a thousand buildings on Mars, performance took a real hit – most noticeable when switching game speeds, panning quickly, or zooming out to orbit. It’s a staple of the genre, but when you push the limits of what a PC can emulate, expect some dropped frames and a little chug.
Per Aspera is not only a detailed strategy simulation, but also a full-fledged sci-fi story. It’s not entirely successful as a narrative, but the best parts of the story elevate the management game beneath it. I won’t spoil it, so suffice it to say that it has the conspiracy of a tech thriller, but it also takes science fiction seriously, dealing with concepts such as the nature of artificial consciousness and the ethics of transforming new worlds.
(Image credit: Tlön Industries/Raw Fury)
The story was made by voice talent who squeezed a lot of grief out of a very simple script. Laila Berzins has absolutely transformed AMI from the confusion of babies and newborns into a journey of complex brilliance. Troy Baker’s performance as AMI’s creator, Dr. Foster, shatters his performance, showing a range of emotions in a way rarely seen outside of the best audio dramas. I could go on and on: Phil LaMarr is a dedicated officer, Yong Yea is a cunning businessman, Lynsey Murell – if the show is anything to go by, You’ll hear more names – as the leader of the Martian colony.
It’s similar to the rhythm that has made Hades so beloved this year, albeit with its own twists and turns, and it’s not quite as long.
The shock and joy of seeing a dynamic narrative in a strategy game cannot be overstated. It’s an imperfect story, and the writing is bumpy or sluggish at times, but it’s a true experiment. Parts of the narrative are also non-linear — they may happen in a different order, or not at all in each player’s game — but that comes at the cost of some feeling of dislocation or disconnection. I have two back-to-back events, but the second should definitely happen before the first. Still, the basics here are good enough that I’d still recommend it even if the bugs I’ve seen are never fixed.
Between a short story and moral decisions, you’re pushed back into city building. Back to the intensity of choice and strategic action until someone bothers to call the orbital, hyper-intelligent AI consciousness again for consultation. It’s similar to the rhythm that has made Hades so beloved this year, albeit with its own twists and turns, and it’s not quite as long.
Per Aspera’s novel adaptation of a non-linear narrative to suit a strategy game works surprisingly well. Combining novel terraforming mechanics, smooth aesthetics, chops of hard science, and classic genre gameplay, this game is definitely worth the time.
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