This is just one of those examples of a game you were disappointed in, but would have loved to see much more come of it.
Developed on a budget disavowing the development team of just about any freedom (in tandem with some objective dissonance within the team itself which led to the hackneyed product we have today), Martian Gothic had the foundations of a rather solid survival horror experience. It had the chills, the atmosphere, the fantastic music, a very desperate gameplay model with limited weapons & ammunition, and unfairly difficult enemies (indeed, the enemies are either invincible or are predominantly just obstacles to be overcome), and quite the distinct storyline underneath it all.
But things just didn't fully turn out the way they should have.
The graphics are a rather mixed-bag, with butt-ass ugly character models that would make the original Resident Evil laugh, almost non-existent lighting effects, and a general lack of polish all compounding the aesthetic disappointment. The saving grace here is in the background sections, or the level design, which, for the most part, aptly portrays the implied chaos that pre-dated the events of the game's plot. However, it would have been monumentally better if the game had an actual lighting system to accentuate the atmospheric prowess we could have beheld. It wouldn't have hurt to darken many of the areas as well, because for the most part, this game is BRIGHT, but not in a good way, due to an issue I've mentioned at least once before.
It would be criminal of me to omit the tidbit that Stephen Marley, the writer and designer of the game, intended for this to be a survival-horror game more akin to Resident Evil than what it turned out to be. While it did end up being a very similar game (albeit a far slower, less consistent one), the overt emphasis on puzzle-solving notwithstanding, it was meant to be even more apt in that comparison. Instead, we got a prodding, "Guide dang' it!" kind of game that threw mostly obscure puzzles with clues that even Sherlock Holmes would scratch his head in solving. The action is not even there, really, because you will realize that enemies can't really be killed. Zombies don't ever die, but instead get knocked down, just to get back up again (the rate of revival increases as the game goes on). The rarest enemy in the game, also an element that had a lot of untapped potential, serves to be a dangerous obstacle to the player. That is, until you get a weapon halfway through and kill them with relative ease. There are ankle-biters in the game, but they have terrible AI, are viable to get glitched severely (you'll see a lot of it in either version where one of them is seen in impossible places, unable to touch you at all), and can be ignored entirely.
A definite strength going for our adventure is the audio. All of it is fantastic and builds one of the strongest atmospheres around, in spite of the elements that bring it down. The music is minimalistic, resembling the rustling of wind, enforcing a "haunted house on Mars" vibe. When it lifts at times, it's ominous and mysterious, taking on a dark orchestral sound. All thanks goes to FirQ (the artist responsible for the music in the game). And then there are the sounds of monsters. Zombies, or "non-dead" as they're called here, emit creepy guttural sounds when they rise from their slumber. If one grabs your character (and that's all they'll do in this game), a loud instrumental sound will play that may make you jump the first few times. My favourite, however, is in the menacing growls of distant TriMorphs, which are tripartite monstrosities consisting of three individuals clumped together into one killing machine. If you're in the immediate area of a TriMorph (often just behind a door near your position, or just the next camera-frame over), you'll hear its animalistic growling.
And then the story comes 'round, and it's kind of obscured by a "let's-cover-all-possible-grounds" methodology. I'll flesh out what I mean here: when you thought this game was a mystery, driven by adventure & mired by infrequent adversity, it later turns out that the game is a Resident Evil-esque survival action romp slowed down by sometimes ill-conceived puzzles. At other times, it may as well be a point & click adventure title, slow & prodding leaving imagination to the player. And then it becomes some kind of avant-garde combination of all of those things. Are you confused yet? Did all of that work out to produce a consistent, solid product? No, not really.
There are also a number of characters introduced that seem unfulfilled or are missed opportunities. One of them, being known as "Ben Gunn" or "John Farr", merely populates a messy canteen, divulging cryptic clues as to the dark history of the base. That's pretty much it. Another, more egregious example of a poorly-conceived character is Judith Harroway. It eventually turns out that one of the team-members is intimately (literally) tied to the character, and a *SPOILER ALERT* conspiracy of rebellion rears its ugly head! It also doesn't help that the characters are not very-well acted, coming off as unconvincing given their situations. They seem almost ecstatic to be there, actually. It ends up diminishing the feel of the game. Some of the story elements, thus, seem to be abrupt cop-outs that come off as jarring rather than anything else.
