Ugly duckling is a series of posts talking about games that could’ve been great, but were not.
I’ve talked about my love for Dead Space many times. When it was released in 2008, lots of people were excited about the first [RE-like] survival horror in space. But that’s not true. Dead Space was the first good (I’d say great) RE-like survival horror in space. 8 years before it, though, another survival horror in space was released, first on PC, then on PS1. It was called Martian Gothic: Unification, and it was, unless I’m mistaken, the first. Curiously, Dead Space even shares some concepts with this game. But the main difference between them is that unlike with Dead Space, it’s playing Martian Gothic isn’t that fun.
It’s frustrating in simplest of things. I’ve owned it ever since it got released on both platforms too, yet it wasn’t until now that I’ve finished it. And only because I’ve abused the hell out of the emulator savestates. Dead Space expands on RE4 mechanically. Martian Gothic breaks what was good in RE1. Undead enemies grab you from meters away and it takes a long time for you to break free. Enemies have tons of invincibility frames while performing actions which might take up to 5 seconds. And all of that isn’t some cool tension building jank, it’s just broken.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Martian Gothic story takes place in 2019 on Vita-1, a science station on Mars. It has been silent for 10 months so Earth decides to send a team of 3 people to investigate. Last message received from Vita-1 said that you can only survive if you’re alone, so each of the 3 main characters enters from a different airlock and that’s where the game starts.
You can switch between characters at any point, which is awesome and makes you think about where you “park” a character. If it’s not in a safe spot, they might get attacked as you’re playing as a different character, so you’d need to switch back and save yourself. It’s also great in segmenting the station in three distinct chunks, as originally there is no way to meet (not that you’d want to), and you can easily mentally plan things out and map the station out. When the station opens up for everyone, though, that’s when the game gets really infuriating. Apart from finding places safe from enemies, you also need to find places which will not be visited by any of your other characters. Because if you bring any character to close to another character, you die. And more annoyingly, the game will actually start demanding bringing characters dangerously close to each other, since some of the problems need two people to be solved.
So after a certain moment, the game stops being any fun. All enemies are immortal – you can only knock them out temporarily. The station is gigantic. The map is pretty bad. Goals are muddy and you have to plan for three characters at once. Playing it all without a walkthrough is just terrible. And all of this has a pretty simple explanation – the game was not really finished. Several problems can only be solved because you can exploit enemy AI in a certain way, as a better “correct” solution was simply not implemented. You can find countless items that should have a use, and even have several places where they clearly should be used, but they remain unusable. And a lot of this and other stuff is even more obvious if you check the game files that contain references to unfinished parts of the game. Even the story wasn’t really finished.
Which is a huge shame, since the concepts of the story are fantastic. And reminiscent of Dead Space, come to think of it. You can find weird monuments that aren’t entirely unlike The Marker. The story starts due to an ancient artifact that reanimates dead flesh. There are necromorph-like creatures and even the “make us whole again” concept has a parallel here. But then the voice acting is just… wow. Main character voice actors sound bored most of the time and lots of audio diaries are pretty bad. Yet, MOOD, the station interface voice, is pretty good and is reminiscent of The Administrator from TF2. The writing is also uneven, but I could appreciate a lot of dark humor when characters react to things you find and events that happen.
Martian Gothic is in dire need of a good remake. With a great studio tied to it. Leave the story mostly as is, keep the diaries, the dialogues, the overall map and the design, but remake the way the game controls from the scratch, re-plan the events, the puzzles,the combat. Maybe make it more stealth-like, maybe make enemies less obnoxious, but still dangerous. Despite loving the classic RE-like controls and structure, I’d even say that it’s just a terrible fit for this game. If this remake would be a thing some day, I’d gladly recommend people to play it. Yet, Martian Gothic as it is, as it was made and unfinished in 2000, isn’t something I can recommend at all. Unless you use cheats, savestates and a walktrhough and really love classic survival horror. Otherwise, you’ll just be frustrated all the time.