Who doesn’t love survival games? Very few people. The Solus Project combines survival with exploration, but lacks that extra step to really put it over the edge and its competitors.
The story
You take control of a space explorer that has a mission. The task is not the easiest – save the whole mankind. You encounter problems and your spaceship crashes in an unknown part of space, on the surface of planet Gliese-6143-C. So far, sounds like a typical space survival game, but just wait it isn’t what it might look like. The planet you appear on becomes the setting for the game and it grasps you in from the very beginning. As the only survivor, you feel lonely while carrying probably the hardest burden of any human – save the race. The main enemies in The Solus Project are the alien civilization which inhabits the planet of Gliese.
The game
Solus Project combines, survival, adventure and environment simulation. Plants can grow and rot, dynamic weather and temperature, humidity and other stats all affect you, so you have to be constantly monitoring the environment around you, the game gets props for that. This is a first person game that is visually very appealing, but some mechanics feel hard to manage, for example tracking temperature, humidity and other things might cause a headache. The game is divided in to three main parts, Survive and live, collect and explore.
Survive: this is a survival game, you’re lost on the surface of an unknown planet, the aliens are aggressive and there are many climate’s jokes (tornadoes, hurricanes, temperatures) that you have to be independent on.
Collect: The main focus is to survive and in order to do so, you need to communicate the outside world, with a communication device, so collect useful parts for its construction.
Explore: You need to uncover the secrets that this planet is hiding about the alien civilization. Knowledge is power and power will allow you to survive.
Look at the sky and you’ll see two moons orbiting around the planet, creating tides and immersing you in the atmospheric world of Gliese. Pop in the Oculus Rift for complete immersion. There are only a few games that feel like they were literally made to play just this way.
The temperatures range from +40 Celsius during the day to -35 at night, so you need to be prepared. The dynamic weather system feels very realistic and the environment is harsh and unforgiving, yet management and coping could be easier to manipulate. There are puzzles to solve, and things to do in this game, besides just trying to survive on food and water. The main motivation the player finds is that You can’t die because mankind might end with you.
Horror?
Some reviews said that this is a survival-horror game. We disagree, this is a tragic and sad story that develops in to an intense, involving and solid gameplay. The game is 20+ hours in length and the beautiful environments are way to pretty and well-lit to be from a horror game. The Solus Project won’t try to scare or frighten you. It wants you to explore, interact and do things your way. There are enemies, mysteries, but finding relics and alien wildlife is far from a horror game.
Summing up our experience, we would say that this game is very memorable, stunning visually, with a good atmosphere and immersion, but lacks detail in some elements of the core mechanics, the ending is far from great and there just isn’t anything to remember in comparison to even No Man’s Sky, which is by far the weaker game of the two.