Cool, calm, collected. Cutthroat. Cannibalistic. These are all qualities of a successful Tharsis player — the dice-rolling sci-fi strategy game releasing on the Epic Games Store free on September 16. Like Tharsis, Speed Brawl will be debuting on the service in September, despite already being out on other platforms already. In fact, Tharsis actually boasts a 2016 release date, and now gets to court an entirely new audience thanks to Epic and its storefront’s “Discover: Free Games” section.
Tharsis actually bears a striking resemblance to another game on the store: Sheltered. Sheltered is currently free on the store, and they really couldn’t be more different. Sheltered focuses on the procedural and reactive nature of post apocalyptic survival. Alongside that, it boasts a cute, thematically appropriate art style, and a really harsh difficulty curve at points. Tharsis presents a similar fantasy, but transposed onto the backdrop of a failing Mars mission. Unfortuntealy for Tharsis, this comparison might not be brilliant for it, as it accomplishes its goals with a lot less grace than Sheltered. Although it's not be perfect, it still makes for a compelling Epic Games Store free title.
Tharsis: Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Tharsis is a game that focalizes decision making. In the game, players control the entire crew of a Mars ship. Every choice that this crew has to make is governed by the player, including but not limited to any commands to start killing and eating each other. Thematically speaking, this is certainly not a game for the faint of heart. Although jumping straight to cannabilism might seem like a light overreaction, it might become more reasonable when the stakes are clear. Tharsis is a game with hard decisions to be made, and it really heavily leans into this central conceit.
At the start of the game, Earth's first manned voyage to the Tharsis region of Mars is beset by a micrometeroid shower: Half the ship being destroyed before the game begins. After this calamity, the turn based strategy begins. A player's mission is to get a character onto the surface of Mars, if any of them surivive that long.
It is, however, very different to other previously free Epic Games Store titles like Surviving Mars. While some space simulator games tell the story of a glorious universal empire, or a plucky young colony on a different planet, Tharsis is concerned with the immediate, the terrifying, and the deeply fraught moment-to-moment decisions that would be necessary in these situations.
In Tharsis, players have ten turns to try and successfully land on Mars. During these ten turns, they can allocate resources to different places and work to fix some of the many inevitable breaks or faults in the ship. Of course, space dilemmas are never that simple, so every turn also has the potential of something new and catastrophic happening. Like the best dice-based games, a lot of the game's elements are entirely left up to chance. Ultimately, Tharsis is a game all about reacting to new stimuli as efficiently as possible — no matter how damaging it might be to a crew of characters.
Death Spirals and Disappointment
Unfortunately, this highly reactive and incredibly punishing dice roll mechanic has a negative side effect for the game — defeat feels unfair and victory often feels unearned. Tharsis is an inarguably beautiful game, with absolutely gorgeous sound and environment design, but its commitment to this very harsh, randomized gameplay tone sometimes pulls players out of the experience.
The best strategy games are all about empowering a player enough, but trusting them to be able to make their own decisions that will heavily impact the game. When Tharsis is at its best, players are swiftly reacting to a whole bunch of inputs, and it feels really good to figure out methods of circumventing emergent problems. When it's at its worst, however, it feels like any decision on the player's part gets immediately wiped away by some brand new random horror that was rolled.
Completing Tharsis often involves a fair bit of luck. While that coheres fine with the central premise of the game, it can feel awful to get multiple bad rolls in a row and have the game transform into a full-fledged death spiral. Ultimately, Tharsis is an absolutely stunning and compelling game that probably needed slightly longer in development. It is, however, still worth a download when it becomes free on September 16, alongside Sheltered.
Tharsis will be free on the Epic Games Store on September 16.
