Fort Solis
The eerie silence had left me on edge as I thudded around the deserted Fort Solis in my heavy Martian environment suit, so when all of a sudden I momentarily glimpsed another person in an adjacent room I was startled. I barely had a chance to react before all the lights went red, the alarms blared and the oxygen was venting out of the med bay. I dashed to retrieve by helmet, which I had foolishly took of with an ironic thought of 'it's too suffocating', much to the admonishment of my colleague on the radio Jessica. Out of immediate danger I was left with more questions than answers and so I continued my investigation into Fort Solis.
Despite the exceptional production values in sight and sound on display throughout Fort Solis never quite lives up to the promise of these visuals, in fact it suffers from something I have a personal grievance for: mediocre writing. I'm not a fine writer by any stretch of the imagination and I don't have a particularly sophisticated taste in literature either. But what I do know is that hiring a writer is much cheaper than photorealistic humans and high fidelity motion capture. And that without solid writing all the work gone into establishing the atmosphere is undercut.
I have two examples.
Firstly, after finding the first shocking sign something is not right here you are able to progress to inspect other items in the immediate environment and the tone of shock is immediately lost from the character's performance. It could be easy to criticise the acting here, but one thing I have done a great deal is work with actors, and without good direction, informed by the script, you are relying on the actor's instincts which will only ever get you so far, especially when you have no set or others actors to bounce off.
Secondly, and more egregiously, is that when an antagonistic voice is coming through your radio it makes unnecessarily vague comments about what everything here needs to happen. Despite the core part of the mystery being clear from right at the start to the player, it's never made clear that the protagonists think the same way. So when the antagonist is justifying their actions it would be perfectly reasonable for the protagonist to question them, 'what do you mean?', 'what is going on here?', 'do you mean X?'. The antagonist could remain cryptic (though that would honestly seem odd) or they could add clarity and THAT version of the story has the potential to be far more interesting.
Which gets to the root of it. The writing suffers from something which separates enjoyable B movies from bad ones; It's uninspired. It has all the tropes of a claustrophobic sci fi thriller but it doesn't subvert our expectations or squeeze the juice out of those well worn elements.
I regret to say the same is true of the gameplay. The level of interaction is minimal and what is there actually has no affect on the outcome. I am a big fan of lock and key gameplay and I do love a good log (see below) and it does these very well, but as soon as it steps out it stumbles, which is unfortunate given how much work was put elsewhere. There was also an odd moment where I had the correct key for a door but it would not let me open it, which turned out to be locked behind some later story event.
Where it does excel however is in it's commitment to atmosphere. The game is lovingly animated and good contact and a honestly excessive level of things you can interact with given the scope of the project. The video logs are excellently acted and animated (save for the aforementioned jumps in tone and cliché writing) and are probably it's standout element. The soundtrack is understated but keeps the tone and pace consistent and it's heavy but subdued beats mesh well with the ambient soundscape.
In conclusion, had the narrative pulled more weight and some more thought put into the mechanics it would have elevated an already stellar production value and good performances to create something well worth the 2-4 hours it takes to get through it. As it stands it's worth the money if it's on sale and you have an evening free that you would have spent watching trash TV or you are curious what a small team could do at the time.