39 Days to Mars (PC)

There’s a certain level of charming whimsy to the early ideas people had for space travel before it seemed like a legitimate possibility. Whether it was something outlandish like riding a whirlwind to the moon or getting shot out of a giant space gun to reach the stars, the fantasy of early space travel has been unfortunately lost now that we know the realities of it. However, 39 Days to Mars manages to recapture it a little bit with its tale of two British gentlemen taking off for the red planet in a ship where they have their clothes hanging out in space to dry on a clothesline, an old fashioned stove for brewing tea, and a velocipede they’ll ride out into the stars to mine asteroids to power their vessel’s coal engines.

This absurd yet posh adventure begins in a way befitting those two adjectives as well, Albert and Baxter sitting together one day and jut having the idea strike them that they should go to Mars. From there, we cut ahead to them having a cobbled together ship ready to go, the exact layout of it changing between playthroughs but it always consisting of rooms that look like they were yanked out of a regular house save for the occasional sci-fi doodad that matches the game’s Victorian aesthetic, the game even presented mostly in sepia with white and black to designate important objects or characters. Despite being called 39 Days to Mars though, you won’t actually have to live through the entire travel period, the game instead consisting first of preparation for lift off and then skipping a few days at a time until something goes wrong on the ship that needs fixing. Repairs and problem solving are the bulk of the expected play, but you won’t be alone on your adventure, the player encouraged to have another player join them so they can work together to solve puzzles while also offering a single-player option where a cat replaces one of the gentlemen to help out. The odd thing with single player though is that it doesn’t really change the controls too much. All tasks will still require two hands working on it, it just goes from a player contributing a hand each to the lone player using both of theirs to complete their work.

The jobs in 39 Days to Mars might involve deceptively simple concepts like trimming the on-ship garden or more space-focused tasks like trying to catch space jellyfish for food and fighting off space squids who are inking up your vessel, but all of them are made more of a challenge by the need to cooperate with your partner. Or at least, that’s the idea, as quite a few of the games can be completed without the other person contributing at all if you so wish. Things like creating a proper pipe path for the ship’s oil or connecting wires to the proper ports don’t really require two players at all, the task certainly made easier by potentially having many hands working to solve it, but even when there is something like a timer to try and add pressure to the affair, it can be beaten with relative ease alone. These puzzles are still decently designed despite this though, they just don’t really emphasize the teamwork the game seems to be hinging on all that much, which is a shame because the ones that do require teamwork often achieve it through unexciting means.

For the puzzles and repair jobs that do a decent job of nailing cooperative play, they usually involve one player coordinating control while the other performs an action. For example, the coal mining involves one player driving the velocipede in space while the other uses a claw to break rocks, and this can make for a brief bit of fun as you have to collect coal while managing your oxygen meter. Failure is possible for these minigames, and your route to Mars can take unexpected turns if you fail certain ones, but the ones that are a bit clunkier in design don’t often have that level of pressure. The main task formula that crops up in ones that make full use of co-op is the odd idea of players having to work together to rotate objects. Whether it be map pieces, pieces of paper for telegrams, the pages of a torn up library book, or the garden shears, play quite often comes down to one player grabbing the object and the other then grabbing it to spin it around to how it should be positioned. While chasing after the oddly aquatic life of space can be enjoyable cooperative play, puzzle-solving by way of just awkwardly spinning things around gets old after the first time it’s done, just like the memorization puzzles that thankfully are much more rare. When you need to send out a telegram or prune the garden, you’ll need to go to the library and find out the proper methods to do so. These are randomized every playthrough just like the shape of your ship and the order you need to perform tasks on your trip to Mars, so you can’t just memorize them completely. Each game requires this process, and while conceivably the idea behind these is the players need to both memorize part of the important details, forgetting one can lead to trudging through your large ship again, as you can’t take the pertinent pages out of the library to the area where you’ll be doing the actual work.

