Here's our first look at Per Aspera, a base-building game about terraforming Mars

In Per Aspera, you'll take on the role of an artificial consciousness—not an artificial intelligence, but a human mind that has been uploaded into a machine. While your consciousness orbits Mars, you'll gather resources, build a base and expand it, and attempt to terraform the entire planet, all starting with nothing more than a single drone. Have a look at the trailer above, shown for the very first time on The PC Gaming Show.

Naturally you won't have a single drone for long, and eventually, along with your robotic helpers, you'll begin to host human colonists in your expanding base as well. You'll research new technology, build new structures, and grow your base until it stretches across the entire planet. Per Aspera will have a campaign mode centered around the goal of terraforming the hostile, barren surface of Mars into a lush green planet with blue oceans, and there will also a sandbox mode where you'll be able to play freely. Full mod support is planned through the Steam Workshop.

Per Aspera is being developed by Tlön Industries and is being published by Raw Fury, with a planned release date in 2020. In the meantime, you can find it here on Steam.

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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.