That's all I keep stumbling on and I'm pretty sure that's not it.
It might have been a demo/ extreme redux build but I don't think so, here os what else I remember:
It was on one of the disks that came with our very first computer, or it was preinstalled, it was embedded into some introduction to your computer BS. A win95 laptop IIRC but it might have been win98 as well I was very young, but I think we bought it a VOBIS which was once a huge chain and is now only 7 stores in east germany.
Anyway the game was embedded into some other app, parts of the UI might have been "outside" of the game window, and I think it deliberately had a very small resolution and color palet to fit on the disk and run super smooth on such a machine. The controls were sorta like those 3d tours you had in microsoft encarta, I'm pretty sure it was exactly the same cursor sprites, you know the circle with the 4 arrows. Anyway all red and black, you land on mars, you don't violently crash land, but you do have to gather a few things IIRC, there is a hill that is too slippery and you need to use the hoverboard you found IIRC, I think you have somebody helping you over the radio, but the protagonist might as well have been monologuzing, it's a space game afterall. There might have been some hyroglyphs at some point but near the end of the demo you get to a place with obelisks and buildings and stuff and the thing told you to get the full version, or that the full version was releasing later that year. I remember being completly alone in my surroundings.
I watched the first 20 minutes of cydonya it's kinda similar from the theme, but at the same time not at all the same game I remember.