Waking Mars
Waking Mars. Tiger Style Games, developer: 2012. Randy Smith et al. designers. Amanda Williams et al., artists. Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, platforms. See Wikipedia for more details.[1]
Summarized in a currently brief Wikipedia entry (summer 2020), "Waking Mars is a platform-adventure game [...] in which players jetpack through underground Mars caves and encounter a host of alien lifeforms that operate as an ecosystem. Players must master the behaviors of these creatures to create ecosystems of their own design to survive and discover the secrets of Mars' past."[2]
Joey Eschrich notes that the game, relevantly here, "features two interesting AI portrayals and revolves around a pair of human astronauts and an advanced but hampered (and cheeky!) AI called ART exploring subterranean Martian caves in search of another artificially intelligent explorer, called OCTO, which has discovered strange ecosystems in the caves" (e-note, 22 July 2020).
In addition to the AI's, see for generally neutral or positive images of containment in an underworld that is not demonic, as in Dante's Commédia (The Divine Comedy) or mechanized and demonic, as in Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," or mechanized and just long-term dangerous to humans, as in Forster's "The Machine Stops." Instead it's a space for adventure, where "players jetpack" among robustly organic lifeforms that can form ecosystems. In the instructive wording of the PC Gamer review: "Waking Mars is actually about ecosystems: organic machines running autonomously, and the satisfaction of knowing that it was you who built the engine" — but "machines" the reviewer does not view as a threat.[3]
RDE, with thanks to Joey Eschrich, 22July20