Per Aspera | PC Review

Explore. Build. Survive. Per Aspera tests your mettle against a foreign environment as you build and research for the future of mankind. Tlön Industries and Raw Fury teamed up to take the base builder/resource management genre and pump it full of steroids in this narrative-driven terraforming game. These types of games have really struggled to grab my attention since the early 2000s, so I was extremely shocked when I found it hard to put this game down. From the relaxing process of upgrading roads to the blaring sirens alerting you to incoming hostiles, This experience was out of this world.

A Fresh Start

You open your eyes from space to a gorgeous view of the red planet Mars. You play the role of an AI called AMI (pronounced Amy, short for Artificial Machine Intelligence,) created to terraform the planet for human migration. Sounds like a pretty daunting task, right? Don’t worry. Help and direction come from your creator, Dr. Nathan Foster. With his guidance, you’ll be on your way to bringing colonists to Mars in no time. Along the way, you’ll make decisions that will shape the future of not only life on the planet, but the life of the planet, and your own consciousness, as well.

The latter of those is what I found most intriguing as the story progressed. Instead of playing the part of a machine that simply does as it’s told, you develop who AMI is as a character by answering rhetorical questions, such as if your reaction to an event was logical, and why. Some of the discussions with yourself get deeply ethical, and actually made me squirm a bit as I pondered how I wanted to respond. It manages to pull you into conflict with your conscience with almost no effort whatsoever.

The other side of this coin, however, houses one of the biggest problems with this experience. Very often, these “reflections” occur out of nowhere, most times a lengthy period after the event that triggered it occurred. Early on, this isn’t that big of an inconvenience, but as your base grows, you have more and more going on. Eventually the delay in these reflections becomes quite troublesome. Numerous times I found myself struggling to remember what she was speaking about, and by the time I had remembered, the timer was up on the window they gave me to answer. Despite this confusion, the enjoyment this aspect provided was great.

Make the World Yours

Per Aspera is a new breed in the base building and resource management genre. You aren’t just building a base or a city – you’re terraforming an entire planet. Coupled with how the processes that you are tasked with are based on real life scientific research, this is a game like no other I’ve ever played. You start with a landing site, and get started with simple processes such as mining minerals and building factories. From there, you develop materials needed for other processes, and so on.

Before long you will have built a colony and greeted your first colonists, and developed a research center where scientists will develop projects in your “tech tree.” This is a skill tree you will use to progress the terraforming process, and you designate which projects will be researched, one at a time. There are four branches: Engineering, Space, Biotech, and Military. Each will research abilities and buildings that you can then use or build to further your directive.

Almost as soon as you start on the red planet, though, you’ll come across Per Aspera’s most glaring issue – the “how to play” is almost nonexistent. You are left almost completely to your own devices to try to figure out what the different icons mean, how to perform almost every task, and even how to progress your tech tree. And boy, is there a lot to figure out. After about 10 hours of solid gameplay, I was still trying to figure out why some of my factories were halted at times, keeping me from the precious resources that I was starving for. Literally starving for, because my colonists were not getting enough food to sustain them. I had mismanaged my resources, and my scientists and their families were paying the price.

Which brings me to the next facet – this game is punishing and unforgiving when it comes to the resource management aspect. While challenging, however, it was not completely off-putting because I had played games from this genre before, and pretty much knew the ins-and-outs. I pity any who land on Mars not having experienced this type of game before due to the lack of instruction on what you need to know to succeed.

Seeing Red

The view of the planet as your canvas is sincerely awe-inspiring. While it feels almost generic the first couple of minutes, it doesn’t take long to appreciate what Tlön Industries did here. The map of Mars that you’re playing on is actually the real map of the planet, topographically, with real names of valleys, craters, and other landmarks. While the other parts of the game are pretty run of the mill from a visual standpoint, once I realized what I was looking at, I seriously spent half of an hour spinning over this globe with my mouse, admiring what I was looking at, and just taking it in.

Final Verdict

Per Aspera is a mandatory experience for fans of the base builder genre. Diving into an environment void of oxygen felt, ironically, like a breath of fresh air. It presents challenges I haven’t seen in a game of its style before. That, coupled with the story, and the way that it pulls you in with its interactive self-searching dialogue, make this an absolutely brilliant experience. Unfortunately, unless you’ve played games in the same vein enough to have a good grasp of the concepts, this probably isn’t something you’ll spend long on. At least not before you get frustrated and develop a serious disdain for the space program. Which really is quite a tragedy, because once you figure it out, this is a beautifully uncomfortable experience. But if you can figure it out, you can explore, and you can build. But can you survive?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h80HfxffLBY

This review is based on a PC copy of Per Aspera provided by Sandbox Strategies for coverage purposes. As of this writing, it is exclusive to that platform.