If you’ve always wanted to get your ass to Mars, but find it’s distance from home and lack of wifi unappealing, Lacuna Passage could be the next best thing. The 25 square miles of traversable martian surface in Random Seed’s Kickstarted, open world exploration game were painstakingly recreated from actual NASA satellite data of the planet, ensuring every hill and valley is an actual location on Mars.
Lacuna Passage tells the story of astronaut Jessica Rainer as she attempts to investigate the disappearance of the previous team of astronauts stationed on the surface. Unfortunately, her own landing ends up being a bit of a bumpy one, leaving her separated her from her crew and extremely vulnerable in the hostile, martian environment.
My 15 minutes demo opened after my pod crashed on the martian surface. After getting my bearings, I was able to use my data pad to locate a NAV beacon for previous team’s home base. While huffing it to the base, I realized that my oxygen count decreased faster as I expended more energy, making running and jumping a nerve-racking experience. Upon reaching the base, I encountered IRA, the base’s patronizing AI whose attitude is purposely reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. After spending approximately 2 of the game’s natural day/night cycles exploring what areas I could reach with my EVA suit, my demo ended with a sudden fright as an explosive decompression rocked the base, one of the many unforeseen hazards that can occur as you struggle to both survive and accomplish your mission.
Lacuna Passage combines both the investigation-driven narrative of titles like Gone Home, with managing resources necessary for survival like water, food, and most importantly, oxygen. Lacuna Passage requires players to investigate their surroundings to advance the story, but includes more spoken dialogue via audio logs and through the protagonist’s conversations with the IRA. Unfortunately, the voice acting performance of the main character is less than stellar, replacing the intended tension with campiness.
As much of the technology left by the previous team is old and broken down, you’ll be walking a lot in Lacuna Passage, which could get a little tedious. However, the game’s gorgeous dynamic soundtrack keeps things interesting, able to both lull you into a feeling of contemplative relaxation, and sudden panicked anxiety when things unexpectedly go awry.
Lacuna Passage successfully creates what Creative Director Tyler Owen describes it as an atmosphere of “open claustrophobia”. The desolate, lonely landscape is hauntingly large, while the threat suffocation and instant death continually feels only inches away. In addition to the non-linear, single-player only narrative, the two brothers behind the project hope to include an additional survival mode, allowing players to freely roam and explore the martian surface while trying to stay alive as long as possible. In this mode, players will be able to freely take photos, with included location data. This data can then be shared amongst the community, encouraging other fellow martian explorers to seek out unique locations and hidden objects on the surface.
Although it found success on Steam Greenlight, Lacuna Passage will not be available in Early Access as the developers don’t want to fully present the story until the game is totally polished and completed. The game is slated for release on PC, Mac, and Linux in spring of 2016. Until then, if you’d like to know more, check out the Lacuna Passage Devlog.