Surviving Mars

Surviving Mars is a familiar but well executed city-building sim right up until it's not. You find yourself in command of a colony on (yes, the clue's in the title) Mars, making exactly the sort of decisions you'd expect to make to survive on the dusty red planet. Extract resources, manage your people, build. Make the right decisions - ensure your solar farms are adequately spaced out to allow expansion; make clear-eyed analysis of the risk involved in sending a rocket ship out of the atmosphere - to keep your colony growing in this harsh environment. Then, when you think you have a handle on the processes involved in growing your settlement, watch and react as things get weird. Once you've met the requirements of survival, different Mysteries kick in. You might find yourself embroiled in a political thriller-style narrative as your relations with Earth get tricky; you might have a police procedural on your hands; you might have to deal with a pandemic spreading through your city; you might find yourself tackling something altogether stranger, like a series of seemingly alien cubes hovering outside the dome of your civilisation. Throw in some high concept research choices like cloning so that you can weed the males out of your colony and you've got something that is much stranger under the hood than its city management trappings suggest.