Per Aspera News

• "...is a charming little city builder wrapped in a gargantuan strategy game. Its vast scope encompasses such intricate details as small cargo holds and worker stations, yet your playground is the entirety of the surface of Mars."
  

• "Players experience the terraforming and colonization of Mars through the controls of AMI, an artificial intelligence that carries out directives from Earth, but is able to make her own decisions to an extent. This causes AMI to entertain a variety of philosophical questions: Does AMI have free will? Is she a person? Is she simply part of the colonization, or something bigger and separate from it? Paired with detailed mechanics, Per Aspera presents a unique expectation for sci-fi simulators."
  

• "...the real driving factor will come down to AMI. Specifically, I'm intrigued by the character development of AMI and how she interacts with humans, the Red Planet, and the mysterious third party. I'd love for the story to have shocking twists as more of Mars is explored, and for the dialogue choices to have real weight. If that's the direction Tlön Industries is taking things, then I'll be sticking around for more."
  

• "...a fascinating new take on the Martian colonisation project, not least for the way that it injects a science fiction narrative into proceedings centred around the growth of AMI’s consciousness, her interactions with the human colonists and how her choices affect them, and a mysterious threat that could derail all of your work."
  

• "The game itself is built around NASA’s geographical data of Mars, meaning you can spin the globe and explore a true-to-life landscape where you land, watching it change as you and life flourish, using hard sci-fi technologies like mirror arrays and polar cap melting dust."

Per Aspera is a charming little city builder wrapped in a gargantuan strategy game. Its vast scope encompasses such intricate details as small cargo holds and worker stations, yet your playground is the entirety of the surface of Mars. Its charm is sometimes at odds with its scope - perhaps it's more twee than it intends to be - but it certainly delivers the anticipation and awe of discovering, settling, and surviving a new frontier.

Part of that is surely its authenticity. Mars's topography is based on geographical data from NASA, and my mission - as an AI tasked with preparing Mars for human habitation - draws upon scientific studies and theories proposed by real space agencies and engineers.

Later in the game, you'll see blue oceans fill in the lower elevations of the surface as you reach the terraforming stage, but here at the start of my mission, I begin with only a landing site, a small pile of resources, and one robotic worker. I'm a little adrift - the controls aren't as intuitive as I need them to be - but the tutorial does a good job of giving me small objectives to build a base. And, after a bit of poking around the UI to figure out how, I'm soon producing my own iron, carbon, and chemicals, my little worker dutifully ferrying them to where they need to be.

Read the rest of the story...