Mars! We’re bewitched by it. What it is like? Is there life? When can we go there? Will there be aliens?
Since most of us will probably never get to explore Mars in real life, a new survival videogame makes it possible to explore the planet virtually—while fighting to stay alive, naturally.
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The game, Lacuna Passage, will simulate the Mars experience with remarkable accuracy, using NASA-collected images of the planet and working with aerospace engineers to assure every detail is based on science.
The premise: Your name is Jessica Rainer and you were on the first human expedition to Mars, the Heracles mission, when everything went terribly wrong. The crash left you alone on the Red Planet, navigating a path to survival with just a scant few resources and your own cunning.
“An interplanetary trail of breadcrumbs is waiting for you,” game creator Tyler Owen writes on the project’s Kickstarter page. “You will need to uncover mission logs, recorded audio files, and other physical clues left behind at critical mission locations in order to uncover the story.”
Yeah, it’s not exactly action-packed. The game is geared more toward the went to space camp/owned a telescope/wanted to be an astronaut type than the typical gamer. In fact it’s quite cerebral. “For some people the role of an astronaut might be more than they bargained for. It’s very lonely,” Owen writes on Fund This Game. “Mars can feel expansive and claustrophobic at the same time.”
If you’re about to fall asleep just thinking about it, here’s the pretty cool part. The gamer traverses 25 square miles of vast, open terrain, composed of high-res images from NASA’s HiRISE camera, which is filming the planet from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter this moment.
The HiRISE is the biggest and most badass camera ever sent to another planet, and the photos and videos its sending back are stunning—even if there’s a notable lack of anything other than rock and dirt.
In the developer’s quest to replicate what we imagine to be the real thing, he’s making sure the capsules, vehicles, pressurized rovers, and other manmade objects the player may happen upon are based on designs proposed for actual potential Mars expeditions. I guess that means there won’t be Martians.
