Back in 2023, Fallen Leaf, Black Drakkar Games, and Dear Villagers released a sci-fi horror adventure game that took PlayStation and PC players to Mars. Today, Feardemic is bringing Xbox players to Fort Solis.
Fort Solis puts you in the boots of Jack and Jessica, two engineers working on Mars, when an alert comes over their coms from Fort Solis, an antiquated base. After arriving to investigate, Jack soon finds the base to be completely abandoned…or is it?
Now, onto the game itself! When it comes to controls, it’s minimal; just be prepared to notice that the characters will continue to move a step or two after you stop on the controller. The one major bummer is that there’s no “Run” button, but I’ll get to that later.
Sond design and soundtrack, they nailed it. The voice talent of the game’s three main characters, played by Roger Clark, Julia Brown, and the legendary VO actor Troy Baker. All gave great performances that added to their characters, including the other members of the voice cast.
When it comes to the game’s graphics and art, that was the selling point for me; the graphics are amazing, but one issue I’ve noticed is that it’s harder than hell to read anything.
Well then…now that we’re done talking about the “Good” of this game…time to get down with the bad… The gameplay and plot. From this point, there will be SPOILERS; if you wish to avoid them, skip ahead to where it says, Overall.
The weakest aspect of the game is the gameplay itself. It’s quite flawed, as 90% of the game is just you walking and investigating Fort Solis and finding clues to what happened there. So when the game decides it wants to make things exciting, there are quick-time events that really serve no purpose, as there’s no consequence or advantage gained by being successful with the responses. When I said that the game needed a “Run” button, I think that if there were one, the game would be shorter.
The plot ultimately proved to be very weak, despite a promising start. From what I could make out from the written lore within the game, and with what I alternatively experienced while playing it, Fort Solis could not pick one sci-fi horror trope and stuck to it; it picked multiple ones to run alongside one another. There’s talk/hints of an alien, there’s a virus that changes people, some kind of corporate cover-up for illegal operations, a viral outbreak, and space madness. So that’s why, at the end of the game, it was confusing, as they made it clear that the sole survivor of Fort Solis just went crazy and killed everyone, thinking he was stopping the spread of a virus, but there’s a post-credit scene where it shows that the one survivor sent a plant back home and they play a voice message from him telling his wife to NOT open the box he just sent. This part really burned my ass, and I’ll tell you why.
From a storyteller’s perspective, this is why you need editors or others to read over your story. The post-credit scene, and an email you find from the one character’s wife, freaking out over his message, don’t line up with events within the game because of two massive in-your-face things. One, the character in question was going to send his daughter, Rachel, a plant growing in Martian soil. The character in question mentions that they “Almost sent a plant home to my daughter!”. Two, you actually find the plant in question in the game, inside this character’s living quarters, a plant with a post-it note saying “Rachel” on it, which means one thing: someone really f-ked up in the continuity department.
Overall, Fort Solis was promising at its surface, but once you got into the game, you start to unravel all its flaws pretty quickly. From useless quick-time events, lack of real danger to the characters, the unnecessary slowness in making the characters walk all the time (dude, if your game is short, it’s short, don’t annoy the player), useless map, hard-to-read texts, and the jumbled plot that can’t pick a lane. It was not an enjoyable experience.
The good graphics, sound/music, and voice cast could not save Fort Solis from itself. On my scale of 1-10, Fort Solis is a 4. If you choose to give this game a try, it’s available now on Xbox Series X/S, along with PlayStation 5, and PC.
