preface

	"Responding to an unusual alarm call from a remote mining base, Jack arrives at the dark and desolate Fort Solis. With storm warnings imminent, he heads inside to make desperate contact. As the night grows longer, events escalate, spiral out of control and the mystery of what happened to the crew begins to reveal itself. The storms is approching, limiting Jack’s escape as he looks to hold out until morning arrives."

key features

	Fort Solis looks to deliver a high-fidelity experience designed to completely immerse the player in the cast and their long night. With performances from Roger Clark, Troy Baker and Julia Brown, Fort Solis looks to deliver emotion, fear, empathy and much more with every chapter.

Supporting the core narrative are additional instances of story such as audio logs, surveillance footage of past or present events. Accompanying those are video logs recorded by all crew detailing the events before and perhaps even after that night the alarm was triggered at Fort Solis…

Fort Solis brings to players, the next level of details, facial and body animations. With the help of Unreal Engine 5.2 Fort Solis realistic universe is brought to life!

The skeleton of Fort Solis is built above and below ground. The base contains a variety of locations each with their own surface and sub surface levels. Players will be able to explore the isolated storm bearing surface, the creepy service tunnels absent of any light or the multiple departments that help Fort Solis function on a day-to-day basis such as Engineering, Medical and Communications.

As the story unfolds locations can easily be revisited for additional story context or continue to serve as a backdrop to the fate that awaits Jack with each passing hour.

mechanics

	A walking sim, and likely the prettiest I've played to date. I got a cold shower rather early in the gameplay as I was confronted with that most dreaded of enemies.. quick time events. Fortunately you can't really fail them, which made me question why they were there at all since they add nothing to the story. 

The game is refreshingly old-school with no flashing indicator lights telling you were to go. The map is your best, and in most cases only, friend. While you can get lost when trying to figure out where to go next, and I did on one occasion, it's not because the game didn't give you enough clues as to where to go. You just didn't think it through.

The majority of the game is trying to overcome environmental obstacles caused by the run down base or figuring out what has happened with audio, video and text logs. In other words, the perfect gameplay loop.

tech

	Worked flawlessly from start to finish with wine-ge. Looks great. Sounds fantastic. Plays superbly.

my thoughts

	Once the QTE scare subsided I was immediately struck by the uncanny valley. The game is pretty, real pretty. In fact it's so realistic at times that every time a facial expression deviates from the expected you react. That's the danger with going for realism but it paid off, the game looks great.

The protagonists and antagonist are all great, but the real star of this game is Fort Solis itself. A run down, broken and obsolete mining station. It reminded me a lot of the Nostromo from Alien, another ship that stole the limelight from the actors. The base has a visibly modular design with manual overrides, authentic engineering crawlspaces and in general felt believable.

One thing that surprised me was that blacks really were blacks. It's quite common for developers to overly light environments, in this they dared to leave a lot of it pitch black which truly added to the atmosphere. I was kind of struck how it reminded me of Dead Space, only without the aliens and none of the silly combat.

There was really only one thing that bugged me throughout, and I'll make sure to avoid spoilers here. In the second half there's a protagonist swap and while the second voice actor is as solid as the first she sounds entirely too chippy for the situation. I'd be a whole lot more shook up. It's redeemed from her terrific acting towards the end which is surprisingly grimdark.

All in all this is a must play. The world building is of the sort where there just has to be sequels, or at least follow-ups if not direct sequels.

links

	Fort Solis
	Black Drakkar Games
	Good old games