The weaker minigames do drag down the experience of 39 Days to Mars, but the better cooperative games almost salvage it by either being sound challenges that require coordination with your companion or just working well as single-player obstacles. The rotation and memorization puzzles are less common than taking on aliens or repairing machines, and the charm of the game almost helped it get over the hump as well. The thing is, the upper crust British theming leads to something that only drags down the experience, and that is Baxter and Albert constantly needing to have tea or scones before most of the minigames. When something goes wrong on the ship, you first investigate it, only to learn one of your men has a hankering for one of these staples of the English diet, after which you now traverse your ship to find where you can prepare them. Making scones and making tea are two separate minigames with pretty similar structures, that being you are given the order of the peckish astronaut that you must fulfill before continuing on with the important task. The pertinent ingredient will be laid out before you, but you and your partner must work together to pick them up, the items swinging around madly if you try to do it with just one hand. Much like the rotation games, the focus here is on grabbing the item together to rotate and move it, but neither of these are too bad in a vacuum. Needing to put the right ingredients on a scone is an enjoyable enough task the first time due to how unusually messy it will be with the odd control system, and while making tea does involve waiting on it to cool down to the proper temperature, it too has the same ingredient silliness to enjoy on a single visit. The problem is, over your 39 day trip, you will make many scones and cups of tea, the minigame not changing much save for the substance of the order between plays and it quickly loses its charm because of this. Any anticipation of an upcoming minigame is weakened when the players know first they’ll have to revisit the same dull design the tea and scones games recycle again and again.

While 39 Days to Mars has many paths to its ending and a single player and multiplayer version to see the differences between, the journey unfortunately feels far too repetitive despite the game’s efforts to shift things around. The tasks on each journey will be the same but in a different order, and the constant interruption of making food and drink makes it hard to look forward to some of the better ones. The fact certain solutions change across playthroughs makes it less about finding new solutions and more about just making sure you can’t just easily skip past some work on a second visit. The changing ship structure also makes running about a little less convenient, with both players needing to be present in the room to start working at something. It’s possible to imagine players pushing through the normal game on the strength of their friendship patching over some of the weaker puzzles, but a second trip to Mars, even when it diverges from the previous path, still will be too much of a retread to be worth their time.

THE VERDICT: There are plenty of aesthetic details to like about 39 Days to Mars. Its cartoonish depiction of Victorian-era British gentlemen and a charmingly unrealistic tale of space travel makes for a fine framework to a game to enjoy with a friend, but the tasks you must complete together aren’t always up to snuff. There are some decent ones focused on aliens and machines to be sure, but then there are some that barely require your partner and others that require you both to work together on less than thrilling tasks like awkwardly rotating paper together. The constant breaks to make tea and scones are what push this game away from simple co-op fun though, as they crop up so often that it weakens the game’s flow with repetition and makes it easy to resent the old-timey aesthetic that had otherwise mostly enhanced the game.

And so, I give 39 Days to Mars for PC…

A BAD rating. Even when working with a perfectly cooperative partner or just being good with both of your hands, some of the puzzles in 39 Days to Mars just don’t have much going for them. There’s a little room for some funny failure in certain games, but for the most part the tasks are often fairly simple when they’re good but bothersome when they’re relying on weaker gameplay styles. Awkwardness is the name of the game in a lot of the tasks that require good co-op to complete, and these tasks use awkwardness to make up for their minimal level of challenge. Perhaps the biggest reason tea and scones grow so stale on repeat visits is it is not very stimulating mentally. You have the list of what you need to do, the execution just involves dragging around a jar of jam awkwardly or trying to use a knife together with another person to put butter on the scone. Ultimately, the more well thought out puzzles are often ones that could be solved by a single player, the middle of the road ones are decent but too simple, and then the weakest ones rely on cooperation that is more obtuse than it is interesting.

2 friends in good humor can make most any cooperative journey an enjoyable ride, and there’s plenty to work with in 39 Days to Mars. The parody of old-fashioned ideas of space travel and the British gentlemen heading it do make the game rather fun when it comes to the trappings of the experience, but the tasks performed just aren’t very strong. The concept is a fun one, but the minigames are padded with repetitive designs, the better ones not engaging enough to serve as a suitable counterbalance that could right this charming yet flawed ship.