Here Come The Martian Martians

I had quite different plans for today's post but Mrs Bhagpuss's PC decided to throw a shoe around Saturday teatime and I spent all yesterday evening and most of today trying to figure out what was wrong and put it right. I'm still not really sure but she's up and running again thanks to an old hard drive of mine that still had Windows 10 installed. A more permanent solution will have to be found but for now I can get back to what I was doing, at least until Beryl wakes up

Fortunately, when I said yesterday that I'd settled on the Next Fest demo on which I had the least to say, I may have been mistaken. That might be

Mars Vice

I had a lot of trouble with this one at first but it had nothing to do with the game or the demo. It was all me. I was trying to play it on the laptop, streaming via Splashtop and while it ran perfectly well that way, some odd glitch in the process meant I could only rotate the point-of-view camera about 270 degrees. 

That made moving around in the smallish spaces of the main character's apartment quite problematic and things didn't improve much when I got him outside. Given the annoyance and frustration it caused me, it's a point in the game's favor that I didn't just close it down and quit.

I wasn't sure if it was a bug in the demo or a fault at my end until I carried on the next day from where I'd left off, this time playing directly through the desktop client. Played as intended, full 360 degree movement was immediately restored and the whole thing suddenly became an order of magnitude more enjoyable.

Sadly, it turned out I'd already all-but finished the demo anyway. There was only about five minutes left. I probably should have started again from the beginning to give it a fair go - the whole thing only took me half an hour, even with the movement issues - but I felt I'd seen enough.

Mars Vice is an odd game, or at least the demo makes it seem like one. I can clearly remember everything that happened but I'm going to have to go look up the description on Steam to see what sort of game it is that the developers' think they're making. It certainly isn't all that clear from the demo.

They describe it as "a narrative adventure game" and I suppose it might turn into one later on but in the demo itself there's precious little narrative and absolutely no adventure. Come to think of it, there's not much in the way of a game, either.

As far as I can recall, the action consists of waking up and getting a call from your boss, telling you you ought to be at the Transference Port to meet a new colleague, who's just arrived on Mars. You have to find your clothes, get dressed, find your keys, go to the arrival area and find your new partner. Then you both get in the car to go to the office and the demo ends.

That's hardly an adventure, although it is more interesting than I'm making it sound. The setting is mildly unusual and the local customs more so. 

The game takes place on "a distant and futuristic Mars", although how and why Mars can be any more "distant" than usual isn't explained. Maybe it just hasn't been returning Earth's phone calls. Travel to and from Earth is via some kind of teleportation, or maybe remote cloning, whereby your persona is transmitted to a new physical body.

The gimmick is that you can pick just about any look you fancy, provided all your fantasies are fairly furry. Everyone is an animal or a chimera because you can mix and match animal attributes to get the exact look you like. This, clearly, is designed to appeal to a certain mindset, one with which I'm comfortable, so I found it all quite appealing.

More interestingly in terms of the storyline, the incoming Earther doesn't take to the idea at all. She stubbornly declines to join in with the anthropomorphic fun and insists on keeping the body she was born with, something the Martians seem to find both scandalous and shocking. Ground being laid there for an ethical debate later in the game, I fancy, although there's precious little hint of it in the demo.

Mars Vice is visually appealing, with a strong and coherent design aesthetic that carries through everything from the UI to the scenery. It's all flat, matte, pastel washes and self colors and it looks good. There's no extraneous detail but what's there is appropriate and engaging.

The protagonist is a Lionman, somewhat goofier than that animal's usual reputation, and the various walk-on parts cover all the expected bases from tiger to wolf to shark. Everyone's an animal but I did spot one customer who looked human other than for a pair of what appeared to be bat ears.

Gameplay, such as it is, consists almost entirely of long conversations, all of which are presented in the style of text messages, whether or not they take place in person or through a screen. It's a format we're all used to reading and it works well. NPCs also chat amongst themselves by way of comic-book speech bubbles, which adds nicely to the ambience.

There are a few hints along the way as to what the nature of the storyline might be, if and when it decides to make an appearance. The employees at Embody, the company that seems to serve as both animorph storefront and inter-system arrivals hall, clearly have some contractual issues going on that may or not shade into malpractice. Come to that, the whole "Come as you aren't" set-up, upon which modern Martian society relies, seems like it might be shakier than it should be.

Really, though, I came away with no clear idea what was likely to happen next. I wasn't even sure what line of work Dax, the player-character, was supposed to be in. Is he a policeman? If so, I'm mostly getting it from the title.

There's just about enough there to make me want to know more and it feels very comfortable and easy to play. As a demo it probably just about does enough. But only just.

Wishlisted, more out of curiosity than desire. Recommended, but only tentatively. I need to know more. Which is going to happen a lot sooner than I thought... I just realized Mars Vice is set to launch just three days from now on 6 March.