Fort Solis Review

When playing Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, I couldn’t help but be a little bored despite becoming increasingly wrapped up in the game’s central question.

The British accents, the evocative soundtrack, and the core mystery were all so tantalizing. But you still had to walk everywhere. And the default walk speed was atrociously slow, made even more laughable by the ability to press a trigger and mildly add some speed–like a grandmother who thinks a dash of pepper will make her meal too spicy.

As players, we are constantly at the mercy of decisions made by the developer. Whether good or bad, the fundamental design of a game is what we are stuck with barring an update or a patch. Often as reviewers we take on the role of backseat developer, suggesting what could have been better, what choices would potentially make a better game.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was an enjoyable game. But I fought against it the entire time. I would watch a brilliant light swirl and dance over to a distant building and dread the trek through molasses I would be taking. Would it help me take in the scenery? Sure. Would I think about the narrative, further immersing myself? Yeah, I guess. And while that may have been developer The Chinese Room’s intent, it didn’t enhance my appreciation for the game. Instead it continued to hinder it.

Fort Solis would have been a sufficiently better game had it allowed me to traverse its intimidating facility at a reasonable, optional speed.

The prime example of this agonizing walk speed and its clash with Fort Solis‘ attempt at immersion takes place near the end of the game. A character is attacked and, after a couple quick time events, escapes. They proceed to mutter something along the lines of “it’s time to get the hell out of here” and walk away from where the encounter took place. They walk at the same protracted speed as before, no change in pace, no alteration of the walking animation to indicate a heightened sense of fear because the threat is still looming.

Walking simulators get a bad rap. Undoubtedly the moniker feels derisive because who in their right mind needs to simulate walking? But there have been champions of the “genre” such as Gone Home, parts of Firewatch, and large portions of Death Stranding. But for players to really soak up a directed narrative and let the environment tell a tale, the answer won’t always be dodge rolling and paragliding. It’s about immersion.

And immersion is something Fort Solis so desperately strives for in every line of its coding. Yet that hard boundary proves to be its frequent downfall.

Fallen Leaf, the small developer of Fort Solis, definitely seeks to punch above its weight class. This feels like a big budget game with high production values befitting the yearning to mimic prestige television dramas. Visuals are some of the best. The voice acting has two gaming heavyweights for top billing. Without these elements, however, I’m not sure what Fort Solis would have.

Set in the year 2080, players take on the role of Jack Leary, voiced by Roger Clark of Red Dead Redemption 2 fame. Jack and his coworker Jessica–voiced by Julia Brown–are engineers on Mars doing maintenance before violent storms hit the planet’s surface. On the last moments of Jack’s shift before going on vacation, an alert comes in from the nearby Fort Solis that it has gone into lockdown. Suggesting that the lockdown was manually triggered and with no one responding to Jack’s hails, he goes to investigate.

Fort Solis‘ creeping descent into thriller territory is such ripe fruit. As Jack hops into a vehicle and drives along the dusty surface of Mars, the storms inch closer and cloud the entrance to Fort Solis, darkening its exterior. The lights of the facility and its digital keypads are the prominent points of reference as no one responds to Jack’s efforts.

When Jack makes his way through the initial hallways and sections of Fort Solis, the absence of a human presence acts like an icy needle slowly pushing into the back of the neck. That crawling dread exacerbated by a few narrative seeds planted in the emails, voice messages, and video logs scattered about.

I would argue the first hour or so of Fort Solis is a tonal stroke of excellence. The state of the game’s universe is communicated expertly through the visual design. Humans have reached the surface of Mars primarily to mine for resources, as Earth seems to not be doing great. Technology has moved into the realm of practical possibility, giving the aesthetic a more grounded approach than outlandish science fiction. It’s up to players to glean most of this information themselves through patient observation and exploration.

During the opening hour, Jack and Jessica are continuously chatting and interacting with each other over comms. Their relationship professional but emitting a warmth and friendship that endears players to them both. Clark and Brown’s acting sells these moments of casual interaction and concern as things progressively grow more “off” about the facility.

