Tharsis Game Review

Tharsis is a turn-based game by Choice Provisions. The game is about a spaceship on it's way to the Tharsis region of Mars to investigate a mysterious signal. Of course, everything goes horribly pear-shaped in no time flat and it's up to you to guide the crippled ship and its hapless crew to Mars, hopefully before the cannibalism and insanity set in.

The game works kind of like a board game. You have a ship divided into different modules. Each module has a special ability like provide food units, heal the crew etc. You're limited to a crew of four but you can choose from a collection of characters, each with their own abilities. Every turn, a new problem comes up such as a module needing repairs or else it damages the ship or damages the crew in the next turn. If the ship takes too much damage, everyone dies. The player must deploy the crew to perform repairs and other actions that may prove helpful such as harvesting food or healing up a wounded character. The challenge of the game lies in crisis management; balancing urgent priority actions with long-term beneficial actions... also, unbelievably cruel RNG.

Everything is fine. I mean, we're only going to explode next turn.

This game has been criticized for being overly reliant on random numbers. It's an understandable sentiment. See, majority of the actions in this game require a dice roll and I mean a literal dice roll. You roll a die and use the value to perform specific actions. For example, if you want to heal a crew member in the med bay, you need to roll a 5 or higher and then spend the winning die on the med bay slot. If you want to repair a module, you need to accumulate, say, 18 points so you need to roll die and spend the values you get cumulatively. Some modules require you to spend several die of equal value to each other. For example, to repair the ship in the engine room, you need at least two die of the same value. The value is not important as long as both die are the same. 

What makes it more challenging is that some modules make certain die rolls dangerous. For example, 3 can be assigned the "void" penalty which means any die that gets a 3 will disappear and cannot be spent on anything. Sometimes, die with a value of say, 6, can be given the "injury" penalty which means every 6 a crew member gets will drain his health by a point. A die value that leads to "stasis" cannot be re-rolled but can only be spent. The only way to counter status effects is to get "assist" points which block their effects per assist point you have on hand. Of course, the only way to get assists is to roll 5 or higher in the assist point module.
 

Bad rolls = bad end

Personally, I don't mind the random nature of the game. I play a lot of board games so there is that. But I can see how the reliance of die rolls can frustrate players who aren't used to this sort of thing. In other games that have a lot of RNG, like XCOM or Darkest Dungeon, the player at least feels some measure of control like outfitting his troops with the right items or bringing extra torches to reduce the edge of random factors. In Tharsis, it always seems to come down to a roll of the dice. Perhaps that's the greatest flaw of Tharsis: it doesn't hide its randomness mechanics well. It's a matter of perspective. A die roll feels so naked. The player always feels like it all came down to something beyond his control. Sometimes the game is just too random and doesn't properly reward good choices made by the player and instead just keeps heaping on the pain and misery relentlessly and remorselessly. Sometimes it doesn't! Who knows?

That doesn't mean to say there's no strategy involved in this game. There's a lot of thinking to it although it's obscured by the randomness of its core mechanic of dice rolling. Different characters have different abilities you can use to mitigate troublesome effects but you need to figure out who goes first and when. The amount of die a crew member can roll decreases per turn so you occasionally need to gather food to replenish it whether from the hydroponics lab or some other less savory places. At least the corpses of your dead crew mates are good for something, eh? You can also spend dice on the research tab for useful abilities, some of which are quite powerful.

 In between every round, the player is given choices too. Some crew members will prioritize ship repairs while others may prefer healing up. The choices are mutually exclusive and choosing one or not choosing the other can have negative consequences. How demented the player's choices are depends on the stress level of the crew. The more stressed they are, the less rational their proposals will be. 

Abuse their abilities if you want to live.

The sound effects and music are just OK. It could have used a nice catchy soundtrack like FTL but it's no big deal.

All in all, I found it fun but only because I'm already so used to roguelike games and games with a lot of random elements in it. If you like that sort of thing, this deserves a look. If you're the type of gamer that doesn't have the patience for it and hates random numbers and starting over and over again, this isn't for you.

That's totally understandable.