Be an AI and terraform Mars next month in Per Aspera

Strategic, narrative driven city-builder Per Aspera finally has a release date: December 3rd. We first saw Per Aspera at the 2019 PC Gaming show, and at the time we thought that it was both pretty and promising. Now, we can confirm, that it is in fact both pretty and promising. The game stars voice actor Laila Berzins as artificial intelligence AMI and Troy Baker as Nathan Foster, the doctor who built AMI and sent it out to terraform Mars.

Per Aspera is a city building game, but it's set on a real, to-scale map of Mars based on satellite images. The player is AMI, an artificial intelligence put in overall control of the terraforming and colonization efforts on Mars after decades of failed colonization attempts. THe game has been advertised as heavily narrative from the start, and from the looks of the trailer's end sequence the big twist is going to be bigger than you might expect: Mars' skies darken as thousands of mysterious spaceships descend.

We'll have more details on Per Aspera in the run up to its release. The game has been on Steam for a bit, but there's a free demo if you'd like to try it in the window before release. Per Aspera is developed by Tlön Industries and published by Raw Fury. It's planned to release December 3rd on Steam.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.