Tharsis is a little bit brutal, in kind of the best way. Remember when FTL first came out, how the big talking point was how difficult it was to make it to the end at all, and how beating the final boss was exponentially more difficult? “I got to the second phase and managed to beat it, and thought that was it, yeah? But it was not it and then I didn’t win. But I ALMOST won.”
Tharsis, the space-sim-resource-management-dice-rolling-Dark Souls experience, is that statement, but on steroids. And not like the steroids you get prescribed to deal with a particularly bad round of pneumonia, but the proper HGH type of steroids athletes use to hit like a thousand home runs (or whatever athletes do).
In Tharsis, you have four crew members on a ship en route to Mars. You are ten weeks away from Mars when something goes wrong and your ship gets damaged, which leads to needing to use your four crew members to carry out repairs. You can use each crew member once a turn, and each crew member rolls dice to determine how much health can be repaired. In addition to simply rolling dice, any damaged section can have dice-specific bad things to watch out for — rolling the same number as a Void status or an Injury status means the dice is lost, or the crew member gets hurt.
At the end of a turn, once all four crew have been used and hopefully all the different damaged ship modules are evaluated, time progresses and more sections become damaged, often in worse and more plentiful ways. To make things that much more difficult, each time you use a crew member they lose one of their dice pool, which can only be replenished by feeding them.
Example: Maybe you got really good rolls, and it took two crew members to repair the only two damaged sections of the ship. You then have only two crew members to use to keep things productive. Do you use them both to try and harvest some food? Do you split them up and try and harvest food and repair the ship’s hull? Oh, but maybe you should use one to try and recover the crew’s health, because if the guy with one health left rolls an Injury, he dies?
Now it’s in between turns and it’s time to feed your crew. You’ve got four members and only one food cube. Who gets the food? Who goes without? Maybe you opt to give it to the Captain to refill his dice completely. Then, if a module takes a serious amount of damage to repair, he can hopefully fix it himself. However, you end up with three leftover kinda useless crew members. And the Doctor? She only has a single dice to roll.
Well then, maybe it’s time to say goodbye to the Doctor. Maybe it’s time to kill her, intentionally, and then feed her meat to the other three. They’ll have less total health, but now they all have full dice for the next turn. That means you can probably repair everything again next turn and still have some human meat left over.
Alright. Just seven more turns until Mars.
These are the tough choices that seem inevitable, until you learn about research points. The secret to success. When you literally roll the dice, instead of allotting dice to repairs or module abilities or crew abilities, you can metaphorically roll the dice by slotting those dice into research. There’s a spot for each side of the dice, and you’re given a random selection of three abilities, ranging from giving you a food cube to repairing an entire module’s damage, regardless of how high the damage is. You will be tempted to only feed low, useless dice into your research at first. This will lead you to failure. The higher cost abilities seem to often be the deciding factor in making it to the final turn and surviving, and even knowing this you’re probably still going to die a whole bunch. One of the abilities you can get requires having a full set of dice, one through six, and spending all six lets you repair an entire module regardless of damage. Sometimes this can save a run, and sometimes it’s barely enough to get you to the next turn.
In my time with Tharsis, I’ve played four and a half hours, or thereabouts. I’ve attempted to beat it on Normal all of thirty-nine total times, and of those thirty-nine attempts I’ve succeeded exactly once. Across all of those attempts I’ve only successfully harvested actual food thirty-eight times — less than one food stock per run, on average. On the flip side, I’ve fed human to my surviving crew members 132 times to keep them going. I’ve repaired over 5000 points of damage to my ship across all of those games, and accrued almost 350 research points.
Tharsis is a very, very cool little game, and a hell of a way to kick off gaming in 2016.
Tharsis was reviewed via Steam code provided by Choice Provisions, Inc.
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