Mars

About

Mars is a sci-fi RPG action game that blends character progression with rhythmic combat and environmental strategy. Players choose between Seth, a gritty soldier, or Pandora, a fluid-wielding technomancer, each offering distinct playstyles and intertwined stories. Battles emphasize timing and movement, with quick strikes, magic casts, and dynamic boss encounters. The game’s standout feature is its use of sunlight as a weapon, players manipulate the environment by breaking roofs or angling mirrors to expose foes to lethal rays, turning light into a tactical tool. Missions unfold in a fractured Martian colony where political factions and water scarcity drive conflict, with a plot exploring survival, mutation, and societal decay. The game’s fusion of action and RPG elements created a divisive but memorable experience. While some praised its inventive combat and dual narratives, others found the pacing uneven. Its 2010 release marked one of the first attempts to integrate environmental hazards as core mechanics, with a setting that’s more cyberpunk wasteland than traditional fantasy. The Mars of this game feels lived-in and desperate, with a focus on resource scarcity and decay that sets it apart from typical sci-fi adventures.

Storyline

Colonisation and the great catastrophe The game begins 200 years after the colonisation of Mars. The planet has not been terraformed as such although its air has been rendered breathable. While colons settled on the planet 70 years ago in different enclaves, Mars turned around its axis and changed its orbit. This tumult not only completely shut down communication with Earth, it also spread death and destruction, creating unprecedented chaos in the planet’s colonies. Many inhabitants were forced to leave the cities in ruins and destroyed agricultural land, exposing themselves to solar radiation. Most of them died, but some survived and mutated, taking shelter as quickly as possible. Other colons managed to stay in more or less undamaged cities, taking shelter from the now deadly sunrays. Very soon the survivors were confronted with a problem : water, which abounded in the past has suddenly become extremely rare. The companies in charge of this commodity became very powerful, controlling most enclaves and bargaining with the life of the people. Isolated, at the mercy of solar radiation with no water, the colons quickly deteriorate from a technological standpoint, sinking into decadence. Factories and mines are virtually abandoned. The metal manufactured is now mostly from recovered material. The people living in Mars live in a technologically medieval standard while using highly advanced technological remains they hardly control. Now Today, two kinds of people live on Mars : those who never left the security of their city, the so-called True People who are free of mutations, and those who have been exposed to radiation, the Ashes from Mars, who are mostly slaves of the former. Water circulates from one city to another as far as the cultivated lands via aqueducts which create the so-called shadow paths, covered roads which allow free movement from one place to another. Various water guilds rule over the planet and fight for supremacy. The political power they exercise is authoritarian : any form of rebellion is punished by death without trial. Water has become a weapon like any other : by simply stopping it from getting to a village life can be destroyed. This is also the case of the sun, since exposing a district to its light is enough to get rid of all its occupants. There is virtually no opposition in place, just a few isolated individuals here and there or a few Ashes from Mars raising objections in breach of the law, living in the worst districts or city slums.