39 Days to Mars

My first instinct with a one-person studio's debut is to root for it before I've even loaded it up, and 39 Days to Mars rewarded that instinct in ways I didn't expect. It's a local co-op puzzle-adventure set aboard the HMS Fearful, a Victorian steam-powered ship crewed by Sir Albert Wickes and The Right Honourable Clarence Baxter, two magnificently unqualified gentlemen piloting humanity's most impractical spacecraft toward Mars. The hand-drawn art has an inked blueprint quality to it, monochromatic and fine-lined, and it fits the steampunk absurdity so naturally that it feels like the only aesthetic that would work. The piano score, composed by Chris Zabriskie, carries the whole thing with a warmth that makes two hours feel like a long quiet evening rather than a short play session. The puzzle design is the creative heart of the game, and it's genuinely clever. Every challenge splits control between two actors: one player manages the left-right motion of a fishing hook while the other handles the vertical, together trying to thread it through a contraption to retrieve a key. Or both players grab opposite ends of a paper map and have to rotate its pieces back into coherent form. Or someone pilots a penny-farthing bicycle through space while a mechanical arm scoops coal from passing asteroids. The puzzles never explain themselves upfront, which can produce a brief moment of confusion at the start, but the experimentation phase is part of the charm. Working out what you are even supposed to be doing becomes its own puzzle layer. Outside of puzzle sequences, movement between rooms on the ship is handled like a light point-and-click, keeping the pacing unhurried and the atmosphere intact. The co-op mode is where this game belongs. Playing solo is doable, you juggle both hands yourself using dual-stick controls and the ship's cat fills the second character slot, but the precision demanded by some later puzzles becomes genuinely fiddly when you're one person managing both halves. With two people on the same couch it transforms into something warmer and funnier, the kind of session where you end up narrating failed attempts at buttering a scone in a bad Victorian accent. The recurring tea-making mini-game is a small point of contention in the community, it involves randomised requirements (temperature, milk level, sugar) and physics-driven pouring, and it is charming the first time and slightly wearying by the third. It's the one design beat that tips from whimsy into routine. The honest caveat here is length. A co-op first run lands somewhere between ninety minutes and two hours. There's mild replayability, the ship layout shifts between runs and some puzzle variants change, but once you've solved a puzzle you carry that knowledge forever. Completionists chasing achievements will get more mileage out of multiple runs. Solo players who know the puzzles well might cruise through faster. Whether that runtime feels like precise, intentional game design or not enough game is genuinely a matter of taste, and I lean toward the former. A game that knows when to end and ends gracefully is rarer than it should be, and this one does.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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