Guns don't feel right, at all. Plus, they're given monikers that don't amount to anything, slightly diminishing the "oomph" factor. The weakest weapon, called the "Piccolo", is a pea-shooter and will be discarded immediately for something better. Plus, it sounds more like a fart than a gun. You later nab a nail-gun which is barely a step up, but can pin down one of the only other enemies present in the game (which you can ignore entirely anyway, making this gun kind of pointless to use). Later, you get your hands on a magnum-class handgun called the "Dillinger", which I can't complain about much because although it never really kills anything worth a damn, it sure does pack a punch doing its job temporarily dropping zombies. Then there are novelty weapons, like the Daedalus sub-machine-gun, which only serves to stop "non-dead" in their tracks but takes forever to put just one down. Then there are the novelties OF the novelty pack; the Psionara is a weapon that does virtually nothing to anything in the game, except for special, rare enemies that are affected by its psychic, non-ballistic delivery. The next one is the flare-gun which kills the TriMorphs clean in one hit whilst doing sweet piss all to anything else (in fact, shooting it at zombies in the PC version reveals that they're not fully corporeal anyway!). What this all boils down to is that you'll only really use two, give or take three of those weapons; the Dillinger the flare-gun and yeah, the psionara, the latter of which does in-fact serve a pretty useful purpose once or twice. This amounts to another disappointing roster.
Bugs are aplenty, however. On the PSOne (not the original Playstation), you are apt to run into a hard freeze when you enter a decompressing airlock sequence. If you're playing on the PC, and you don't patch the game, you are liable to run into a game ending glitch every time in the following sequence: Matlock must traverse a ventilation duct to a locked room, and outpace a TriMorph in the process. Prior to this sequence, privy players (most wouldn't know of it if they don't refer to a guide beforehand) will place Kenzo, the "infomeshing" expert near a surreal switch/rock/whatever thing (it's hard to explain what it is and why it works at all). At the right moment, a door in the ventilation duct will shut right behind Matlock, trapping the oncoming TriMorph in the process. However, in the un-patched PC version, the door will shut but won't be physical, and thus, the TriMorph will go through it as if it were nothing. Because you need that door to survive this sequence, you'll die every single time. Given that this game is so obscure and it's been over ten years since its release, good luck even finding an available patch to download.
That's assuming you're able to play it at all to begin with.
The game's length also doesn't do it any favours. Not that a lengthy play time is anything to scoff at, but it has to be engaging throughout. Here, however, it's not; it's too confusing, puzzles and their clues/solutions are far too obscure to understand at all, the action is absolutely barebones that it can barely stand without crumbling to the floor, and it is boring for most of the game. It also doesn't help that puzzles seem to take centre-stage over everything else. Enemies are simply obstacles rather than individual challenges. There is often just one way to deal with any challenge, leaving little to the imagination of the player. The story is a mess, going from one note to another with poor transition often being the case. Oh and, I haven't touched upon the HORRID controls yet. Let's just say that, like many survival horror titles of the day, you are burdened with tank controls in this game. However, imagine a tank with leaking motor oil and broken treads, with a top speed of five miles an hour. And this tank takes FOREVER to turn and reach any modicum of speed. And then there's the fact that you have to press enter, once you activate "aimed" mode, to fire. What the fuck? Yeah, I thought that, too.
Characters, while they are free from absurdly retarded dialogue (think "Resident Evil" for the Playstation), don't come off as convincing because they don't exhibit the mood & urgency that you think their situations would rouse from them. Then the game appears to be flat-out rushed because there's little variety to the engaging elements, there's no final boss fight (even though you'll witness a brief sequence hinting otherwise, it means nothing), and the ending is both confusing and anti-climactic. All of that hard work, and what do you get? You get pretty much jack shit.
However, it's the little things that keep it from being an abysmal, less than average game. It has its moments: the foreboding atmosphere (which, if improved as I described earlier, would have been utterly fantastic), the genuine scares you'll get that aren't typical jump-scares, a basis for a chilling enemy, and neat concepts such as the exploration of Mars & the possibility of life beneath its cosmic-ray battered surface. The negatives kind of outweigh the positives, though. It deserves a retry, though.
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Two and a half TriMorphs out of Five
The Rundown:
Positives
+ A chilling, interesting storyline, albeit requiring a bit more fleshing out
+ The backgrounds you traverse through are fitting, portraying a tale of chaos & terror
+ The audio is superb, only hampered by audio glitches (sounds sometimes cut out) and generally low quality bitrate.
+ Decent characters that don't succumb to complete idiocy, typical to the genre
Negatives
- It's ugly, seriously. Character models would fit right in with a Playstation launch title. No lighting effects other than specially designed "lights." Disappointing enemy designs.
- Tank-like controls that tank-like controls laugh and/or scoff at.
- The bugs are aplenty
- Rushed, especially evident toward the end
- Sadistic puzzles that are often nigh-impossible to decipher or require nothing but trial-and-error
- Limited save system, which can be punishing to less inquisitive players.
- Barebones enemy roster that is disappointing, feels unexplored
- There's a dissonance of mood between the characters and the game's storyline/atmosphere as a whole. Everyone is either understated or nonchalant about being in a Martian base haunted by ancient ghosts, invincible zombies gnawing on their necks, huge masses of former humans shambling on them in places, mind-numbing psychic phenomena, and a lonely, oppressive atmosphere. What is wrong with these people and why were they told to be so detached emotionally & mentally?
- Boring overall. It never really goes to great lengths to engage the player, and just when you think it's going somewhere, it settles right back where it's been for almost the entire time.
- Hasty, rushed, lame ending.
