Jupiter & Mars Review
by Amr (@siegarettes)
- Jupiter & Mars
- Developer: Tigertron
- Publisher: Tigertron
- PS4, PSVR
Jupiter & Mars reads like a cautionary tale, not only about the environmental damage the story concerns itself with, but about the considerations we need to give when telling stories within games. Jupiter & Mars often talks over itself. In blunt terms, it’s too much of a videogame for its own good. Its clumsy use of game mechanics and tropes distracts from its environments and iconography, dulling the tools for visual storytelling it comes prepared with.
Jupiter & Mars has a strong central premise. The story of two dolphins making their way through the ruins of humanity, rescuing sealife from the damage inflicted upon the sea. Seeing images of our everyday lives submerged underwater comes preloaded with pathos, and provides a refreshing change from our usual modern apocalypses, which often oscillate between arid deserts and overgrowth.
Jupiter & Mars reaches its visual peak here. Developer Tigertron’s staff includes James Mielke, who previously co-produced Lumines Electronic Symphony and Child of Eden, and the influence of his time with Q-Entertainment shows in the neon linework and electronic rhythm powering Jupiter & Mars.
Environments are rendered in stark darkness and simplified geometry, which helps it work within the technical limits of Sony’s VR platform, but comes alive with each pulse of Jupiter’s echolocation. Echolocation allows Jupiter & Mars to communicate the sometimes suffocating darkness of the sea, but make it navigable and beautiful. Sealife gives off its own energetic glow, which contrasts strongly with both the darkness and the muted, cooler colors of the inorganic parts of the environments. This creates a natural uplifting mood in lush spaces, growing more melancholy as the detritus of humanity encroaches.
Echolocation works to highlight that creeping damage, boldening the contours of the ruins and detritus, accentuating the way they intrude onto the natural environment. Upon reaching the game’s Plastic Beach biome I hit it with a pulse, revealing the hundreds of cans, bottles and pieces of debris floating in the darkness, like an ecological minefield.
Sadly, the game’s most powerful visual tools become blunted with the careless inclusion of everyday videogame tropes.
With the introduction of collectibles, echolocation quickly begins to feel like a glorified detective vision. The things it does for its spaces become lost in the search for glowing objects to smash into, and meaningless trinkets that not only fail to contextualize the world, but come in threes that differ by color.
Likewise, many objectives amount to “find a certain number of animals”, complete with a counter marking how many are left in the area. It immediately changes the space from something to observe and take in, to a place to run through for objects that gate your progress.
Ability gating makes an appearance, with small areas that can’t be accessed until the ability to swim further or deeper is found, but most of the areas are straightforward enough that this doesn’t meaningfully change the space, and seems more like a way to give players a reason to return to old areas. One area gives a glimpse into what a more integrated approach might look like, with exploration of the depths coming moments after a dramatic downturn in the story, mirroring Jupiter’s emotional state. It’s basic narrative design, but it draws attention to the way this gating awkwardly breaks up areas elsewhere.
Alongside the dry snippets of dialogue describing situations that are already clear on screen, there’s a sense that Jupiter & Mars didn’t trust itself to succeed on the merits of its visual storytelling, and felt the need to add more “gameplay” to keep players engaged.
Strangely enough, it’s the inclusion of basic stealth that works most successfully. Safe points are clearly marked via echolocation, but it forces you to scope out the environment and time your movement to the rhythms of the dangerous pulses sent out by hostile machines. The pulses feel appropriate to the electronic soundtrack and the sound design and hostility helps communicate the way humanity’s artificial growth has intruded on the environment.
More story beats like this would have helped the game play to its own strengths but these moments are inconsistent highlights in a story whose running time too often takes detours into scouring the sea for trinkets. Ironically it’s that approach, which turns the sea into a space to scour for valuable items, provides a parallel to the same consumptive attitudes Jupiter & Mars warns us against.
It’s a bit too late to stop Jupiter & Mars from being buried under its mountain of stuff, but Tigertron seems to be holding out hope that we can prevent our world from falling to the same fate.