Marsmare: Alienation Reviews

Great little metroidvania.

Excellent retro game play. Super fast and slick graphics for backgrounds and characters. Medium difficulty and large playing area. Good settings for for retro and NEXT styles; music, sounds and graphics. Highly recommended.

Brilliant game! Tiny size, but nice music, lovely sprites, perfect gameplay. It looks easy at first, but difficulty increases when you progress and open new areas. I'm really in love that you can setup different look for sprites and change sound. At last - it correctly supports my gamepad (not all other games are able to do this!) We are playing this with my son as hotseat. He attracted by the game from the very beginning. It costs every penny! Big thanks to the developers who did it!

This enhanced version of Marsmare is great - solid engaging and addictive gameplay, responsive controls, excellent enhanced gfx and sound as well as being able to pick the original game's gfx - its a bit like getting a sneaky look into an alternative universe where the ZX Spectrum didn't have colour clash and had beefier audio. It's also a peek at what the game might look like on the more recent ZX Spectrum Next. I'm playing on a Steam Deck and the game works fine after a bit of controller remapping. The game doesn't fill the screen but that's because it has a border around it like the original ZX Spectrum version, but this seems a waste as the border is black throughout the game so an option to remove the border and scale the play area to use more screen would be good (keeping the correct 4:3 aspect ratio of course!). This game shows they really do still make 'em like they used to, and that is a very, very good thing indeed.

Super fun mini-metroidvania! You are basically running through an interconnected spaceship, slowly gaining new abilites (I think there was about 4), grabbing collectibles, killing enemies, and making your way to the escape ship. It's very simple but it does it all well. I was really happy that it has a map, not only perfecly detailed for navigation but also marks missing items, doors, etc. So, it's a good game for my fellow completionists. If you enjoy 1-2 hour metroidvanias, this is totally worth the price. If you want other games like this, check out 100 Pumpkins 1 and 2, Satan Loves Cake, Tank-o, or LXD Red Honey (the last three are only on itch.io).

Great fun and a wonderful new version of the platformer on PC. I played the ZX Spectrum version back in 2020 (footage of both on DVDfeverGames), and it's great that this also works very well with my Xboxish gamepad, so I don't have to rely on keys :) I dig the music, and it's a snip at less than two quid!