Sometimes, I've played a few games and thought, "This would make a good film". Other times, I've been watching a film and thought, "I want to play a game based on this now". Fort Solis is something new that sits somewhere in the thought pattern of "why isn't this a film, because it may as bloody well have been". Described in its Steam page blurb as "Like a Netflix series", I'm not sure if developers Fallen Leaf Studio and Black Drakkar Games understand the connotations that brings because while there are some excellent series on Netflix, there is some utter rubbish there, too.
I suppose that gives away my general impression of Fort Solis. What is important is why I've got that impression because the things that have led me to my thoughts may lead you to the complete opposite. So, on that note, let's delve into a Mars-based thriller (though action as a descriptor, as first mentioned, would be pushing it).
Backstory: The place is Mars, the year is 2080, and you are Jack Leary - voiced by Roger Clark (Arthur Morgan, Red Dead Redemption 2) - and you're answering a distress call at the titular place. Your only friend up here is Jessica - voiced by Julia Brown (World on Fire, with Sean Bean!), who is in comms contact for a chunk of the game, making some idle chat to keep things from feeling too bare. Also in the game is Troy Baker (every game ever, but has unfortunately never had the joys of working with Sean Bean). As you go through Fort Solis, you'll find something isn't as it should be.
I can't say much more than that because of two reasons. The first is that it would spoil the game, and I only do that when I feel like it. The second is that I'm not entirely sure what is happening anyway. You uncover aspects through documents, as well as audio and video logs. So, here's the issue - I found 120 out of 122 in my playthrough, and I still can only guess the plot. I'm unsure if there's a conspiracy or the antagonist mentally broke down. If it's intentionally vague to force the player to decide what the story is, mission accomplished. This can work, but only if the end product is far more engaging than this.
Let me get the good out of the way. Fort Solis looks and sounds fantastic even on the PlayStation 5 (I played in whatever the quality mode, not performance, was called). The use of shadows and lighting is amazing, and it helped to build an excellent atmosphere in the first chapter. Everything from the characters to the items you interact with was exceptionally detailed, too; enough that if the "game" aspect was taken out of this, I could see it being on Netflix.
The soundtrack also helped build the atmosphere and was trying up to the end of the game. This was supported by excellent voice acting, even in the smaller bit-roles in audio and video logs. Now, here's the problem. As good as the audio and video can try to build an atmosphere, this can all be broken, and it was broken very quickly.
Let me talk about pacing, both in a narrative and a literal sense. Any story can and will live or die in the pacing. Get it wrong, and it will struggle, no matter how good the plot may be. A common misconception is that slow pacing equals poor pacing. This isn't true. Slow pacing can be exceptional in the development of a story, as it allows for character and world development, and mixing this with moderate and fast pacing is what a good writer will do. Games also have this, and this can also be directed.
Fort Solis has a combination of both slow and fast pacing, but all of it is poor. There are a few reasons for this. First and foremost is the narrative pacing. This features a prolonged burn that works exceptionally well in the first chapter - even if it's held back by the slow gameplay pacing (more on that soon) - and continues to an extent in the second chapter. The problem is that the moderate and fast-paced sections are rubbish following this.
Why? The slow burn introduces you to Jack and the titular base well enough, but it doesn't even remotely touch on the overarching story, the antagonist, or Jessica. By the third chapter, when you're controlling Jessica, you've no real investment and are still utterly blind about why things are happening. The pacing picks up but still doesn't grab. In the last hour of the game, you get everything thrown at you, even things that should have been dripped hours earlier. Imagine The Lord of the Rings being 800 Pages of The Shire and Tom Bombadil, with the remaining 378 being the rest of the story - only with far less character or world-building.
It is possibly a poor example as we would still have known the antagonist's reasoning, and the protagonists wouldn't have been so stupid that they all deserved to die. As mentioned, I don't understand why Troy Baker was a murderous arsehole, but he was. He was either a saviour or a raving loon. I'll honestly never know because I don't care. There's another reason for me not caring beyond the poor writing and pacing, and that is the gameplay.
Fort Solis is a walking simulator. Please make no mistake about it: this is a walking simulator through and through. A more apt descriptor could be "crawling simulator" because - again, on pacing - this is what it does regarding gameplay, only this is the case from the beginning to the very last second. Every step you take is laboured, reminiscent of a slower-paced early The Dark Pictures anthology title. Within the first thirty minutes, the slow movement was tedious; two and a half hours in, it had long passed the point of infuriating, and I just wanted the game to end.
What further aggravates this is the only thing that classes as action in the game: quick-time events. Only that isn't entirely accurate. Some of them are super-QTEs, finishing quicker than me with Emma Stone, and others just being 'events', essentially a button press seemingly being there to test if you're still awake - at least they went that slow it felt like that. Aside from them being frustrating or feeling pointless, they - for the most part - are pointless. Succeeding or failing has zero impact on the progression of events, seemingly until the last one or two in the game.
On a final note, let me talk about immersion. Due to the excellent visuals and superb atmosphere, Fort Solis was immersive. Despite the absurd slow walking (which you wouldn't do in this situation) and the little side things you can do, like have a beer or sit down on a bed and tell jokes (again, you wouldn't do after seeing a pool of blood), it was immersive.
However, further poor choices killed this. In an attempt to be immersive, everything is shown on-screen, including the map. The problem is that this is always held away on your character's wrist. This is just that extra thing that tears away the immersion while navigating a map that looks like it was made on an etch-a-sketch and is just as helpful. What wouldn't have killed immersion would simply be pulling in the map to full screen, such as with the Pip-boy in Fallout.
All in all, I can't recommend Fort Solis. The very little it gets right, which is essentially the visuals, the voice acting, and the atmosphere, is countered and almost killed by everything it gets wrong. From a story that is atrociously paced and far from clear to completely pointless "gameplay" (QTEs) or the character walking speed of a sedated sloth, this is not a fun experience, sadly.
PS5 version reviewed. Copy provided by the publisher.
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