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Mars colony is in trouble, and a team of three investigators is sent out from Earth to discover what went wrong. The last transmission from the colony warned that any "rescuers" would need to "stay separate—stay alive." This gives an in-game excuse for the characters to explore separately while the player controls them in turn as needed. The game starts with the characters crash-landing on the Red Planet, so they have no way out except to solve the mystery of the colony. Obeying the warning, which is the secondary mission objective, each character enters through a different airlock.
Once inside the base, the player directs the characters as they explore, hunt for clues, pick up needful items, repair things and all the while try to avoid getting killed. For some reason, the powers that be decided this rescue mission didn't need sidearms, so finding guns is a priority, although the characters can fight hand to hand. The game can be saved only when the characters are accessing the base computer from one of its terminals.
The mission and the game mechanics force the characters to stay apart, but they have to work together to solve the mystery. For example, right at the beginning each character is in a different airlock and has to go through a decontamination chamber. It turns out that two of the three doors are stuck. Only one of the team can get out and start exploring. The other two characters depend on the one who is free to set them loose. The characters stay in touch over the radio, and they pass items they've found back and forth using the base's system of vacuum tubes. Each character can carry only 18 items, but with the vacuum tubes effectively allowing them to pool their inventory, the characters actually have 54 slots for carrying things. And to solve the game, they'll need most of those slots.
Staying alive just isn't enough
There are two important things to keep in mind about Martian Gothic. The first is that it is a PlayStation game, so it will play on either the PlayStation or the PlayStation2. The second is that it costs $10. For the cost of renting most games, gamers can own MG. Having been created for the previous generation of boxes, the game is not as smooth or as pretty as the PS2 games, but that is only a drawback for players with a PS2.
The thing MG does best is atmosphere. The setup, the graphics and voice-acting all work together to give the feel of being a small, isolated group that finds itself in deadly danger. The logs and clues from the lost colony members make the characters' plight all the more fraught.
The backbone of the adventure is the puzzles, and they would be better if there weren't so many zombies floating about. Danger is a necessary part of a game like this, but it seems to be a contradiction that solving the game is almost entirely a matter of reasoning, but that staying alive is almost entirely a matter of reflexes. The zombies are the primary threat, and when they tear into a character, the graphics are properly horrific, but players get to see it too many times. The zombies can be kicked and shot, but neither is as effective as dodging and running. All three characters have to be kept alive; if even one dies, the game is over.
PlayStation2 owners who buy this game should make sure the store takes returns. We had problems saving games to the memory card on both of our test PS2s. MG may require a completely empty memory card, or it may have just been the particular copy of the game we had.
Horror games are best when they have a little humor to them, and Martian Gothic has more than a little. The atmosphere and the puzzles and the humor make it a good game to play, particularly at the price. It is just a shame that zombie surviving is so much a part of it.
— Eric
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