In 1984, a Martian meteorite was discovered in Antarctica. It was labeled ALH 84001. In 1996, NASA announced the existence of alien microfossils in it. In 2009, Earth sent its first manned mission to Mars and estabilished Vita I base, a research center to investigate Martian bacterial life. In August 8th, 2018, Vita I sent its last transmission to Earth:
"If you send a manned craft, warn the crew: Stay alone. Stay alive."
Today, 10 months after complete radio silence, an investigative team of three people landed on the surface of Mars and entered Vita I base through different airlocks. They expect to deal with a bacterial outbreak. What they'll find there is worse than anything they could dream of.
This is the premise of Martian Gothic: Unification, a game developed by Creative Reality, relased in 2000 for PC and 2001 for the PS1.
Cool cover, ain't it?
It becomes clear from the start that despite being sold as a survival horror game, MG:U wasn't developed with that genre in mind. In fact, its point-and-click adventure origins are everywhere. This game has a heavy focus on exploration and puzzle-solving. You'll spend most of your time walking aroung, clicking at stuff, examining and combining items, reading memos and computer files. There's even a magnifying glass icon that pops up whenever you can interact with something or someone.
You play as three characters who must stay away from each other during the whole game for reasons you'll learn as you progress through the story, and time doesn't stop when you switch from one character to another, so you must always leave them in a safe area before switching to a different one.
With that said, I want to lay down every criticism I can in order to focus on the good parts later on.
Anyway, if you can tolerate awful controls, overly frustrating combat and the possibility of needing to restart your whole playthrough because of bugs, you'll most likely find a lot to love in this game. For a game developed by only six people back in 2000, this is quite the achievement.
Thank you for your time, Era. This is my first thread here, and I wanted to pay homage to this beautiful and horrible game I love so much. I really hope the people who made MG:U are still working in the games industry, with better results of course.
"If you send a manned craft, warn the crew: Stay alone. Stay alive."
Today, 10 months after complete radio silence, an investigative team of three people landed on the surface of Mars and entered Vita I base through different airlocks. They expect to deal with a bacterial outbreak. What they'll find there is worse than anything they could dream of.
This is the premise of Martian Gothic: Unification, a game developed by Creative Reality, relased in 2000 for PC and 2001 for the PS1.
Cool cover, ain't it?
It becomes clear from the start that despite being sold as a survival horror game, MG:U wasn't developed with that genre in mind. In fact, its point-and-click adventure origins are everywhere. This game has a heavy focus on exploration and puzzle-solving. You'll spend most of your time walking aroung, clicking at stuff, examining and combining items, reading memos and computer files. There's even a magnifying glass icon that pops up whenever you can interact with something or someone.
You play as three characters who must stay away from each other during the whole game for reasons you'll learn as you progress through the story, and time doesn't stop when you switch from one character to another, so you must always leave them in a safe area before switching to a different one.
With that said, I want to lay down every criticism I can in order to focus on the good parts later on.
- The controls are absolute garbage. Characters are heavy, move slowly, constantly collide with walls and surfaces that completely halt their movement and leave them open to attacks until you're lucky enough to turn your character and circumvent whatever it is that's stopping them. You can't ready your weapon while moving, so you first need to let go of the D-Pad, wait for your character to stop, then you press R1 in order to raise your weapon. Combat is extremely slow and frustrating because of that, which leads me to my next point.
- This game was balanced to frustrate the player more and more as they progress through the story. As soon as the game starts, it doesn't take you more than a few minutes to walk through dozens of corpses, which isn't all that bad because they're all apparently dead. As you make progress, though, more and more of these corpses are reanimated, and once they're up, you can't kill them. Not for more than a few seconds, anyway. In order to deal with that, the game showers you with ammo, but your enemies become more and more resistant to bullets as well as taking a lot less time to get back on their feet. To make matters worse, the most important hallways are littered with enemies, which makes going through them an exercise in patience. And now, the cherry on top: Hit detection is abysmal. Enemies can grab you from ridiculous distances, and often they'll be facing you and suddenly grab you from behind, which does more damage (oh, and by the way, a LOUD JUMPSCARE CHORD OF DOOM plays almost every time your character is grabbed). It makes Rule of Rose's combat feel like Bayonetta's in comparison.
- The 3D models are nothing to write home about. Every human looks like a pile of boxes, and there's very little variation in the enemy models.
- It can get pretty confusing. Since there are a lot of items and the game is somewhat non-linear, it's pretty easy for the player to get confused and not have a clue what they're supposed to do next. Some puzzles are very obtuse and follow that crazy point-and-click logic some of us know and love, some of us hate with a passion.
- Game-breaking bugs. As I was replaying this game in order to write about it here, I came to a bug that made me unable to advance through the plot and beat the game. I thought these bugs were exclusive to the PC version, but some of them are present in the PS1 version as well.
- The voice acting may not be to everyone's taste. I've read a lot of criticism towards it online, but I enjoy it quite a lot. Characters talk like real people, and the fact that some of the talents were not actual actors gives a lot of authenticity to their lines.
- Well, for starters, the writing is great. Dialogue is interesting and well done, and the story is quite good as well, with worldbuilding far above the average for when this game was made. There are lots of text files and audio logs that give more details about the story and setting. One of the best things about this game is visiting every area with each character and listening to what they have to say about it. Same goes for the items: most of them are examinable, and each character has a different thing to say about them. You learn a lot about these characters' backstories and personalities by doing that, and they become quite interesting as the story goes on.
- The pre-rendered graphics are beautiful. Despite being a sci-fi research base on Mars, Vita I has a lot of visual variety. Many rooms are themed after different cultures for reasons explained in game, so you won't be staring at dozens of metal corridors and gray room after gray room. Vita I looks like a place in which people lived and met an horrible fate.
- The soundtrack is perfect. Don't get me wrong, it's not like it's the best soundtrack ever, but it definitely fits the atmosphere the game aims to achieve. Each track has this eerie feeling of isolation, mystery and alien horror, making the whole experience feel just like a good horror game should.
- It's a bit ahead of its time in regards to diversity. The player characters are an African-American man, a Japanese man and a British woman. Vita I's crew has a good balance between men and women, as well as many women in leading positions, and some audiologs seem to suggest that some characters had same-sex relationships.
Anyway, if you can tolerate awful controls, overly frustrating combat and the possibility of needing to restart your whole playthrough because of bugs, you'll most likely find a lot to love in this game. For a game developed by only six people back in 2000, this is quite the achievement.
