There’s something calming a few clichéd sci-fi horror, isn’t there? Deserted area stations, eerie corridors, and the countless prospects of hazard make up a style that has efficiently infiltrated nearly each format of leisure. Fort Solis is simply the most recent, bringing with it a subdued sci-fi story, voice appearing royalty within the type of Roger Clark (Purple Useless Redemption 2) and Troy Baker (The Final of Us), and a gameplay expertise that’s in components enthralling and others excruciatingly tedious.
As we first walked the halls of the titular Fort Solis we couldn’t assist however be reminded of sci-fi film classics akin to Sunshine, Moon, and even Occasion Horizon. Responding to a mysterious misery sign, engineer Jack Leary (Clark) makes his option to the Martian station to research. With its sluggish pacing and a spotlight to element, we have been already on edge. Not due to something we have been seeing, however the potential of what we have been lacking.
It’s a component of the sport that its opening chapters seize so nicely, made all the higher by the backwards and forwards banter between Jack and his in-ear coworker Jessica, performed to perfection by Julia Brown. As their dialog progresses from garbage zombie TV reveals to slight pangs of concern, there’s a good swelling of rigidity that solely serves to amplify your curiosity.
To satiate mentioned curiosity, exploration is on the coronary heart of the Fort Solis expertise. You’ll be studying emails, noseying via private belongings, watching video logs and usually taking within the environmental particulars of the station within the hope of discovering what occurred to its crew. Whereas nowhere close to the density or high quality, it does have echoes of video games like Gone House, the place you’ll fill in lots of the context of its story by taking in all these optionally available particulars. The doubtless downside for some is that exploring the station is about all there’s to the sport.
Whereas actually glammed up, Fort Solis is a strolling simulator expertise, that means that there are not any fight, puzzle, or stealth mechanics to the sport. You’ll stroll very slowly via the station — and no there isn’t even a “barely quicker stroll” button. Regardless of this, the expertise will take now not than 4 hours to finish.
This partially is to the sport’s profit, because it permits us to take pleasure in a streamlined narrative expertise, with out being slowed down by crafting, weapon upgrading, or needlessly advanced mechanics. Nonetheless, as Fort Solis steadily expands, the sport slows to a snail’s tempo with ventures to new areas taking a number of minutes at a time. The sport tries its finest to fill these moments with one thing, however as a rule you are left with a tedious slog as Jack ambles his option to his subsequent location like he’s obtained on a regular basis on the planet. It may be jarring too, as the sport will sometimes provide you with a spurt of motion the place you’ll velocity via a complete space by way of a cutscene. But regardless of the dramatic nature of that second, Jack goes proper again to his leisurely strolling tempo.
At occasions, you’ll additionally expertise QTEs or button prompts to seemingly give the participant one thing to do throughout moments of traversal or aforementioned spurts of motion. Nonetheless, because of their slick white design it’s really easy to overlook these prompts, and a scarcity of audio cue means you by no means actually know once they’re going to pop up. That then leaves the gameplay expertise a fairly sparse one, which makes the sport’s lacklustre second half all of the extra monotonous.
There’s a honest quantity of backtracking in Fort Solis as you open beforehand locked doorways or stage up your safety clearance. But since traversal is one thing just for probably the most affected person, we regularly questioned whether or not we actually wished to know what was behind these doorways. Within the latter components of the sport you even have the choice to journey between buildings by way of the dusty floor or the claustrophobic tunnels. It’s a pleasant function on paper, letting you select your personal stage of horror, however it rapidly devolves into “which approach is faster?”.
Traversal turns into all of the extra uninteresting as soon as the narrative pulls again the veil. To us at the very least, it was fairly apparent what was occurring about an hour or so in, and the sport steadily does what you form of anticipate — simply three hours later. All types of rigidity or anxiousness that we felt in these opening chapters have been passed by the ultimate hour, and the credit (and publish credit score scene) rapidly induced a shrug of the shoulders.
It’s a disgrace as a result of the central performances from Baker, Clark and Brown are all excellent, really. Troy Baker particularly delivers an excellent and nuanced efficiency, which must be counseled because you witness most of it via video logs. The chemistry between Clark’s Jack and Brown’s Jessica additionally fuelled these opening chapters, so it was disappointing anytime they misplaced comms for narrative causes.
The sport can also be a looker. Working on Unreal Engine 5, it’ll undoubtedly catch your eye at occasions with a nice steadiness between its animation, lighting, and visible element. There may be an possibility between a efficiency and high quality mode, however we largely caught with efficiency. Efficiency struggles to take care of its larger framerate, however it’s higher than the extreme dips that high quality mode makes, partnered up with a bizarre blotchy impact to its visuals on sure surfaces.
And lastly, we have been supremely dissatisfied by the shortage of DualSense implementation in Fort Solis. The sport is so sporadic with its use of the function, the place sure actions that don’t warrant it get a thick rumble, and different apparent moments are left with a disappointing vacancy. To us, DualSense being correctly carried out right into a strolling sim expertise like this is able to have actually amplified that rigidity, and even helped out with the refined button prompts.
Conclusion
Fort Solis begins out promising, with an eerie and mysterious narrative that simply appears to get all the things proper. From environmental particulars to pacing, this opening act genuinely had us considering we had a Firewatch or Everyone’s Gone To Rapture on our palms. Nonetheless, as the sport begins to increase, the pacing tanks, the story fumbles its approach throughout the end line, and the gameplay expertise makes us need to throw our DualSense off the wall. There are a selection of how through which we ought to be impressed by the sport — it’s made by a ten individual workforce in spite of everything — however in the long run Fort Solis is an expertise as dusty because the pink planet itself.
