Fort Solis: A Cinematic Indie Experience

Fort Solis is an indie, cinematic storytelling game developed by Fallen Leaf and Black Drakkar Games and published by Dear Villagers. Released for Steam and PS5.

In Fort Solis, we control Jack Leary, who receives a warning signal at Fort Solis, on Mars, in the middle of a sandstorm. Accompanied by Jessica Appleton on the radio, he goes to investigate the sudden signal and strange disappearance of the team that was working there.

Stunning visuals, immersive sound design and that’s it

Being straightforward: For an Indie game, Fort Solis looks amazing. All the setting, equipment, space costumes, and lighting are very beautiful, even though we opted for the mode that focuses on performance over visual quality.

Its soundtrack is somewhat simple, with only a few tracks, but the sound design is another story. The ambient sounds—Jack’s footsteps, equipment sounds, and the like—are very well done, and they add a lot to the game’s thriller setting.

Unfortunately, that’s where the game’s good points end.

Gameplay and narrative with extreme linearity

Gameplay is based on walking with Jack and investigating Fort Solis.

Eventually we find files that tell little by little what happened and some puzzles. And in certain situations, we also need to press some buttons for him to perform some actions.

The problem is that for 85% of the game, you do nothing but walk around and search for clues. The rest consists of extremely simple puzzles (almost irrelevant) and some rare occasions in which we perform actions requiring us to press buttons, whether to open something, dodge someone, or simply turn on a machine.

These actions, despite being similar to some moments in narrative games such as Detroit Become Human and Heavy Rain, do not lead to other narrative possibilities. Everything follows a linear script.

Add that to a story that is no more than 4 hours long and concludes almost nothing of the questions it starts.

A professional cast was not enough

Fort Solis stars Roger Clark as Jack Leary and Troy Baker as Wyatt Taylor. Roger is known for his role as Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption. And Troy as Joel from The Last of Us.

Even their great performance didn’t make the game more interesting due to the excessively slow pace of the campaign.

Fort Solis is terrible for Livestream

For this review, the PS5 version was analyzed.

We played Fort Solis, opting for the “Performance” mode. Overall, it ran without frame drops, with the exception of a small portion towards the end of the game.

We tested the PS5 version, but even so, for those who choose to play on Steam, we researched several reports that the performance leaves much to be desired in the PC version.

Unfortunately, Fort Solis is so drab that it’s not very suitable for Livestreaming.

Playing it on Livestream was the same as watching a 4-hour movie, where we do nothing but walk around, move objects, and read files. As we listen to Jack and Jessica talking in the meantime.

Alexandre Gaara

Anime lover, Specialized Reviewer and Game Platinator