IFComp08 Review: A Martian Odyssey
Well, that was thoughtful of the developer to ship an entire spacesynth album with the game. This alone kicked the filesize up so far that this game alone was 5/6 of the comp by volume. That's pretty impressive for a game whose walkthrough is all of 50 moves, most of which involve going south repeatedly in the first part, then going north repeatedly in the second part.
As you might guess from this, the plot is very much a "there and back again" sort of experience, but the interaction is mostly limited to walking past the various wonders of Mars. Even EXAMINE doesn't get us too far, and despite being the first man on Mars our protagonist finds a shocking amount of this experience boring and dull. The narrator even tells us this explicitly. As far of sense of wonder goes, this is a pretty strong buzzkill.
Some of the specific imagery - especially the pyramid builders - tickled some old memories of some story I'd read as a kid. I found in the credits a note that this was indeed based on an old short story, but I don't remember enough of that story to figure out whether or not it was intended as an adaptation or as a more freewheeling pastiche. Either way, though, it's both too linear to engage the explorer's instinct and too thinly implemented to reward working through a linear plot.
The soundtrack was nice, though.