The Promises of Mars
George Larkwright
Excuse me a second while I muse about something this game made me realize:
In a parser game, you can’t get away with a prolonged opening cut scene: lots of scrolling text with just ‘hit space to continue’ before you finally get an actual prompt is just obviously bad. But in a choice game, it’s easier to hide: you can break up whether the player is clicking anywhere on the screen, or on a single line of text, or on a word in the middle of a paragraph or whatever, and the player is fooled into following a huge cut scene before ever getting to actually make a reasonable contribution to the game.
As you might suspect, ‘The Promises of Mars’ has a HUGE cut scene at the beginning, long enough that I finally noticed what it was doing and went, “hey!” End of digression.
I feel like this is the first complete and normal game I’ve played in the comp so far. It had a story! I moved through the story and solved puzzles as I went, doing normal in-world stuff an actual protagonist in a world like that would actually do! It had a particular perspective and invited me to comment on that perspective!
The story was sparse and austere, both in content and in presentation. The prose was straightforward but insightful, inviting you to draw the obvious but also not-as-obvious conclusions from basic descriptions. We’re traveling in a post-climate-apocalypse world on an outing from your bunkered society. We travel through the ruins of a city (haunted by stories from your mother along the way of how things Used To Be), make our way to a broken-down station previously run by the people that sent you here. The interface gives you a map to click on to revisit places you’ve been, entirely consisting of differently-sized rectangles, and somehow each rectangle had enough unique purpose and relation to everything else that I never once got ‘what rectangle do I click on to go to X?’ wrong! So you progress some, then back up to grab a thing, then go back to the obstacle and use the thing. Sometimes this became a little tedious, when room descriptions had to be clicked through several times before they were complete. But generally it was reasonable, and it gave me things to do while exploring the world and the backstory.
Eventually, you find a thing you can restart. And then the game asks, “Do you want to restart it?”
And it’s a good question! It seems kind of futile, but it’s something, at least, right? Is that worth it? The game has by now pretty seamlessly introduced you to two now-deceased people with different perspectives on the question, and both are treated seriously. And it’s interesting that I feel this way about this work, because in the past, when a game has asked me a question without having its own perspective on things to add to mine, I’ve found it incredibly tedious (‘The Baron’ being the first game where I noticed this happening and was able to articulate it). You might argue that the same thing is happening here: you make your choice, and the game gives you a bit of text to confirm it, and then the game ends, and you don’t know what happens next. But somehow, in this case, it was much more satisfying. Perhaps because it’s a question you have to answer without ever knowing what happens next, and, indeed, part of the point of the question is that you don’t know what’s going to happen? Perhaps because the game had already shared alternative but fair perspectives on the question (the two dead people), and then essentially asked me which one I agreed with.
One final digression: What’s up with the title? At first I thought the whole game took place on Mars, but pretty soon I thought instead that it actually just took place on Earth, though I guess we’re never explicitly told this. But if I’m right, then the most relevant reference I can think of for ‘The Promises of Mars’ is Elon Musk saying that humanity will need to move there, all the while actively trying to make life on Earth more terrible. So it’s sort of… ironic, I guess? And it would mean that the final question is sort of ‘is it worth latching on to someone’s terrible plan if there’s no better plan available?’ It’s a bit haunting.
Did the author have anything to say? Yes! They had a very specific, nuanced, and intriguing vision of a particular future in mind, and a question to ask me about hope in the face of hopelessness.
Did I have anything to do? Absolutely! The puzzles were slight but satisfying, and the final question made me actually think.