The survival genre is getting another entry, and this time its from the developer of the Might and Magic: Heroes series and Tropico 6. Limbic Entertainment announced Memories of Mars today. This new adventure will have players taking on the role of a clone who must craft dwellings and scavenge for resources on a Mars that Earthlings have abandoned after failed attempts at colonization.
Limbic is developing Memories of Mars with the help of publisher 505 Games. Together, the two companies will launch the survival sim on Steam as part of that platform’s Early Access portal for unfinished games. This early version will go live this spring.
The studio showed off Memories of Mars for the first time at the PAX South fan event in Texas, and it has now rolled out the first trailer. In the clip, you can see players putting together shelters and roaming the surface with a weapon and taking on giant spider enemies and other threats.
But the biggest obstacle that players might face on the Red Planet is other humans. Memories of Mars is an online experience. This means you will likely have to compete with and attempt to cooperate with other people. This is common for this genre — especially when it comes to Early Access games on Steam. DayZ, Rust, and others have emphasized the idea of building a band of survivors together to maximize the efficiency of your resources and to increase the security of your characters.
Still, this is something of a departure for Limbic Entertainment. Might and Magic: Heroes and Tropico 6 are strategy games with lots of menus and units. Memories of Mars is a first-person game where you only control one player. That said, it’s likely that some of the management aspects and mechanics from a strategy game would apply to a survival situation.
The survival genre is in a weird place. It simultaneously feels played out and as if we never really got the definitive survival experience. This could leave room for a game like Memories of Mars to step in and win over entirely new audiences.
Of course, it’s not the only game going after the survival genre from a sci-fi angle. In fact, DayZ creator Dean Hall and his development studio RocketWerkz just launched the space-survival sim Stationeers into Early Access at the end last year.
I’m definitely getting the itch to jump into a new survival game, so we’ll see if Memories Mars, Stationeers, or an updated Rust can win me over in 2018.
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