Review for Fort Solis
The term “walking simulator” is a bit fraught. The best walking simulators — Tacoma, What Remains of Edith Finch, and The Stanley Parable, to name a few — hold that title because their narrative elements are strong. Without a typical gameplay loop to back them up, they center around story and exploration, they follow through on the themes they present, and there is enough going on atmospherically to make you forget that you’re kind of just…walking around. The worst walking simulators are, to put it frankly, boring. Fort Solis, the story-driven sci-fi thriller from Fallen Leaf and Black Drakkar Games, unfortunately misses the mark when it comes to what makes a walking simulator great, and I’m more comfortable putting it in the latter category.
Set in the year 2080, you play as Jack Leary, an engineer who’s tasked with checking out the titular mining base after communications go silent. His colleague and close friend, Jessica Appleton, guides him on comms as he explores the base and tries to piece together what happened to its mysteriously missing crew. Jack and Jessica have the easy banter typical of two people who have been stuck on Mars together for an extended period of time and who happen to enjoy each other’s company a great deal. Their conversations are a bit clichéd in a couple of places, eliciting some eye-rolling, but the voice acting is perhaps Fort Solis’ strongest suit. Julia Brown, who voices Jessica, gives a particularly convincing performance, especially in the latter two chapters where you play as Jessica and where her shaky unease shines through brilliantly.
There are four chapters total in Fort Solis. I finished playing it in just over four hours, spending an afternoon with a cup of coffee and a Martian storm. The problem is, the atmosphere never sunk in enough for me to really enjoy that Martian storm coupled with my coffee. I never quite forgot that I was walking — very slowly — through a game environment. The developers took great pains to make Fort Solis look and feel like a cinematic experience. I imagine the slow walking pace was done in an effort to promote both immersion and realism (albeit, cinematic realism). In a film, you don’t see the characters running around constantly or experiencing things from a first-person viewpoint. The problem is, Fort Solis isn’t a film, no matter how much it wants to be, and it often fails to acknowledge its game-ness, for lack of a better term. Games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Immortality work because their stories are presented in unique, dynamic ways that change and adapt to your exploration. Fort Solis is almost painfully straightforward in comparison, simply forcing you to push the left analog stick as the film plays around you.
While the majority of Fort Solis’ gameplay consists of just that — pushing the left stick — it does require you to pay enough attention in some spots to react to Quick Time Events. These QTEs are placed in action sequences, such as climbing a rock face or having a scuffle with the game’s antagonist, but they’re used so sparingly that I often forgot they even existed. Thus, when one popped up onscreen, I wasn’t ready for it at all. As far as I can tell, failing the QTEs doesn’t have a major effect on plot points, only altering the cut scenes slightly, which begs the question: why are they even there at all? I’ll admit I’m not really a fan of QTEs. I think they can and have been used effectively in games like Until Dawn and Resident Evil 4, where they’re easy to recognize and they have a defined purpose, but in Fort Solis they have no weight to them. They feel like they were placed randomly as a way to offer some feeling of interaction beyond walking through the game and picking things up every now and then.
These items that you pick up are video and audio logs as well as emails and a few documents scattered here and there. You can also pick up and fully solve a Rubik’s cube, which constitutes the only puzzle in the game. I found myself almost aching for puzzles while playing Fort Solis. There is one section where you have to flip a bunch of switches, and I got excited thinking I was about to be presented with a puzzle, but nope — you just flip the switches in sequence and that’s it. There’s no thought to it, and it’s just another section in which the slow walking speed becomes tedious.
Another thing that adds to the game’s tedium is the map. The user interface in Fort Solis consists of an armband on which your map is housed along with any audio/video logs and emails you discover. There is no fullscreen option for the map, and it becomes increasingly hard to read as the game continues. At one point, it opens up to the outside, and I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out where to go because the game doesn’t give you any sort of indication as to what your current objective is, coupled with the fact that I could barely read the map. Everything just feels so surface-level in Fort Solis, barely thought through and secondary to its attempt to be a Netflix miniseries.
I could forgive all of this to an extent if the story landed, but it never quite does. Remember what I said about walking simulators following through on the themes they present? Fort Solis seems like it’s going to have a lot to say about sacrifice for the greater good and inadvertently causing one catastrophe while trying to avert another. Wyatt Taylor is actually a compelling and nuanced character who’s brilliantly acted by Troy Baker, but unfortunately the game — and therefore Wyatt’s storyline — just kind of abruptly ends. We never get more insight into Helen’s experiments, and there isn’t a satisfying payoff to Jack and Jessica’s struggle with Wyatt. Everything is over too quickly, and the themes the game presents are barely touched upon.
I do have to mention the score by Ted White. The soundtrack is beautiful and makes great effort to build the atmosphere that the game is sorely lacking. The end credits song, “If You Let Me” by Mary Komasa, is wonderfully placed as well and feels appropriately culminating for an ending that should have been more fleshed out than it was. Listening to the music as I played was one of the highlights of my experience with Fort Solis.
Fort Solis has potential. It does a good job of setting up its story, and the cast’s performances go a long way toward making you feel like that story is going to be something special. Unfortunately, it never unfolds in the way that I hoped it would as I played through the beginning sequences. Fort Solis’ potential is muddied by its seeming desire to be anything but a video game. It’s too slow-paced, there isn’t enough interaction, and the narrative is not presented interestingly enough for me to recommend this game in good conscience.
