Mars Underground Demo

Time loops are quite popular in science fiction stories, especially when characters are forced to re-live the same day over and over again. Probably the most famous example of this is the movie Groundhog Day, although there are many others that took the concept in one direction or the other. Granted, there are many ways one could spin the subject to obtain something new and intriguing.

Mars Underground is a peculiar top-down adventure game with role-playing elements and sandbox-style gameplay mechanics, in which your goal is to play through the same day over and over again trying to aim for different results. As with every other story of this type, it can be quite difficult to understand what’s going on at first, but things become much clearer once you stick with it for a few minutes.

As such, you play the role of a boy named Mars, who’s about to attend his first day at the new school. However, he seems to be suffering from some kind of psychological disorder, because he is unable to speak or respond, that is until he visits a psychiatrist and gets his medicine. After that, it turns out that the same first day of school is repeating itself ad infinitum, which means that it’s up to you to find a way out of the loop.

From the moment Mars wakes up in the morning you start making decisions that influence how the day ends. While at first many of the options are greyed out on account of Mars being unable to act on his own impulses, more and more of them become available later on. You can basically talk to anyone and interact with anything in the game world, which means that there’s a fair bit of exploration involved as well.

Dialog is important as well, and you can actually obtain very different results by choosing other answers. Whether you get expelled, have a normal day at school or anything in between, it’s always a rush to have fun in a world with no consequences. On the other hand, the world in question is nothing more than a handful of pixels, given the retro style of the game.

Mars Underground is very well made, even if the demo does not allow you to do all that much. However, it’s nice that the developers thought of almost everything, which means that there are many options at your disposal.