Fort Solis

Fort Solis is the first game from independent British development team Fallen Leaf Studio. It is an experience focused on storytelling and excitement and promises to offer a distinctive level of graphics while using version 5.2 of the Unreal Engine development engine. It’s time to learn more about this experience and find out if the development team is able to offer a unique experience with its first game.

The events of the story take place on the planet Mars and begin with engineers Jack Leary and Jessica Appleton on a routine maintenance tour during the planet’s storm season. As they work, an emergency call is made from the Fort Solis mining facility. So Jack decides to respond to the emergency call and goes to inspect the facility and its crew. Jack arrives at the facility and finds her. Completely empty with no crew members responding to his attempts to communicate with them, and this is where things get even worse. It’s a mystery as to what happened at the facility and the reason for the distress call. The game will gradually provide the player with details through some audio and video recordings and some correspondence that you will find as you explore the facility. The story was interesting at first because it was built gradually and very slowly over the first two hours, where the focus was to add more mystery to the story and make the player ask more questions. Of questions.

The unfortunate thing is that the careful and slow build-up of the story in the first half is followed by a relatively large acceleration of events, but without any actual details through which the events can be understood! At the end of the experiment you won’t be sure what really happened in the facility? Some audio recordings will make you think about a particular possibility but without clear details, and some files and video recordings suggest another possibility, but all the evidence and details provided to the player are either blurry or incomplete, and it’s also like the development team jumped from the middle of the story to the end! Had the experiment not been short and discussing additional details might have spoiled it, we would have explained more about it.

Graphics and Voice Acting

One of the experience’s standout strengths is the voice acting, which was particularly masterful for the three main characters, Jack and Jessica, as well as Wyatt, a member of the Fort Solis crew. While exploring the facility, conversations will take place between Jack and Jessica to try and resolve Jack’s feelings of loneliness and tension due to the strange situation in the facility. The character Jack’s singing performance was, in my opinion, the best as it balanced the sarcastic nature of the character and his attempt to encourage himself to move forward despite the tension and fear that will increase as events unfold.

On the graphical level, the game actually varies in level, but the development team intelligently took advantage of the Unreal Engine. Overall, the characters’ facial features and expressions were very good and excellent for a game from an independent developer. Effects such as lighting and shadows, special attention was paid to adding aesthetics to the facility’s narrow corridors, and lighting was manipulated. This is the development team’s basic cloaking method to cover up graphical defects. If you look closely at the details, even just a little bit of the area, you will notice an annoying smoothness and blur, especially when you walk around outside the facility and look at the details of the Martian surface. Additionally, the very dark areas clearly highlighted the varying levels of these details, but we appreciate the intelligence of the development team. By taking advantage of the development engine’s techniques to present his game in the best possible way, which might have helped him reduce the cost of the development process, the game suffers from some performance issues represented by severe and sudden frame slowdowns , although the majority of the experience takes place in this small facility.

Gaming Experience and Puzzles

We can’t say that the game offers actual puzzles. Rather, they can be described as obstacles, nothing more. You will find some doors that require a power source, which means you go into the adjacent rooms to look for that source and then return. You also will have some obstacles that require you to operate some devices in a certain order and a team might have done this. The development has added more depth to the gaming experience, putting more effort into these puzzles and making the player think about how to solve them in order to break the oppressive rhythm of wandering.

As you go through the facility you will find a group of movie posters that can be collected and you will also find some elements that can be interacted with, such as a pool table, but the way the movement is very slow Figure has made us reluctant to waste more time collecting these posters or interacting with elements that have nothing to do with the story and its details. This is another attempt by the development team to extend the life of this short experience.

Conclusion

We completed Fort Solis in 4 hours, and the game could have been completed in much less time if it weren’t for the slow movement. The game delivered excellent performances from its characters, but failed to complete the construction of telling the story in the required manner. And we shouldn’t forget the difficult gaming experience to accept, with its strong limitations and slow movements that make it a short experience. Difficult for the player who wants to complete it as quickly as possible!