Per Aspera is a charming little city builder wrapped in a gargantuan strategy game. Its vast scope encompasses such intricate details as small cargo holds and worker stations, yet your playground is the entirety of the surface of Mars. Its charm is sometimes at odds with its scope - perhaps it's more twee than it intends to be - but it certainly delivers the anticipation and awe of discovering, settling, and surviving a new frontier.
Part of that is surely its authenticity. Mars's topography is based on geographical data from NASA, and my mission - as an AI tasked with preparing Mars for human habitation - draws upon scientific studies and theories proposed by real space agencies and engineers.
Later in the game, you'll see blue oceans fill in the lower elevations of the surface as you reach the terraforming stage, but here at the start of my mission, I begin with only a landing site, a small pile of resources, and one robotic worker. I'm a little adrift - the controls aren't as intuitive as I need them to be - but the tutorial does a good job of giving me small objectives to build a base. And, after a bit of poking around the UI to figure out how, I'm soon producing my own iron, carbon, and chemicals, my little worker dutifully ferrying them to where they need to be.