Vidjama Gmaes Work

Script.

Fort Solis almost feels like a trick. It looks a lot like Dead Space or Callisto Protocol and if you look at the comments in various trailers posted on YouTube you see a lot of people saying stuff like “looks great, can’t wait to see the gameplay.” And little do they know that what they’re seeing is the gameplay.

You play as Jack Leary, a space engineer brought to Fort Solis on Mars who finds himself traveling through the space base trying to figure out what happened to the people living there. Unfortunately for the player the game reveals its secrets about five minutes in as you start finding audio and video logs talking about how the crew is acting strange and it’s probably the fault of this compound being developed on site. And that wouldn’t be an issue in and of itself if the game presented an interesting world with characters and environments you’d want to learn more about. But it doesn’t do any of that.

The gameplay loop involves going through an area, finding a power cell, finding the door that needs it, and solving very light puzzles generally based around button timing. There are quicktime events that don’t actually seem to influence what happens, and only seem to be included because otherwise there wouldn’t be much game to this game. The quick time events annoyed the hell out of me during action sequences because they aren’t noticeable and half the time I didn’t even see them on screen until it was too late. And I don’t know what would be more frustrating; the fact that they have no impact on the sequence or if the game had crappy button prompts and just game over’d you for failing them.

It also doesn’t help that Jack’s demeanor is so bored that it made me bored and frustrated by proxy. Jack walks at a snail’s pace in this game no matter what is happening on screen and there’s no option to speed him up. While the map is relatively small by normal game standards, it takes forever to go through at your light walk making every time you go into the wrong area that much more frustrating. The on-screen map is awful to use, is always way too tiny, and your character and objective markers don’t help much assuming they work at all.

And for the record, some of my most memorable games are walking simulators. I’m not dissing the genre and this isn’t one of those “they’re not real games” rants, some of my favorite games are titles like Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, To The Moon, Amnesia: The Dark Descent which I would argue is a walking simulator, and more. But because you have little gameplay, this genre relies almost entirely on engaging the player with the characters and the world. A lot of times they force the players to confront some uncomfortable feelings, and yeah a lot of times it’s just depression simulators. Fort Solis’ only available trick is to try to make you care about the characters and in my opinion it fails on that regard.

Fort Solis is normally about twenty five bucks and there’s no reason to buy it as the game barely justifies playing through once. Actually I can’t really recommend it as a rental unless you’ve actually played every single other game on the PS5. It’s obviously the work of passion by the development team and the voice actors, but we all know you have a backlog that could stack up to the sun and there’s no reason for this one to wiggle its way into the line.