Soon enough Wyatt Taylor, voiced by the incomparable Troy Baker, comes into play. Avoiding Taylor’s role in the game may prove difficult for anyone going into Fort Solis blind but it’s safe to assume that he is the third major character in the game for obvious reasons. And once players begin to suspect what’s happened at Fort Solis, the game sneaks in a new thread to follow.

Movies these days have a runtime of around two hours on average. Without input from the viewer, directors communicate every story beat and character drive through writing, sound, and visuals. Fort Solis works to cram everything into a four-hour block of time. And it shows.

When the characters and text are not directly speaking or communicating information and narrative to the player, there’s little else to rely on. Fort Solis looks incredible, that can’t be said enough. Character animations–especially in video diaries–are able to express a spectrum of emotions. And the voice acting in this game is truly remarkable, to the point where I wonder how much was direction and how much was just natural talent from the cast. But Fallen Leaf does far too much telling and not enough showing.

Fort Solis is keen on shuffling players through a critical path of one narrative beat to the next. By doing so, however, there’s almost no room for anything else. Environments are splendidly realistic but to what end? Around halfway through the game players are able to go outside of Fort Solis, traversing the surface of Mars to reach another part of the facility. With no help from the game’s nearly useless map, players can see that this outside portion is massive and explorable.

Yet the question is why would you go anywhere that isn’t the place Fallen Leaf is directing you to go? And there’s no good answer. As a player who scours every inch to find a collectible, there seemed to be no reward for aimlessly walking the surface of Mars outside of getting a trophy. I got lost. I couldn’t find the thing I was supposed to to progress because a Martian storm was going on and severely limited what could be seen.

At one point in the game, a prompt didn’t appear for me to interact with a door switch, causing me to meander around the room trying to figure out what I was missing. I was baffled that Jack was so tethered to the ground he couldn’t walk over a piece of train track a couple inches high. These kind of moments shatter immersion in a game where pace is so crucial because anything outside of the main path feels pointless.

Why let players interact with the dozens of posters taped to the walls of Fort Solis? Only a handful of times do the characters comment on them and they do little to expound on the world’s lore or deepen the mystery to a valuable point. A world so gorgeous shouldn’t be so hollow. The time it took to craft these intricate environments almost feels wasted just to maintain a sense of realism and place. If humans were to go to Mars and install research and mining facilities on the surface, I would imagine them to look almost identical to what Fort Solis has presented. And while that may seem like an accomplishment to immersion, it offers little for the player. Is it necessary to design an elaborate greenhouse that players are simply going to walk around in or casually glance at once and never think about again?

These concerns address the concept of Fort Solis as a game. At what point do these decisions enhance or detract from this story being expressed through this medium? It would be one thing if the game was on-rails, leading players from one moment to the next. But the minimal use of gameplay and familiar mechanics puts Fort Solis at odds with its narrative expression and its gaming expression.

To progress through the various areas of Fort Solis, Jack needs to find access cards of increasing clearance that are doled out at the expected pace. If players choose to do so, there are a handful of opportunities to revisit areas and unlock previously inaccessible rooms to find more collectibles. But finding these cards doesn’t become exciting, just rote. An elevator soon unlocks that acts as a convenient way to traverse up to three floors in the game rather than walking down the stairs but actually feels like it takes more time to use. Long hallways that use the same patterns of pipes and steel connect sections of Fort Solis. Yet they only seem to be that long to mask loading times or give the allusion that this is a real facility that could exist.

Players may be able to pick up an object to examine or interact with something in the world. If Jack isn’t facing the exact spot the game chooses is “correct” you will have to situate him properly. This is awkward to do because turning on a dime is nearly impossible due to a lack of animation frames. Worse yet, it picks away at that immersion factor Fort Solis is too afraid to dance with. Players aren’t doing exactly what the game dictates is right so it becomes a stumble, a waste of time, or an annoyance.

Later in the game, I was attempting to disengage a lockdown or activate a communication relay, whatever task that was supposed to be completed at the time. To do so I activated a computer screen that gave me five numbers in a sequence. I then had to look at numbered server bays, find that corresponding numbered bay, and then… something? My character flipped up a switch and an overlay said I could rotate the left stick, cancel out, or hit X to press a button.

