A lone astronaut approaching a silent Mars facility

The Martian Directive

The Martian Directive is a browser-playable sci-fi interactive fiction and classic text adventure. You play by typing commands. The story answers with consequences, and the mission keeps score of what you restore, what you reach, and what you choose to reveal.

Contact with the Aurora Research Complex has gone dark. Satellite passes show no lights, no movement, no replies. You launch under mission callsign SENTRY. Your partner holds orbit aboard Peregrine while you descend alone.

The surface facility is wrecked and silent. The missing personnel are not on the map. Somewhere below, Sublevel Delta waits behind sealed routes and bad paperwork.

progress saves automatically play in your browser

Control room inspection

Play in your browser

Start fresh or continue your current run. Storms limit surface work. Orbital windows limit what you can send. The directive never explains itself, but it keeps updating.

New Game Continue How to play

Return to Unseen Lands

Starting de-orbit burn

What it feels like

Big rooms and long corridors that should be loud with people, but are not. Systems that half-run on backup logic. Doors that open when they should not. Doors that do not open at all.

A thin tone repeats somewhere inside the walls, steady as a metronome. Dust scrapes across metal. The complex does not answer your hails. > listen The tone is joined by a second sound, delayed, like an echo trying to match the first. > examine door A clean access panel with fresh tool marks. Someone opened this recently. There is no record of it in the surface logs. > open panel Behind the cover is a second latch, unlabelled, and a cable tagged in a format you have never seen.

About the story

This is a rescue mystery with procedural dread. The danger is physics, bureaucracy, and cascading decisions. The complex is too large to brute-force. You will plan routes, restore capability, and follow contradictions until the map breaks open.

Endings depend on what you do. You can prioritize rescue. You can prioritize the truth. You can carry evidence to orbit, transmit it in a narrow window, bury it, or burn it. The game will not choose for you.

Quick facts

For readers, streamers, and anyone searching for this kind of sci-fi interactive fiction.

genre: interactive fiction / text adventure / parser game / science fiction / mystery play style: exploration + routing + access gates + rescue planning platform: web browser (no install) tone: silence, storms, controlled information saving: automatic progress, optional manual save best first commands: look, examine, inventory, listen, read