GAME CLEAR No. 178 -- Caverns of Mars: Recharged

Caverns of Mars: Recharged (2023, Multiplatform)

Developer: SneakyBox
Publisher: Atari
Clear Version: PS5
Clear Platform: PS5
Clear Date: 6/25/24

---

Why should I care?
Caverns of Mars: Recharged is utterly inessential, but there’s some fun to be had in this well-deserved homage to a lesser-known Atari classic.

---

Pew pew

Atari’s Recharged series is one I have probably given more chances than it deserves. Each of these budget sequels to old Atari franchises is certainly okay, but they are all ultimately fairly forgettable.

This one at least came as a bit of a surprise, though. Most of the games Atari has chosen to revive have been 2600 or arcade classics like Yars’ Revenge, Breakout, or Centipede, which have pretty significant name recognition. Caverns of Mars, meanwhile, was a game released exclusively for the Atari 800 home computer, making it a bit of a deeper cut.

The original game’s path to existence was kind of neat, too. It was submitted by college student Greg Christensen to the Atari Program Exchange, which was a mail-order service for software compatible with Atari’s 8-bit home computers. Aspiring programmers were encouraged to submit software for evaluation by Atari. If the company liked it enough, they’d distribute it through the service, crediting the developer and paying them royalties. Pretty cool!

The original game is included in the lovely Atari 50 compilation, and I’ve dabbled with it a bit. It’s a fun little shooter in which you descend into a Martian cave blasting baddies and snagging fuel pickups. Reach the bottom, and you rig a reactor to explode and have to haul ass outta there.

SneakyBox’s take on the idea was to take advantage of procedural generation and random upgrades and turn it into a little roguelite, that ever popular and comparatively inexpensive genre. It makes it sound quite a bit like the great Downwell on paper, but of course falling down a hole and shooting stuff is straight from the source material. I think it’s a natural convergence, not a plagiaristic one.

So that’s basically the deal. You pilot a little ship down a cavern of Mars and shoot at enemy robots and defense systems (and blast through walls if you need to) until you reach the end of a section, at which point you’re prompted to pick an upgrade from a random set. Do that about a dozen times without dying, and you’ll reach the reactor and blow it up. Run’s over; did you beat your high score?

The shooting feels good, and the kickback slows your otherwise perpetual fall, making shooting a critical movement option. There’s a nice handful of enemy types to deal with, and the challenge level is tuned pretty well. It’s fun for the first several tries!

The trouble is they just didn’t throw enough ideas in the pot! I imagine this was likely for budgetary and deadline reasons, but the number of powerups seems to barely exceed the number of stages, and the level “chunks” that form the meat of the procedurally-generated stages seem to be a bit too few. This unfortunately is just sort of incompatible with the roguelite experience, in which the number of achievable states should vastly outnumber what can be seen or achieved in a single run.

It’s a shame because really all this game needs is more meat on its bones. The fundamentals are here and the gameplay is solid enough, but it just doesn’t have much staying power and feels more like a proof of concept.

Although I’ve purchased (I think) three of these Recharged titles now, I think I may be done with them. They all suffer from the same issue of being just a bit undercooked. I have no idea what kind of sales numbers they do, but if they’ve not done well, I hope Atari doesn’t learn the wrong lesson. There are some sound concepts here, but they need just a bit more time and care to really shine.