Indie Game of the Week 460: Mercury Fallen

Any long-time readers of my weekly Indie musings are probably used to seeing the same old genres pop up over and over—the exploraction games, the 3D platformers, the RPGs, the point-and-clicks—so I will occasionally gingerly open the shack door to my wheelhouse, squint at the blinding daylight, and traverse outside of my comfort zone to see what's happening in the wider world of gaming, mostly as a service to myself so I don't stagnate those familiar thrills. A genre I've stayed way the heck away from due to their intimidation factor are those colony management sims that typically have you spinning multiple plates as you work towards both short-term goals—keeping everyone alive and fed and, if not happy, then at least not suicidally despondent (after all, why should they be in better mental shape than I?)—and longer ones, like building elaborate structures of significant value towards whatever goals you're hoping to achieve in this remote and hostile place. Nitrous Butterfly's Mercury Fallen is a sci-fi variant: the colony in this case is an extraterrestrial one, where your stasis pods went on the fritz mid-transit and woke you up long after the gradual decay of the temporary forward operating base that had been constructed there before your arrival. That means rebuilding the base—including vital rooms like the living quarters, a research lab, and a utility center for your power needs—by cannibalizing the old, crumbling infrastructure for parts and, once you've sufficiently bounced back, eventually constructing an elevator to the now-safe planet surface for further exploration (and exploitation) of this world and its resources.

Mercury Fallen is a fairly barebones one of these, yet I find that suits my purposes just fine. With all the anecdotes people share of their time with multitasking-intensive games like Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld you could be forgiven for wanting to take the plunge yourself, despite the complexity and wall of information you'll have to process to reach any measure of success. That's why I've long felt that there's a market for an accessible, entry-level "one of those" that can get folks' feet firmly planted on that nerve-wracking ground floor and whet their appetites for something more in-depth further down the road. Mercury Fallen doesn't have you worrying about alien marauders beating down your automatic sliding doors and destroying what little progress you made, or really too much in the way of monumental setbacks beyond the occasional cave-in (you start underground, if that stuff about the surface elevator didn't make it clear) and some food shortages before you get your farming situation underway. This alien planet was kind enough to toss some potatoes (they came from space this whole time? Well, I'll be) and edible fungi in your direction, so solving your hunger problem is a relatively simple one early on. Keeping everyone happy and procuring the vast amount of resources you need to build the machines and tech to keep you going is another matter. A few more robot assistants wouldn't hurt either.

Early days, here. Just planning stuff out mostly - that's what the transparent blue parts mean. At least I figured out that you need to put down farmland to make food come out of the ground. Science sure is amazing.

As is often the case with games like this, you get attached to your crew of hapless and neurotic workers pretty quickly. The game has a sort of class system where expertise is often dictated by the three stats of each colonist (smarts, athleticism, and brawn) and whatever that character's primary class might be, which is to say what they were trained for and entered the mission to provide. Botanists grow food and cultivate wildlife, scientists research new technology, builders construct and demolish anything manmade (or indeed mandestroyed), miners break down walls into raw materials, and so on. Some jobs, like doctors, surveyors, or engineers won't become relevant until you reach a certain point in the progression: the doctor needs a medlab built before they can perform their tasks, and likewise any surveying will have to wait until you get that surface elevator active. Each randomized colonist also has a set of quirks, including a negative "stress response" that procs whenever that particular gauge maxes out due to your mismanagement of their well-being. My chief engineer vomits everywhere, both of my botanists and the back-up engineer enjoy smashing mechanical devices with a stick to vent steam like they'd just been informed of "PC Load Letter" for the umpteenth time, while my scientist just curls up in the fetal position somewhere and rocks himself back and forth. The latter is funny enough, in a bleak gallows humor sort of way, but the others can create some serious problems if I don't pay attention to what they're doing. It also incentivizes me further to give them a nice place to hang out between tasks, a table where they can eat, and a comfy bed to sleep on to reduce the odds of their stress responses occurring. Or I could just have my spider-robot continue to mop up any anxiety-induced emesis while fixing everything that keeps getting mysteriously broken, but I suspect keeping colonists at max stress throughout isn't going to be conducive to any long-term success.

The appeal of games like this, I'd soon discover, is how often it engages the puzzle-solving node of your brain. You learn so much by poking around the UI a bit, fixing any bad habits that start to develop, and self-reasoning through every problem that presents itself to figure out a solution that, if perhaps not the ideal or intended one, is one you nonetheless feel a certain fond ownership over regardless. Why isn't anything being built? Just mouse over the construct with the highest build priority; it's clear they don't have the resources. Where can I get those resources? Looks like I'll have to build a refiner that can turn my huge pile of ore into the right components. Why aren't they building the refiner? Because I've assigned everyone jobs that they prioritize over building shit and I should probably change that. And so it goes. Mercury Fallen is very generous about correcting for mistakes and while I can see a few areas where I could potentially run into a dead end scenario—there's only so much of each ore to find and dig out, even on a medium-sized map—that you can recycle so much suggests it'd be hard to really screw yourself over. It does give you a few long-term missions to pursue but no specifics on how they can be accomplished, though the in-depth glossary will probably give you some ideas if none are forthcoming from clicking around the UI for a while. Playing a game like this is much like learning something like Excel: not exactly something you need a software engineering degree to decipher, though the learning curve is robust enough that you're constantly discovering new information every hour.

Space elevator will be on the left in the near future, just need to finish building it. And a map table. And resource containers for anything I bring back or ship to the surface. And a generator to power it all. So, yeah. "Near future."

Sometimes the game's lack of super granular control (though it's certainly in-depth in many other ways) can lead to some irritating issues I wish I had the means to correct for. Cases like how people carry goods from remote areas in very small quantities when they have a much higher capacity, or how they'll be in the middle of their tertiary job (they can have up to three) when they'll suddenly get distracted by a new task suited for their primary or secondary job and just abandon whatever it is they were doing. They'll harvest some blue mushrooms somewhere, leave the goods in a container on the ground, and then I'll see a bunch of them march halfway across the map to eat them because they provide a little more sustenance than the potatoes I'm growing on my farm. Eccentric CPU behaviors you have to work around have long since been a beloved aspect of this genre, I'm well aware, but sometimes I wish I knew if a lack of efficiency was a failing on my part or due to some wonky AI that I've little control over. It's also both visually and content-wise a bit dry, as you might expect from a "hard sci-fi" game that styles itself after The Martian more than it does a Star War, but given the genre it occupies I don't think people are looking to this kind of game for a non-stop rollercoaster. I have to admit, I've grown to appreciate it the more I dig into how everything works, and the imminent advent of getting to the surface and setting up bases to accelerate my understanding of this world is a tantalizing prospect. There's also that mild worry that I've adapted to this game's pace as readily as I have due to my age, but hey. What is there in the news that isn't a grim reminder of our fragile mortality these days? So glad we're out of winter now and my meta commentary can become more cheerful again.

(Unfortunately, shortly after writing this review I bumped into a game-breaking bug that not only corrupted my last manual save but all three of the auto-save slots. After losing hours of progress to a bug that should not exist (or be immediately patched out, top priority) I cannot in good conscience recommend the game as it is now. No clue how frequently they patch this but give it a wide berth for a few more months, or years.)

Rating: X out of 5. (Previously 4 out of 5.)

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