Honestly, I couldn’t tell you how I solved that “puzzle” outside of just guessing. Rotating the left stick didn’t seem to do anything except perhaps fluctuate some static noise that maybe I was supposed to be paying attention to. Ultimately I fiddled with my controller until the thing that needed to happen happened. For context, this segment occurred right after a dramatic moment, giving me whiplash and sucking all the emotional air out of what had just took place.

Fort Solis‘ gameplay is negligible at best because players spend most of their time either walking or standing in place while a journal plays out. Perhaps a dozen times a quick time event will happen and many of these feel completely unnecessary. Once I had to time a press of X three times to open a door. This meant that in the construction of Fort Solis, an engineer decided that a handle needed to be pushed down and up three times in order for a door to open. And this happens in a section where Jack’s life was not in immediate danger, he just needed to make way for a mine cart, only to have to do the process a second time.

Worse yet, when a quick time event pops up on the screen, it can disappear so fast that players will barely have time to process its appearance. Frustration exists at missing an element requiring quick reflexes when the game rarely asks the player for similar inputs for long stretches of times, almost acting as a hard slap in the face to make them pay attention to the action. Questions also arise because nearly all of these moments don’t seem to have actual stakes. Not dodging an attack or improperly hooking a cable to your suit isn’t going to lead to a death.

Looking back, I honestly doubt that Fallen Leaf designed fail states for most of these events and instead just had a short few seconds where failure or success meant a slightly different animation plays out that leads to the same end point. I also doubt the developer accounted for the handful of bugs and framerate stutters I encountered. One particularly egregious moment had me restart the game. Jack had opened a locker and got startled by an object tumbling out. To enhance the fear, the camera zoomed in on the reaction. But once the moment was over, the camera became stuck in an awkward position and would fluctuate wildly under the environment or above Jack’s head, preventing me from seeing what was going on.

Still, I think all of these avoidable errors that would infrequently break my immersion never put me past a boiling point with Fort Solis. My tolerance for issues is quite high and can often lead to amusement. But the agonizing pace of Fort Solis after that first hour became a hard burden to bear.

The default and singular walking speed magnified the long stretches of game where absolutely nothing happened. At one point, I mistakenly went down the wrong hallway and was met with a door I couldn’t pass. The lonely, silent walk to and from took possibly two to three minutes. Then I had to do it again down the correct hallway, those are precious minutes to waste in an already short game. Fort Solis certainly feels like a sprawling fortress but one that is entirely lifeless when no one is around. At one point in the game, the banter stopped, leaving Mars a quiet husk and me lamenting when Jack and Jessica were making jokes about zombie movies.

With such detailed environments and character models trapped in the delightfully moody Fort Solis, I expected tension to constantly eat away at my nerves. But even as the game acts like it could rise to the challenge and deepen the mystery, the pace drags. While that may sound surprising for a game that can be completed in under four hours, those awkward, slow moments take their toll.

Revelations become rushed. Suspense is traded for icy silence. And by the time players think they are able to understand the machinations of the core mystery and its herald, the game ends almost with a gloomy thud.

No part of me expected Fort Solis to show all its cards and explain everything that was going on. Not only would that be boring, it would inhibit the mystique the writers tried so hard to thread through the narrative. But I think there was still another hour’s worth of narrative left in Fort Solis, deserved or not, even if I wasn’t looking forward to an hour’s worth of the same limp mechanics and tedium.

But would Fort Solis have worked better as an on-rails game or simply a movie? Yes and no. Scrapping most of the game’s extraneous traversal would have made things significantly shorter and tighter. But that would have also left less room for building the narrative on the back of its video and audio logs, which allow players to keep guessing and piece out the game’s lore.

Fort Solis is a conundrum, one I think I’m happy to have played just for the sake of experiencing a new take on the genre. The slow pace of the game outside its moderately engaging action scenes and snappy dialog can kill narrative momentum. The limited and rote gameplay mechanics are only minor breaks in the plodding walk speed of the main character. The technical excellence and masterful voice acting truly give Fort Solis a glimmer of promise in an otherwise conflicted game. Undoubtedly there is an audience for these pieces of entertainment but those who find themselves entertained by this particular approach may indeed be rare.