It’s rare to find a game set in the real world. Most opt for outlandish fantasy or sci-fi worlds, because those provide the best fodder for interesting stories and game mechanics. Waking Mars does things differently, however. It takes place in our own near-future, placing you in the spacesuit of Liang, an astronaut who is exploring some newly discovered underground caverns on The Red Planet. Initially, you are tasked with locating a robot called 0CT0 that has been lost somewhere in the cave system, but that almost immediately gives way to a far more interesting discovery: the existence of life. Specifically, the existence of plant life, the cultivation of which is at the heart of Waking Mars’s gameplay.
The caverns you explore contain patches of fertile terrain in which seeds can be planted. They also contain membranes that block the exits, thereby preventing further progress. Fortunately, the membranes can be opened by increasing the biomass in the cavern, which is done by encouraging the growth of Martian plant life by planting seeds. At first, you’ll find the seeds you need just lying around but, as the game progresses, you’ll learn how to grow your own by providing the plants with the conditions they need to reproduce.
It’s nothing too difficult, so long as you have the desire and patience to experiment and explore. You’ll discover different species of plants and different soil types, each of which provides benefits and drawbacks. For example, there’s a plant whose seeds explode when thrown, which you’ll need to blast through rocks. However, if you don’t pick the seeds right away, the plant will throw them in a random direction, thereby destroying everything in the vicinity. You can only carry a small number of seeds at any one time, so you’ll need to figure out the best places to grow these plants, where they will be fruitful but won’t pose a threat to the ecosystem. In this way, Waking Mars is much like a puzzle game in which you try to find the ideal combination of plants to meet the biomass requirements, while also peacefully coexisting with each other.
It may not seem like a puzzle at first, though. Getting the biomass up to the 3-star level required to open the membranes is actually pretty simple. You can get away with pretty much just tossing seeds about at random. But, as the story progresses, you’ll discover another use for the biomass, one which requires you to get either 4- or 5-stars in each cavern. That requires some more deliberate thought, and is the only way to complete the game.
What fascinated me the most about Waking Mars is that it doesn’t actually telegraph its requirements for completion. It’s more than happy to let you bumble around, playing with your plants until you notice the subtle change that grants access to the area that unlocks the true secrets of Mars. It’s entirely possible that you’ll five-star everything before finding out the “why” of doing so. In fact, it’s entirely possible that you’ll be wondering what’s the point of it all, until you stumble upon the answer… or look it up online.
Waking Mars is a port of an iOS game, a fact that shows itself in the main menu which contains a reference to “Exit App.” Other than that, it’s a pretty good port. The art has been re-rendered in high-resolution, so everything looked nice and crisp on my monitor’s 2560×1440 display. It ran fabulously, too, but that’s to be expected with a 2D side-scrolling game. You can change the resolution and/or run in a window if you want, but you can’t turn on vsync, which is unfortunate because I did experience some very occasional screen tearing.
The keyboard and mouse controls are well laid out—using WASD to move and the mouse to aim and throw seeds—and you can redefine them to your liking. If you’re into using the Xbox controller, that’s an option as well, but I’d recommend KB/M. Navigating the map and menus with the controller requires you to move a virtual mouse cursor around with the left stick, then “click” by pulling the right trigger. It’s slow and clunky and not worth the hassle.
Conclusion—Is It Worth The Money?
There’s a trend lamenting the lack of non-violent content in the gaming industry, but the fact is there are many wonderful games available that don’t require you to kill things in order to proceed. Waking Mars is one of them, and it’s a fantastic one to boot. It’s more than worth the $10.
