[Console games] Fort Solis Review - Strife On Mars

[FRIDAY THE 13]

 

In Fort Solis' vision of the year 2080, we've yet to occupy Mars as a species, but corporations have made it a mining and research hub. I bet you can guess how that's going. As a skeleton crew stays behind to work what is essentially a weeks-long graveyard shift on the red planet, a distress call across the facility alerts Jack Leary to an issue within the titular research lab. The game ramps up its drama at a pace that pulled me right in, where early chit-chat and jokes over the radio with his scene partner, Julia Brown's Jessica Appleton, soon grew more stressed as doors appeared sabotaged, then dire as bodies started to pile up.

Paced to unfold like a mini-series meant to be marathoned, the central question of what happened on Fort Solis is expertly hidden from full view for nearly the entire game. It's presented in a virtual one-shot style without any loading screens, doling out the next dangling thread at a pace that kept me both guessing and playing. I was impressed by how well it shielded the truth of the matter while simultaneously drip-feeding a lot of details over time. It does this largely through video-gamey methods: optional audio and video logs as well as emails.

Though that approach is far from novel, it feels justified in this universe where workers are recording messages to send back to their families on Earth, or cataloging some of the facility's recent dangers to cover their own liability concerns. This ample number of optional clues led me to carefully examine everything I could find--for example, not just the words in an email, but the date it was sent, who wrote it, and whether I'd already seen the other side of the conversation. I was trying to reveal the magician's prestige before they presented it to me. I never did figure it out any sooner than I was meant to, which kept me engaged and ultimately satisfied.

Like in a lot of games, it does feel like the story demands you dig through many of these optional clues to have it all make sense. According to in-game stats, I found 92% of all video logs, audio logs, and emails which collectively help flesh out the story considerably, but it seems a few more important details are hiding in that last 8%. Still, I also sense that some of the game's answers aren't found even there, and as someone who enjoys a lingering mystery, I happily made peace with that outcome.

There are likely branches you might expect this story to travel down, such as hostile aliens, rogue AI, madness by way of isolation--the usual suspects of a creepy space station. I won't spoil anything here, but I will say that Fort Solis is both structured unlike other stories in this po[CENSORED]r subgenre and also lands on a story that feels novel, while still keeping intact some of the more po[CENSORED]r themes of dystopian futures. Its dramatic unveiling in the final act is both threatening on a massive scale and also so innocuous in its original intent that it's actually tragic.

As some in the real world consider the prospect of colonizing Mars, Fort Solis examines why that's even on the table, what pitfalls that might include, and how even well-meaning people can cause catastrophe when we're grappling with the cosmos. It blurs the lines between heroes and villains in asking these questions, making characters complex and its ethical argument nuanced.

Those strengths helped me push through some of the game's more frustrating bits related to its gameplay mechanics. Fort Solis is an adventure game, closer to something like Firewatch--complete with the woman on the radio chatting with you as you investigate anomalies--than it is Dead Space. There's nothing wrong with that, but there are a few missteps in its execution.

 

link : https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fort-solis-review-strife-on-mars/1900-6418105/