It’s weird when the video description tells you more about a game than the video.
That’s the case for Tharsis though, a turn-based rogue-like with “high stakes, tenuous odds and cannibalism”. It was actually announced last year but Choice Provisions, a rebranded studio from the Gaijin Games developers (makers of the BIT.TRIP series), have kept the project largely under wraps until today.
The game’s due out on PC and PS4 later this year and, to celebrate the announcement, there’s a teaser to boost. Although you’ll find, as I did, that you’ll glean much more from the above than the video. But let’s watch anyway.
“[Tharsis] puts you in control of the first-ever mission to Mars, just as it’s struck by a meteor storm,” the press kit reads. The dice in the screenshots makes me wonder if Tharsis is something akin to Blood Bowl-levels of randomness crossed with Faster Than Light/Out There and Star Command.
The developers promised last year to make sure the game was “a lot of fun”, despite diverging massively from the look, tone and theme of their previous titles. “It won’t be easy, and those who can’t stay above water will be punished with perma-death, but we’ve been very careful to make the game as fair as possible, as well as enjoyable in even the most hopeless of circumstances.”
“We do this because we care, and also probably because we don’t want to perpetuate the notion that a manned mission to Mars is something humanity should be afraid of.”
Tharsis is due out later this year, but we don’t know precisely when.
Comments