The year 2023 has been a great one for gaming, and fans have been treated to plenty of highly anticipated releases like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Dead Space remake among a slew of other hits. Of course, the year is far from over – and the coming months are stacked with even more highly anticipated releases like Starfield and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 that will most likely go down as some of the best experiences of this year.
That said, 2023 has also been the year of dark horses. Games such as Hi-Fi Rush and more recently, Viewfinder seemingly came out of nowhere and instantly won the hearts of many fans. And when talking about dark horses, it’s impossible not to mention the upcoming Fort Solis which is another ambitious sci-fi game that looks like it could make a name for itself and end up becoming one of the biggest games of 2023.
Currently in development at Dear Villagers who previously published the excellent time looping adventure The Forgotten City, Fort Solis describes itself as a sci-fi thriller set on Mars. The game takes place in a future where mankind has expanded its horizons beyond Earth, and the planet of Mars is being used for mining important minerals and resources in huge mining rigs. Upon hearing a distress signal from a large mining facility named Fort Solis, our protagonist Jack arrives at the facility only to be met with nothing but questions and a mystery that only grows deeper as you progress through the story.
As mentioned previously, you will be assuming the role of Jack for most of the adventure but later stages will allow you to swap characters with your companion Jessica portrayed by Julia Brown. The writing looks to be quality stuff, and the characters in Fort Solis are morally gray ones with understandable motivations and compelling character arcs that will unravel during the course of the story. It’s also wonderfully brought to life with high-quality motion capture and performance by popular voice actors like Troy Baker and Roger Clark – which definitely has us excited to see what these familiar faces will be bringing to the table for the final release.
Dear Villagers has cited Quantic Dream’s works like Detroit: Become Human as major inspirations for Fort Solis, so naturally choice and consequence mechanics will play a huge role in the game. You will get to choose your preferred path at several critical points in the story, and the choices that you make during those moments will ultimately dictate which one of the many endings you get.
Coming to the gameplay front, the moment-to-moment gameplay of Fort Solis revolves around exploring the many environments as you search for the answers to your questions and finally get to the bottom of what actually happened to the station crew. There’s a wide variety of environments available for you to explore, ranging from the sandstorm-stricken surface of Mars to the many cramped-up interiors and corridors of the indoor facility.
Exploration on the surface is largely done through a Mako-like space vehicle, and getting around Mars will progressively get difficult as the sandstorm will continue to worsen as you make your way through the story. The indoors, on the other hand, provide a different kind of traversal challenge where you must solve different kinds of puzzles to gain access to locked areas and move on with the story.
One of the more interesting things about Fort Solis’ approach to exploration is that all areas are technically open to be explored from the get-go. Sure, there’s going to be a critical path that will guide you through it all – but the only thing stopping you from accessing late-game areas and locked doors is the knowledge of how the game actually functions. Players will have a useful Unitool available for use, and important elements like hacking doors or bypassing other security measures will be done through the same tool – and its utility will only grow as you progress through the game. It all sounds something like the puzzles in Outer Wilds where progression and exploration are strongly linked with one another, and such type of knowledge-based progression will hopefully make Fort Solis a highly refreshing experience.
As for the combat, Fort Solis sticks to the fact that our protagonist Jack is an engineer – so he wouldn’t obviously be very effective with weapons. As such, you will not be taking part in shooting or fighting segments but there will be set-piece moments peppered throughout the adventure which will help add a dash of action to the gameplay proceedings. On the topic of action sequences, it’s also important to mention that Fort Solis will be a one-shot experience from beginning to end much like the recent God of War games, so it’s going to be interesting to see how the action transitions from one scene to the another without the use of any traditional camera cuts. The developers have also stated that players will have a lot more agency in these segments when compared to traditional QTEs found in narrative thrillers, so that’s pretty exciting to hear as well.
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to talk about the visuals. Fort Solis is a highly atmospheric game, and it’s all brought to life in a beautiful manner thanks to the power of Unreal Engine 5. Everything from the carefully rendered character models to the imaginative environments and impressive lighting implementation comes together to create a highly evocative world that would most likely be a joy to explore.
While we could go on and on and keep on waxing lyrical about what makes Fort Solis such a promising game, but it takes a lot more than just making a good game to turn it into a success. Thankfully, Fallen Leaf Studios seems to be on the right track in this regard – though not without some issues. Take for instance, the release date of 22 August, 2023 – which is usually a rather dry period for video game releases. While Fallen Leaf’s upcoming title will be going up against the highly anticipated Armored Core 6 which comes out on August 25, but both of these are drastically different experiences catering to entirely different audiences. Armored Core 6 is a brutal action game, while Fort Solis on the other hand is a comparatively laid-back thriller with little to no combat sequences.
Of course, the marketing for the game has been somewhat on the weaker side since many elements of the gameplay and details about the story continue to remain scant even less than a month ahead of its release. But once the developer course corrects this issue, Fort Solis will make an even stronger case for itself as yet another surprise hit of 2023.
In conclusion, Fort Solis is definitely a game that has an interesting premise brought to life by a star-studded cast of actors and compelling gameplay with plenty of choice and freedom for both exploration and progression. It has a lot of potential, and we are hoping that Fallen Leaf is able to capitalize on its merits and create something that surpasses expectations. Fingers crossed, until then.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
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