There’s nothing I love more in horror than an abandoned space station, whether it’s floating in the cosmos or located on a desolate, otherwise uninhabitable world. The darkness, the flickering lights, the blood painting walls and floors, the silence of space, the certain death outside its walls – space stations make for thrilling, fear-filled environments. It’s a shame Fort Solis, the titular mining base of Fallen Leaf’s new psychological thriller, neither thrills nor fills one with fear. Rather, it bores and doesn’t justify its already brief runtime.
You’ll start the game as Jack Leary, an engineer on Mars. He heads to Fort Solis to investigate a distress signal. He’s not very distressed himself, even though the base is bereft of anyone and in lockdown as he wanders its empty halls. Jack can, if you the player decide, sit and chug a beer or shoot some billiards. There’s no urgency from Jack to find the fort’s inhabitants, and therefore I felt no urgency. The game doesn’t ramp up its thrills until at least an hour in, which might not sound very late, but my playthrough clocked in at just under three hours. Even then, the ending to Chapter 1 is a short, scripted sequence that’s mostly Jack slowly crawling through a maintenance tunnel.
Having no idea what happened to the base’s inhabitants, Jack takes of his helmet. Not a great decision, my guy.
Playing a game like this, late at night with only the TV screen illuminating my living room, I want to feel spooked. I want to feel desperate to not only uncover the mystery but to escape with my life, and Fort Solis doesn’t achieve that. Even after Jack discovers streaks of blood on the floor leading to a dead body – the first of a few he’ll encounter – he still goes back to joking with Jessica, a minor also working on Mars. She’s in his ear as he investigates, and even she remains largely ambivalent as Jack encounters the bodies of Fort Solis’s occupants.
There’s a moment in Chapter 3 where I thought the game was really about to get good. Your player character enters a new area, and immediately takes off their helmet to vomit. They’re frightened by something the camera isn’t revealing yet, and need a moment to compose themself. Once collected, they’ll turn a corner to head to a terminal, a bloodied body lying still in their path. What does the terminal need? A specific handprint to activate. Where is that hand? Severed in a pool of blood. I was expecting an immersive, blood-draining sequence of having to overcome fear to pick up the severed hand. Maybe they’d drop it in the pool of blood, furthering the gross factor. And maybe the blood gets in the way of the handprint sensor, and they’d have to clean off a dead guy’s severed hand to make it work.
Nope. They pick up the hand, make a minor fearful comment, use the hand, and go about the objective like nothing just happened. You’ll then run around this area for a bit to solve a minor puzzle, and all the while your PC will make no further comment on the dead body or the harrowing situation they found themself in. The poor dead fellow became window dressing, and I became disappointed.
This sequence above was maybe the most thrilled I was during the game, but my heart rate barely elevated. Fort Solis had an annoying habit of wresting control away from me whenever something big was about to happen. Get off an elevator in a new area? The game takes over camera and character movement, making the “surprise” attack not so surprising.
The base itself is rendered well and creates a spooky environment.
I got to a certain point late in my experience when I began questioning if everything in Fort Solis was even real. The game’s antagonist is so Michael Meyers-y in that they appear and disappear without a trace whenever the plot demands. They sustain several wounds and simply shake them off like an unkillable horror villain. As the ending to the game felt a wee close to being a deus ex machina, I questioned if this whole story wasn’t in Jack’s head. However, Fort Solis isn’t that kind of psychological thriller–there’s enough evidence throughout the game to indicate these events are reality–making it end up closer to b-movie horror status than the psychological thriller it aspired to be.
We don’t even really get enough context as to what caused the events at Fort Solis to unfold. I won’t spoil the details for you, so I’ll just say that the game does most of its storytelling in optional audio logs, video recordings, and emails. I discovered about two thirds of all available discoverables, yet I still felt like I could scarcely piece together exactly what happened to this mining base. I thought I had a pretty good idea, but I wasn’t not confident. If you grow impatient with the game and start glossing over those logs, you’ll surely be left in the dark. Most damning, however, is that, by the end, I didn’t even care that much whether or not I knew the full story.
Gameplay mostly consists of walking, QTEs, and inspecting objects and terminals throughout Fort Solis.
Now, Fort Solis isn’t all doom and gloom–it did excel in a few areas. Namely, it’s an indie game with Triple A production value. The voice acting truly shines, with Red Dead Redemption 2 star Roger Clark, The Last of Us leading man Troy Baker, and rising talent Julia Brown all delivering standout performances as the three leads. With such excellent motion capture and high visual fidelity, there were plenty of times you could mistake Fort Solis for a horror film and not a game, and I imagine that was the developers’ goal in creating this immersive cinematic narrative.
Unfortunately, though, a well-acted, visually impressive game does not necessarily make a great game. Fort Solis lacked characters for me to invest in, thrilling moments to frighten me, and an interesting plot to truly hook me. I had high hopes for Fort Solis, but I found myself somewhere between bored and uninterested throughout most of its runtime.
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