Fort Solis Review

Fort Solis is an indie 3D narrative thriller game developed by Fallen Leaf and published by Dear Villagers on the 22nd of August. It takes place on Mars in the future and follows the story of Jack Leary, who went out to investigate an alarm that went off in the titular base. The game is viewed from a third-person perspective and has gameplay that resembles Detroit: Become Human and Life Is Strange. It is split into four chapters, each taking around an hour and a half to complete.

The story goes like this: when going out to search the base, Jack finds it abandoned. Exploring the location, a lot of information about it and the people who are supposed to live there is revealed through audio logs, video recordings, and “emails”. Helping with the mission from afar and keeping Jack company, Jessica is always ready on comms. She’s a long-time friend of our main character, and they seem to really like making fun of each other. Eventually, Jack does see some people, but most of them are dead. He tells Jessica about what he saw, and she contacts help, while Jack continues to explore and try to figure out what’s going on. It’s very interesting and definitely does a good job captivating the player.

While exploring and trying to find out what happened, the protagonist often runs into trouble: doors that can’t be opened, alarms going off, and objects flying right into his face. He looks for clues that reveal what happened to everyone at the base. In order to continue, there are puzzles that need to be solved; some are well-designed, others less so. There are also some gameplay sequences that require quick reflexes and reactions, but the main focus is the narrative. There are little problems with the pacing at parts, with some sections feeling a little too long and some too short, but it’s barely felt except for one very specific situation that happens in Chapter 1.

Fort Solis’ gameplay is what you usually see in narrative thrillers: most of the time, you just walk around and interact with some objects. There isn’t really anything innovative or new about it, and it’s not for everyone, but it’s not bad. New mechanics aren’t introduced at any point, and the gameplay stays the same throughout the entire experience. The controls are comfortable, and the game reacts very well to player input. The only problem I’ve had with it is that entering through doorways can be tricky sometimes because the character model is pretty big, which can be annoying. It’s best to play the game with a controller, although it’s still possible to do so with a mouse and a keyboard.

Fort Solis has amazing graphics, even when compared to huge AAA releases. Everything is very detailed, and the animations look stunning. The visual effects, the design, and everything else look like a huge amount of effort was put into them and are very impressive. Equally good is the sound design, with talented voice actors such as The Last of Us’ Troy Baker, who played Joel, and Red Dead Redemption 2’s Roger Clark. The sound effects and the music are also great and don’t have any problem. Fort Solis doesn’t always play music, so when it does, it’s much more impactful.

But these good graphics come at a cost — performance (or more precisely, requirements for good performance). The game isn’t poorly optimised but is very heavy on the GPU, even with more modern GPUs. It provides FSR2 technology which can make it run much smoother but it isn’t really good in terms of maintaining good graphics. The game requires a pretty strong GPU, but even my almost-recommended RX 6700 XT (the recommended GPU is an RX 6800) struggled to maintain good frames on medium graphics at 1080p. The game also has unrelated crashing issues — not after starting the game, which makes it infinitely better, but when launching it, there’s a big chance it’ll crash before opening. It happened to me in more than half of my attempts to launch the game and was really frustrating.

Overall, the game is really good and shows that producing a game with AAA quality is possible without shipping it with thousands of bugs or underdelivering on promises. On top of that, Fort Solis only costs £20.99, being a lot cheaper than the usual price of games that have this quality. It also doesn’t have any “premium version” or any DLCs — it provides players with one fair price for everything it has to offer. The game manages to keep the story interesting and has an atmosphere that keeps the player on edge and waiting for the next thing to happen. 

So, while the game does have some small problems, the overall quality really compensates for that. The crashing doesn’t actually affect gameplay because it only happens while trying to launch the game, and while the game isn’t optimised perfectly, it’s not poorly optimised at all, as there are only large problems if you play with an old GPU that won’t let you run any AAA game released in the last couple years.