Rolling in the deep (space)

Fiendishly difficult games have proven popular with gamers in recent years. Most of these games require fast reactions and an intimate understanding of each level or enemy. Tharsis is as difficult as games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne and it should be. Your spacecraft is on it’s way to Mars. It has just been hit by a meteorite and you’ve lost two members of your crew. Your chances of survival are infinitesimally small – you might never beat this game because it’s all down to luck. It’s emulating real life.

Most games hide their randomness, the chance of a player’s success in a given situation, beneath layers of code. In RPG’s there’s a small chance your attack will deliver a ‘critical hit’ and in other games different events will randomly occur at any given time. So when things aren’t in your favour, the player often feels frustrated. Tharsis is painfully hard, but by exposing its randomness – in the form of rolling dice – it removes part of the frustration. Rather than resenting the developers for building a ‘mean’ game, you start to curse your luck in defeat.

You start to curse your luck in defeat

Dice essentially act as an in-game currency which you can spend protecting your ship’s health, the four members of your crew, and their stress levels. Each turn (you must complete ten before you arrive on Mars) new problems appear on your ship, ranging from fires to a blue screen of death. Micromanagement is the key to success and the game does a good job of teaching you where your priorities should lie after each successive death. One of these is food – which is essential to survival and replenishes your dice. When you’re really low on dice and you have no food, the game gives you an unforgivable choice – do you resort to cannibalism? Make this choice, and your dice are from that point onwards stained in blood and that character’s total life is permanently reduced by one. It’s the game’s way of saying that a part of your soul has just died.

Even when the dice aren’t red they look astonishingly realistic and the physics have been perfectly refined (definitely turn your rumble on if you’re playing with a controller) to make every roll incredibly satisfying. In general, the presentation of Tharsis is sublime. Each module of the ship is beautifully rendered and the lighting gives a real sense of emergency when all is about to be lost. Planning out your strategy each turn requires concentration and the accompanying music does a lot to mitigate the stress. The chill electronica never grows old, sounding like a subdued Tron soundtrack.

Choice Provisions have developed a great game, but I feel like its difficulty might be off-putting for many. In the playthrough where I finally succeeded (it took about six tries with each unsuccessful run lasting from ten to 20 minutes), every member of my crew ate human flesh. Tharsis teaches that sacrifice is necessary to achieve the impossible; a sacrifice that many might not choose to make.

Tharsis is out now on Steam and PSN