The Game Tutor Grades The Solus Project

The Solus Project a narrative explorations, sorta survival game recently released on Steam.

You start the game as a crew member aboard a colony ship sent to find a new home following the destruction of Earth. After an unknown event causes you to crash land on an alien planet you find yourself wandering out into the wilderness trying to find survivors and a way to contact home.

The Solus Project is by and large and exploration game with some puzzle solving with the survival aspects never really causing too much concern. I played the game on medium so if you are looking for more of a survival edge to your experience it may be worth cranking up to hard from the get go.

As you explore the hostile planet it becomes clear this is not an empty planet at all as you start to uncover signs of civilisation. To not give away any spoilers I will not talk about this in detail but let’s just say that the bits of civilisation play a key part in the game’s narrative and exploration.

You have a number of other items at your disposal such as a teleporter which is useful for getting through gaps and up ledges and a beacon allowing you to return if you get lost in a cave. There is also a basic crafting system allowing the creation of items such as a fire torch but this never seemed to run out and could be out away in your inventory for use later.

The inventory system is actually one of my least favourite parts of the game. You can actually hold a lot of items and cycling through these can take a really long time. Especially when stood in pitch black trying to search through mountains of food and water bottles in search of the flaming torch.

Visually the game is gorgeous and contains some of the best weather effects I have ever seen in a game. The tornado and meteor showers that occasionally fill the landscape are awe dropping and were one of the first times in a long time I have been genuinely impressed by graphics in a game.

The pacing in the game is a little odd. The game is broken up into a series of “islands” connected by underground caves. These cave sections are usually one long corridor connected by a series of puzzles and these often felt too long to traverse. Equally while I get the idea of wanting to make the players feel like they are on a massive planet (even though we happen to crash land literally next to these alien structures) some of the outside areas are a little sparse and could do with being a little more densely packed with stuff to see and things to explore.

A few little gripes aside The Solus Project is an excellent adventure game that I enjoyed playing although I do feel that the game actually being a little bit shorter and more concise would have helped it in the long run.