First Impressions of First Martians

First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet is this year’s big release from Portal Games. A challenging game of survival on the surface of the Mars. If you are familiar with the award winning Robinson Crusoe, you’ll understand the basics here as First Martians reimplements many of its mechanics. It’s a cooperative game with a number of scenarios to experience. The core innovative mechanic lay in the action selection, where you may spend all your actions doing a job well, guaranteeing success, or rush two jobs and risk failure, or worse, an adventure.

In Robinson, these adventures could be anything from a minor injury to a savage tiger attack, but they are all bad. Worse, the corresponding event would often have a persistent effect, and be shuffled into a deck you draw from each turn. Eventually that card will come back again to bite you if you didn’t prepare for it! It’s a magnificent mechanism that has you rueing your former choices and really gives the game a sense of story. First Martians changes it in two main ways.

The first and most obvious is the app. First Martians will require you to download an app to play it. This tracks various things like the mission objectives and the event “deck” as it would have been. Which means that now when you roll a die and end up on an “adventure” the app will tell you what happened, but it can add any new event effects into its system without you knowing. That hissing sound you heard when out in the rover will come back to bite you, but you won’t know ahead of time how. This adds a unique degree of tension.

The bigger change though is one of tone. This isn’t a cursed island you are on, it’s Mars. An all together more lonely and psychologically draining place. This makes “adventures” the wrong word. You’ll instead trigger minor system malfunctions. The lights will stop working in the med lab. You’ll take a longer drive back to base and see… Nothing. This is a mental battle not a physical one. Your characters will take far less damage but your group will instead be constantly trying to manage stress levels. And this game puts you in their shoes.

Rather than Robinson’s shipwrecked scenario with the need to build things, you arrive on Mars with a near perfect habitation system, the best that NASA can buy. Which means things can only get worse. The bank of green cubes on the right of the board is your status display that will inevitably flicker and fail to red as the game goes on. You have plenty of food, power and oxygen on the track at the top, but system failures sap these backups and they are never coming back. Robinson is a gaming of building to success (even when you fail). In First Martians, you face death by a thousand cuts.

This is some powerful stuff. The app leaves you feeling at the will of an outside force. Its your only means of contact with the designer, staring at their messages on its screen, like the limited messages from Earth beamed to a computer terminal on Mars. The board’s status display, while I felt a bit like I needed a degree in engineering to understand how it all fit together, is exactly what you would expect to see. The crew huddled around it as the lights slowly go out. First Martians is set to be a haunting sci-fi epic. I’m definitely looking forward to getting my hands on it!

This First Impressions article is based on a demo at the UK Games Expo. Check out my overview article for more games I played there!