Fort Solis Review
Fort Solis Review
Slow-tal Recall
Fort Solis isn’t anything like Dead Space or Callisto Protocol. Instead, Fort Solis is a slow burning, narrative driven thriller with a focus on immersion and creating a cinematic level experience.
The immersion is created by having stunning visuals, thanks to the use of Unreal Engine 5 and excellent motion capture. Excellent audio from every footstep across the metal grates and airlock opened make you feel like you are on the red planet. The story is well written with a high level of human authenticity and obviously, the voice acting is phenomenal thanks to the work of Roger Clark, who you know as Arthur Morgan from Red Dead, Troy Baker most known for Joel in The Last of Us and Julia Brown.
Lost In Space
All of these elements create a very immersive experience, but the lack of player autonomy works counter to all of the immersion building. Quick-time events feel inconsequential, as I was usually deep into the story when they popped up, which is another testament to the quality of the writing, but it ultimately led to me failing almost every single one. There is no way to truly know without multiple plays, but it felt failing never affected the situation or changed the course of the story, as I usually got a pretty favourable outcome and survived the night.
There is a lot of exploring Fort Solis and the surrounding areas while trying to find clues or items required to progress, such as keycards, which leads to a lot of backtracking. This is both a gift and a curse as the base is interesting to explore with strong atmosphere, but it’s hard to understand why there wasn’t a jog or speed-walk button. Clearly, this would’ve led to a shorter play time, but when trying to emulate realism, whoever would be in that situation wouldn’t be walking, especially when you consider the stakes that are unfolding before during the night.
Light Speed Journey
Fort Solis is a succinct journey and at around 5 hours. Although there are some flaws in the experience, the realism delivered by the story that was free of xenomorphs, necromorphs and biophage was a refreshing departure from the norm. Fort Solis displays strong potential from Fallen Leaf as a new and talented studio that will hopefully continue making narrative driven experiences.