"Fort Solis" Review

Publishers: Dear Villagers, Merge Games, Plug In Digital 

Developers: Fallen Leaf, Black Drakkar Games

Available for: Playstation 5, Microsoft Windows, MacOS

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

Over the past couple years, the best games in my estimation have been the ones that play at breakneck paces and feature intense moment-to-moment gameplay. Not only that, but story-centric games have almost continuously burned me over the exact same period of time, with only a few noteworthy exceptions like 2021 GOTY-Winner The Forgotten City. So if I take a chance on a game like Fort Solis, which is described as being primarily story-focused, it means I see some serious potential in it. Whether or not that potential is realized obviously varies...but it does say something about the promise...look, I don't want to make it seem like I disliked Fort Solis, because I didn't, but it's...reeeeeeally hard to praise it. In spite of that damning opening bit, I do think that there's an audience for this game. In a way, I'm that audience, but with caveats. Let's just get into it. 

In Fort Solis, you play as Jack Leary: a maintenance man for humanity's mining outposts on the surface of Mars. In the middle of a routine bit of work, Jack receives a distress message from the titular Fort Solis. When he arrives at the fort, he finds it completely abandoned, and from there, the mystery only grows. The story is the whole point of this game, so that's all you're getting in terms of details! Before I discuss the quality of the story a little bit, I do have a note I want to make: the voice acting in this game is top-notch. First time game actress Julia Brown nails it as her character, Jessica Appleton. Same goes for Troy Baker in his role as the game's villain, whose name I won't give because I don't think you'll be able to tell which character he plays until the villain status is revealed. The only voice I wasn't sold on was Roger Clark as Jack Leary. I thought he was horrible in the role, sporting an on-and-off Irish accent that 100% sounded like an American trying to sound Irish. But then I looked it up, and....that's kind of accurate? Clark was born in New Jersey but grew up in Ireland, so that may just be his speaking voice? You see, I, like many other people, know Clark for his absolutely exemplary work as Arthur Morgan, the protagonist of Red Dead Redemption 2. So, I guess to hear that he doesn't sound like a cowboy in real life is a bit jarring! So, I bring this up as a way of letting you know what the deal is if you play this game and find yourself scratching your head at the voice acting. But back to the story...it's not very satisfying. I'm not the kind of person who thinks that you need to know all the answers to a mystery for a story to be satisfying...but there are just too few answers on display here not just in the base story, but in the 86% of all extra logs you can find scattered throughout the game. Is it possible that the remaining 14% of the logs flesh things out to a more satisfying degree? Yes. But the incentive to find those logs is somewhat marred by one of the game's biggest flaws, which we'll get into a bit later. For now, though, let me say what I liked about the story: it was NOT predictable. Random distress signal on the surface of an alien planet? How could any story in that context be anything but predictable? Well...if I answered that, you might start making other predictions that might possibly be correct...so just take me at my word on that one. Beyond that...that's kinda it.

And in terms of gameplay, there's so little to talk about it that I can't justify giving it its own section. You walk around, interact with things, and occasionally go through a quicktime event. That in and of itself isn't a problem, it just has to be well-handled. But unfortunately, the game's biggest weakness is how slow you walk. It's an unjustifiably slow walking speed I don't think I've seen since Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. But it's not just that, it's also the overanimation. Just like in Roger Clark's last major role, his character in Fort Solis is almost impossible to orient because of how thoroughly animated his character model is. It takes around 2 seconds after letting off of the left stick for the character to stop walking, for instance, and the only saving grace is that button prompts for interaction appear fairly liberally so you don't have to always angle the character in exactly the right way in order to interact. The last gameplay aspect to discuss is the quicktime events....

There's no consequence for failure. At all. At least, I don't think there is. I failed several, several quicktime events because of one of the game's technical problems (more on that in a second), and while the cutscene presumably goes in different directions based on success or failure, there doesn't appear to be any fail state. Again, this on its own isn't necessarily a negative...and in this case, it absolutely isn't a negative because of how easy it is to fail these quicktime events! So, that's actually a positive.

And the positives mostly continue in terms of the technical package. I've said that I didn't hate this game, and it's because I did get what I wanted out of it: excellent atmosphere. The graphics are so good that you could be forgiven for mistaking this for a AAA game, rather than the indie affair that it is. In addition, there are no texture issues, animation glitches, or any other visual problems. The framerate is also solid throughout, with no crashes to break things up. The game utilizes all of these technical strengths to create a thick, effective sci-fi atmosphere the likes of which I always love to see. It's the game's biggest strength, and thankfully, it's the one thing that I wanted more than anything else. 

However, the game does have some major technical flaws, one of which I alluded to earlier. That flaw is the font size. It doesn't matter where it appears: text logs, your map, it doesn't matter. The text is just too small and there's no option to increase the size, so I had to sit at the edge of my seat to be able to read the text without fail. And the fact that the map is crap doesn't help. The map layout itself isn't bad, and the fact that you have to squint to read the labels is unhelpful, but the big problem is the marker indicating where you are. It's like a bizarre combination of a square and a directional pointer, but the directional pointer doesn't point where you're facing or where the camera is facing...it just points down/south nonstop. What's more, the marker doesn't move with you. It's as if it has a couple pre-set points on the map that it moves to when you reach a certain point...like it's more based on region of the map than the spot of the map you're on. Thankfully, the environment is small enough that this doesn't pose too much of a problem...but you also need to keep the movement speed in mind...so if you get turned around because of this terrible map, it will take more time than you want to get back on track...and that's if you don't get tricked by the map another time. 

Folks, I'm really not as down-feeling on Fort Solis as I might seem. As I've said, I got exactly what I wanted out of this game, so if you also just want a nice atmospheric space experience, I think you'll get what you want as well. But when I get started talking about anything else, I find it incredibly hard to find things to recommend. So with that in mind, you hopefully know whether or not I'd recommend this game to you based off your tastes. This being basically a walking simulator, I'll be using my x2 judging scale, where my usual maximum point deduction of 1 is increased to 2. So...

Let us review:

Unsatisfying story - 1.0

Gameplay woes - 2.0

Technical problems - 1.5

The final score for Fort Solis is...

5.5/10 - Barely Above Average

Better luck next time, Fallen Leaf/Black Drakkar, better luck next time