Review of Per Aspera

A fascinating but flawed exercise in planetary stewardship

Per Aspera, which originally came out in December of 2020 to a chorus of fairly respectable reviews, is not an easy game to love, exactly, or heap with generous praise; it’s complex and cerebral enough (at least on the surface) to strike many players as either maddeningly inscrutable or monotonously tedious. But the intrinsic concept nevertheless struck a serious chord with me. In some of the ideas that emanate from this game, it evokes the works of Kim Stanley Robinson by way of Isaac Asimov. When I first played it back in February, I hoped to enjoy it on an almost elemental level, to let its roots sink deep into my mind and remain there for a long time; I make no claims here to abide by any conventions of professional detachment.

Despite a modest budget, Per Aspera might deserve to be called an epic game by virtue of its sheer ambition and scale alone. It grapples seriously with nothing less than the future of the human race. Although the audio calls through which the story unfolds eventually curdle a bit into annoying melodrama, it has the surprising ability to tell a tasteful and compelling sci-fi story—centered on ethical questions about humanity’s dominion over the cosmos and the nature of artificial intelligence—in a manner that feels both sweeping and rather intimate, thanks in part to the enormous voice talents of Troy Baker, Phil LaMarr, and Laila Berzins (the last of whom provides the voice of AMI, the inquisitive and striving artificial intelligence and player avatar sent to Mars for the purpose of preparing the way for human colonization). Mars itself is rendered in all its topographic glory with rich hues and fastidious details; it’s then set against the backdrop of a pleasant but not riveting celestial-themed score that evokes the beautiful desolation of Mars. In short, the game had all of the elements in place to create a compelling and memorable experience.

Yet at the delicate art of combining a rich story-driven narrative with cerebral gameplay in which you can lose yourself for hours, Per Aspera never rises to the level of its lofty pretensions. If the core gameplay loop was just a little more compelling, then the game could have gone down as a great little cult classic: perhaps not a masterpiece by any means, but at least something fun and engaging that stands apart on its own terms. Unfortunately, for all its lofty ambitions and restless intelligence, the game is ultimately an unsatisfying experience. Why it fails to capture the essential creative spark for which it was striving is an interesting proposition to consider.

The gameplay is an odd amalgamation of logistics, infrastructure management, and colony building. While the ultimate goal is to terraform the planet in a manner congruent with human life, the fundamental challenge is to create a smoothly functioning and sprawling industrial supply chain of basic resources like iron, silicon, and water. Although this may sound overly convoluted, the actual player-controlled mechanics are all fairly straightforward. Mines collect raw materials, factories build useful goods, and autonomous worker drones carry the resources to their destination along a vast road network (which spreads out from buildings automatically when they’re placed on the map). As humans start to inhabit the colonies and technologies are unlocked, players can choose to embark on progressively more ambitious terraforming projects that will transform the planet into a second Earth.

Overall, the game is a neat simulation that managed to evoke in me a pleasant sensation of catharsis, immersion, and transcendental absorption. The colony begins to take on the qualities of an emergent organism, and the roads are the lifeblood through which vital resources flow. Unfortunately, as much as the central concept endeared itself to me, the pieces of the gameplay mechanics just don’t entirely fit. I think this stems partly from the fundamental disjunction between the overwhelming complexity of the simulation (with hundreds of resources racing across the map at any given time) and the curious lack of any compelling macro-level mechanics, meaningful choices, and levers of influence in the colony-building aspect of the game. Players do have the ability to prioritize which buildings should receive resources, but there is no guarantee it will produce the desired result. Everything is automated to the most stringent and inflexible degree possible. The natural consequence of this somewhat ungainly and awkward formulation is that colony building feels less dynamic and impactful than it should have been. The player is often reduced to the position of mere passive observer whose sole task it is to balance resources by plopping down more buildings. For all the complex and frenetic logistics activity thrumming away beneath the surface, the gameplay loop feels strangely inert.

During the only campaign I ever played, I rarely felt I had a good grasp over what I was doing. As my vast colony spiraled outward into a chaotic network of unplanned roads and buildings, my solution to any problem was just to build more stuff, piling one kludge on top of another; the game rarely encouraged me to search for a more elegant and efficient method for distributing resources. This sets up a strange schism in which the game strives to create the impression of a well-calibrated machine, even as my colony became increasingly more anarchic, disorganized, and fragile, with minimal feedback to improve my play. As a result, it doesn’t really succeed as a creatively edifying colony-building game like Surviving Mars, but neither is it really the factory-building and logistics game of your dreams like Dyson Sphere Program.

I have read several reviews of the game in which players sometimes reach an untenable cul-de-sac on their first attempt, forcing them to restart their entire campaign. This most often seems to occur when the planet’s oxygen levels spiral completely out of control and start igniting their colony on fire. However, I experienced the opposite problem in my campaign. No matter how many biodomes I built, plant life spread slowly and ponderously across the surface, causing the rate of oxygen release to proceed in random, punctuated intervals before falling back to zero. The game did not offer me any ideas for how to expedite the process, and furious web searches did not yield any pertinent answers either. So I put the game on the highest speed, passed the time by reading a book, and waited several in-game decades for the oxygen levels to rise leisurely upward toward the required equilibrium. It was a slow, agonizing, and sometimes tedious process.

Despite these enormous issues, I think it’s still worth playing just to bask in the ambience of this fascinating but ultimately flawed machine. The physical transformation of Mars is by far the most rewarding part of the game. As the polar ice caps succumbed to rising temperatures and the green efflorescence of plants spread out across the surface, I was relatively absorbed in the process of unlocking the next stage of my world-shaping project. Some of the intriguing decisions in the game enable you to build a space elevator up to orbit or slam the moon Deimos into the surface of Mars. Unfortunately, the game focuses its technical prowess on the wrong things. Instead of the unwieldy sprawling base builder we received, I think it should have been conceived as a planetary management game with some lighter simplified colony building on the side. As it stands, it may go down in my mind as one of the great gaming what-if stories. I hope one day we will receive a great Mars terraforming game with the same attention to detail and ambitious ideas as Per Aspera and the refinement it all deserves. Perhaps that will have to wait for a potential update or sequel.