A fairly common concept in science fiction (that’s becoming less fictional) is the idea that humans suddenly find themselves urgently needing to terraform Mars because we’ve made Earth uninhabitable. In other words, “We need to turn Mars into a second Earth because we screwed the first one up so badly, but we totally won’t do that again, honest.” Per Aspera takes that concept and combines it with an artificial consciousness pondering philosophy and the nature of its own existence. The result is a deeply enjoyable city-builder/colony management game that you can turn into your preferred degree of depth or mindless fun.

In Per Aspera, you play as AMI, a highly sophisticated artificial consciousness whose prime directive is to make decisions and build structures in optimal ways to support human colonists on Mars during the process of turning the Red Planet into a second home for humanity. By design, there’s a symbiotic relationship between you and the colonists you’re expected to support: The more effort you put into ensuring the colonists have everything they need to thrive, the more they can focus on researching new technologies that help with the terraforming process. It’s hard to do science when you’re starving or dehydrated, after all.

In the interest of transparency, I want to mention that every aspect of Per Aspera’s gameplay mentioned here is based on my experiences on its easiest difficulty setting because that’s been most enjoyable for me. Core parts of gameplay may have significant changes or may not exist at all on higher difficulty settings, for all I know. The plan to terraform Mars in Per Aspera is broken into five stages, starting with releasing the carbon dioxide in the planet’s polar ice caps and ending with giving Mars a breathable atmosphere.

When all five stages are complete, this plan will theoretically allow humans to exist on Mars just as we do on Earth without the need for any supportive technology. There are multiple ways to accomplish each of the critical tasks within that five-step plan. You have quite a bit of freedom to decide how you want to go about doing everything needed to complete the terraforming process. Since you’re the highly sophisticated artificial consciousness in this equation, you’re expected to use your processing power to make all the tough decisions while the human colonists carry out the manual labor involved in your plans.

It’s critical to keep in mind that, since you’re expected to basically “do all the complicated thinking” to support the colonists, Mission Control back on Earth will consider it your fault if anything bad happens to the humans on Mars and you don’t immediately take action to fix it. The humans chosen to go to Mars are mainly scientists and engineers themselves, so they aren’t exactly dimwitted. However, they still have to rely on you because they don’t have all the inbuilt processing power and complex decision-making algorithms that you have. If I were AMI, I’d be overwhelmed by those expectations.

As you play through more of Per Aspera’s campaign mode, AMI starts to ponder its (her?) situation and surroundings with increasing levels of depth. AMI will narrate thoughts and observations about things like what it should and should not do, what it is and isn’t capable of, what its role is in the mission (and in its existence in general), and whether or not it’s a sophisticated enough artificial consciousness to be considered “real” even though it’s not a human. You’ll frequently be able to make dialogue choices that influence AMI’s observations and feelings to make AMI more machine-like or more human.

I’m nowhere near qualified to even attempt to judge the depth (or lack thereof) with which Per Aspera approaches these philosophical quandaries. What I know for sure, though, is that I really like Per Aspera’s implementation of these aspects of its gameplay and its story. I get the impression that we real-life humans are rapidly approaching the point where we’ll be able to build AI sophisticated enough that the same kinds of philosophical questions brought up in Per Aspera will have to be addressed sooner or later, even though many among us may not like that idea.

Per Aspera features both a Campaign Mode and a Sandbox Mode. Campaign Mode is a more structured experience that walks players through the process of helping AMI and the human colonists terraform Mars as though this same type of mission were currently progressing in real life. As you might expect, Sandbox Mode removes the guided and more restrictive aspects of Campaign Mode and, for lack of a better way to phrase it, lets you just screw around to your heart’s content as an artificial consciousness who builds stuff on Mars and tries to keep colonies of humans alive.

Both Campaign Mode and Sandbox Mode have varying difficulty settings that can add to or lessen the challenges you’ll face as you go about terraforming Mars. With that being said, the easiest difficulty setting in Sandbox Mode is called “Playground.” If that’s not a surefire sign that playing Sandbox Mode grants you the opportunity to try out anything that your city-building, colony-managing mind can come up with, I don’t know what is. Per Aspera also isn’t shy about telling you that Sandbox Mode lets you entirely disregard the whole “five-step plan to terraform Mars” thing if you don’t want to bother with it.

As I’ve discussed in past reviews, even though I’m usually not great at the finer details of city-builder games like building even somewhat efficient road networks, I often still really enjoy games like Per Aspera primarily because of their built-in sandbox modes. On that note, a huge point I’d put in Per Aspera’s favor is that in both Campaign Mode and Sandbox Mode, roads are automatically built for you whenever you place down a new structure of any kind. That by itself would have been enough to sell me on Per Aspera, though it’s just one reason I can easily recommend it to you.

A PC review copy of Per Aspera was provided by Raw Fury for this review.

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Per Aspera

$29.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Gameplay poses many thought-provoking questions.
• Core gameplay loop is easy to get the hang of.
• Sandbox mode is particularly fun.

Cons

• Non-customizable difficulty settings may not be ideal for some players.