Tharsis Review (PC)

Tharsis is a sign that humanity's dream of getting to Mars might be hard to reach if we plan to base our expeditions around well-designed spacecraft, competent crew members and a decision to solve every possible problem, including life and death ones, by rolling dice around.

The game can generate moments of extraordinary tension and success, but the baseline is one of disappointment and fear, compounded by the unsavory choices that gamers will have to make to try and keep the ship together and reach the surface of the planet.

While playing Tharsis, I sometimes asked myself why I was persevering, with the odds clearly stacked against me, and the answer is probably one that also motivated our quest to conquer space despite the numerous obstacles that stand in our way: because that small glimmer that we can win is one of the main reasons our race has come as far as it has.

Tharsis is developed by Choice Provisions and can be played on the PC via the Steam digital distribution platform and on the PlayStation 4 from Sony.

Story

Tharsis is a perfect companion piece to anyone who has read The Martian or seen the movie of the same name, but it also appeals to fans of spaceship-based horror, although it never goes as far as something like Event Horizon.

The narrative setup is simple to understand and creates plenty of tension as the botanist of a vessel headed to Mars and another crew member, as well as almost all its food supplies, are lost when an unexpected meteor shower hits them during transit, creating a wide set of problems that make the entire ship a deathtrap.

The name of the game refers to a volcanic plateau on the Western hemisphere of Mars, but the actual action and the player-driven narrative is centered on the ten weeks of travel that  gamers need to survive to get to the Red Planet.

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There are smaller cutscenes presented between turns, but Tharsis mostly gives players a chance to create their own action sequences, root for certain characters, carefully consider complex situations and then experience the disappointment of losing everyone well before Mars can be reached.

Players who like the fiction of the title should also find out more about the name of the ship, the Iktomi, which slots nicely into the overall atmosphere and also has some interesting links to the region of our celestial neighbor that Earth is planning to reach.

I would have appreciated more options to bond with characters, which sometimes can feel like disposable automatons, but the feeling of triumph the game delivers the first time the ship actually reaches its destination is its own reward.

Gameplay

Tharsis is a turn-based strategy video game built around choices and dice rolls, a very hard experience that challenges the player to decide what he is willing to sacrifice to reach an objective.

Initially, there are four astronauts, coming from the classes that players have managed to unlock via their actions and, at least, two crises that they need to deal with, with their priority being to make sure that they do not allow the current problems to take the integrity of the ship below 0.

To do so, gamers have to roll the number of dice that each astronaut has and to then decide how to use the results they get.

The priority is to solve the integrity-related problems, and extra dice, although there are rarely any, can be allocated to power the unique ability of the character or to activate the power of the vessel module that's currently occupied.

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The second priority is to deal with the crises that can take down crew dice rolls or health, and Tharsis also features a research system that can also take dice to unlock quick boosts for the crew or the ship, which can sometimes make the difference between survival and immediate death.

Juggling with all the dice rolls and the many challenges in which they can be sunk is complex enough, but the game also uses injury, void, and stasis values, which basically means that certain rolls are evil and will do more harm than good.

This becomes especially annoying when getting a six, for example, can both boost chances of solving a crisis but also mean that a certain crew member will get an injury and might die next turn.

Food is also very important, allowing a character to enhance the number of dice he can use, but it's so scarce that cannibalism, despite its downsides, becomes an attractive option relatively early on.

The dice rolls can feel unforgiving and cruel, landing on danger values too often, never clearing the five or more barrier required for positive effects, always one or two points lower than the total required to solve a problem and make sure that the Iktomi survives another week.

The best plan is to overpower at least one challenge to have some dice power left after solving it to activate some special ability, but even that requires plenty of luck and does not guarantee progress past the fifth week.

“Tharsis is a hard game, the kind that might generate more frustration than pleasure and might end up convincing players to abandon the experience before they ever reach Mars for the first time in their crippled ship.”

At the same time sessions never last too long, regardless of the final state being success and defeat, and that lessens the impact of the difficulty level to some extent as long as the game is played in small batches.

The combination of difficulty, simple-to-pick-up premise and dice roll based tension means that Tharsis will appeal to a particular kind of player, who loves FTL or rogue-likes and wants more focused mechanics and a dose of space-based terror.

Graphics and audio

Tharsis suffers a little in the presentation department because the development team once again fails to make the characters interesting from a visual standpoint and never establishes a connection between the terror that they must be feeling and the way they look or act.

The ship itself has an interesting design, although once again a little bit of variety from one playthrough to another would have been appreciated, but the small touches, like the red dice that show up once a certain threshold is reached, are interesting if too few to keep the experience engaging in the long-term.

The way the dice bounce around the screen, bumping into each other and the edges of the interface and moving a little slower than they would in the real world, is also mesmerizing, creating moments of expectation and dread before they actually settle into their final positions, usually to spell doom for a character or the entire ship.

The sound design of Tharsis is serviceable, unlike much of the ship the game features, but does not impress, with the environmental sounds often blending in the background and the music a little too understated for the terrifying events that are taking place.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion