Mars Power Industries Deluxe

I have a soft spot for games born at a game jam that somehow grew into something fully realised, and Mars Power Industries Deluxe is exactly that story. Four friends from Lublin, Poland spent their weekends over six months turning a 48-hour prototype into a zen puzzle game with genuine atmosphere, and the care shows in every grid square. What you get is a turn-based, order-of-operations puzzler where you play as a colony electrician-slash-plumber tasked with routing power and water to Martian outposts. Each level is a small grid, and you place directional power towers in the sequence they are handed to you on a conveyor belt, choosing optimal tile positions to chain resources from generators to buildings. Every puzzle resolves in five moves or fewer. That constraint sounds limiting; in practice it makes each placement feel deliberate and satisfying. The core mechanic scales cleverly without ever feeling bloated. Early levels are almost meditative, matching a power source to a handful of homes. Then the game quietly introduces conductors that extend reach further than your towers alone, obstacles that shift between moves so timing becomes a factor, multi-resource routing where power and water must not cross, and buildings that need supplying twice. The Deluxe edition on PC adds a frozen biome with fresh mechanics that came as a free post-launch update, bringing the total to 133 handcrafted puzzles. Hidden levels exist for the curious, and some of the final content is locked behind finding them, which gives completionists a secondary goal without gating the main story. About that story: it is wordless, told through visual shifts in the level design and brief inter-level cutscenes. Around the halfway point, colony structures start warping into alien geometry and wormholes open up. The developers cite both Kubrick and Dune as reference points, and you can feel both. The narrative thread is abstract enough that some players will find it too thin, but for me the restraint is the point. The synth soundtrack does the heavy lifting emotionally, drifting from sparse, lonely ambience into something quietly ominous as the mystery deepens. It is the kind of score that makes a small pixel-art grid feel genuinely vast. The one honest criticism is difficulty consistency: some levels produce noticeable spikes that feel out of sequence, and the game offers no in-game hints when you are stuck, so a truly rough puzzle can stall the otherwise smooth pacing. This is not a game that demands hours-long sessions. At four to five hours for a typical run, it is designed to sit alongside your evening, not replace it. The lack of pressure mechanics, no timers, no score counters, and unlimited undos makes it genuinely approachable for anyone who finds puzzle games punishing. If you want brain-bending rule-inversion in the vein of Baba Is You, look elsewhere. If you want something handcrafted, atmospheric, and quietly strange that knows exactly when to end, this is the rare small game that delivers on every intention behind it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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