After Mars

» The Game

Not the Mars you know.
Not the RPG you expect.

After Mars is a narrative RPG set in Jazin — a small Martian town that has outlived more than one future. It is not a shiny colony of domes and heroic engineers. It is a lived-in place of shrinking safe zones, old institutions, stubborn local politics, and machinery that never stopped meaning too much.

You play as Knorbin Wel, a junior Commissioner sent back home from the capital to review three local cases. Officially, your role is modest: gather testimony, inspect claims, file reports. In practice, every document opens onto something larger.

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The game is built around documents, disputes, and admissibility. Tasks are case files. Evidence comes from conversations, records, samples, photographs, and things people would rather not sign. There is no combat. The drama lives in what can be proven, what can be filed, and what kind of truth is allowed to become official.

After Mars is inspired by literary fiction, political melancholy, and narrative games that trust the player to read, infer, and choose. It is quieter than most science fiction, stranger than most social realism, and built around one question: what remains after history — and who gets to write it down?

Genre

Narrative RPG

Choice-based, document-driven, no combat

Structure

Three main cases + side stories

Investigate, dispute, classify, report

Protagonist

Knorbin Wel

Junior Commissioner sent to review the town, not to save it

Setting

Jazin, Mars

A former revolutionary town living past its promise

Tone

Literary & melancholic

Cozy, bittersweet, and deeply human

Stage

Prototype in development

Narrative, setting, and core systems defined; production and writing underway

Platform

PC, SteamDeck

Will be specified later

Technology

Opensource software

Godot, Blender, Krita, Audacity

» Art & Characters

Protagonist

Knorbin Wel, Junior Commissioner

Returned from the capital to file routine reports in the town he once escaped. Tired, careful, ambitious, and not nearly as detached as his file suggests.

Companion

CAR-TER, Field Terminal

A portable administrative unit assigned to assist with records, disputes, and case handling. Dry, procedural, and much harder to ignore than a normal machine should be.

NPC

Regolith artist

The Martian orange clay allows her to express herself not only on the surface, but in relief.

Landmark

The Mammoth

Once the town’s great industrial stomach, later its revolutionary monument. Burned, disputed, and never allowed to become ordinary, it still stands over Jazin like an argument too large to settle.

Church mosaic

Green Mothers Order

Saints of a Mars that never was. Their faces fill the church in gold and green, promising purity, blame, and a lost motherland that still judges the living.

More art on YouTube & Discord

» World & Story

How Mars became home
and what did it cost

Mars was never finished. It was settled, exploited, reorganized, abandoned, romanticized, and rebuilt in pieces. Air cores made open settlements possible in the right places, so towns grew not under perfect domes, but inside fragile pockets of held atmosphere, industry, and routine. Jazin began as one of those places — JZ-1, a technical outpost built for extraction, fuel, and transport.

What followed was not one clear age, but several. Corporations came first. Then unions. Then patronage from Earth. Then revolution. Then a distant state in Great Olympus promising a greener Mars than the one people actually inherited. Each era left machinery, language, rituals, and institutions behind. Jazin kept more of them than most towns.

That is why the place feels layered rather than futuristic. The Works want to build again. The Public Bureau still believes in plans, systems, and eventual reconnection. The Wardens keep revolutionary memory alive, sometimes at the cost of the future. And the Green Mothers turn failure into doctrine, guilt, and spectacle. Above all of them looms the Mammoth, a massive fuel installation — burned, disputed, impossible to ignore.

Jazin is not the center of Mars. But it is still a place where old decisions never fully ended, and where even a routine report can tilt the balance of what comes next.

Extended lore & documents → Discord server

You arrive in a town
that never moved on

Knorbin Wel returns to Jazin as a Junior Commissioner from Olympus, arriving by long-distance vacuum dirigible with CAR-TER, his assigned field terminal.

He is not sent to solve a murder, uncover a grand secret, or save the town. He is sent to do something far more ordinary: review three local cases, file three reports, and leave.

Public transport is failing at the edge of the shrinking safe zone. The giant burned Mammoth is once again the center of a political fight. Citizens claim that breathing feels wrong, while official readings insist the air is good.

The deeper Knorbin goes into these cases, the less they stay separate. Every answer produces another document. Every document changes what can be said aloud.

You came to file reports. Instead, you step into a town arguing with its own future.

Press kit & synopsis → contact us

» Questions

Great Olympus
answers all requests.

What kind of RPG is After Mars?

It is a narrative RPG focused on dialogue, documents, political choice, and local investigation. There is no combat system. The main verbs are closer to reading, arguing, comparing, persuading, classifying, and reporting.

Is it inspired by Disco Elysium?

It is the clearest touchstone for tone: literary writing, political seriousness, damaged people treated as full human beings. But After Mars has a different structure and a different rhythm. You are not a detective with amnesia. You are a Commissioner with documents, deadlines, and three cases that refuse to stay administrative.

Why Mars?

Because Mars lets the game talk about history, ideology, distance, technology, and belonging in a way that feels both strange and grounded. This is not a heroic frontier or a clean sci-fi utopia. It is a lived-in world after ambition, after extraction, after revolution — after Mars.

What makes the game mechanically distinct?

Tasks are handled as case files. Evidence is attached to documents. Checks become disputes, warrants, and admissibility problems instead of dice rolls or combat encounters. The game’s bureaucracy is not decoration — it is the actual gameplay structure.

What stage is the project in?

Early development. Narrative, setting, and core systems are defined. First playable materials in production.

Are you looking for collaborators or publishers?

Yes. If the project speaks to you and you have relevant experience in art, writing, music, production, or publishing, get in touch. Early interest is welcome.

» Contact