Fort Solis Preview

From studio Fallen Leaf comes a third person, narrative thriller set on Mars called Fort Solis. We got to experience a preview build of the game on the PAX East show floor and it did not disappoint.

The game is an exploration of space station and it’s surroundings to figure out what caused an alarm call from a mining base on the planet’s surface. You play as Jack Leary, a repair engineer, who takes it upon himself to answer the call and investigate what’s going on. It stars such talent as Troy Baker, Roger Clark and Julia Brown, they pull double duty with motion capture and voice acting.

What unfolds as your explore the station is a mystery that begins to spiral out of control. In the portion of the game that we got to experience, we took Jack around the inside of the station, traveling between washrooms, lounges, offices and common areas that looked decidedly lived in. Much of the storytelling is combination of environmental details, internal messages between personnel, video logs and audio recordings, the latter of which is convincingly told by the excellent cast. Gameplay consists of traversing around the various section of the space station, gathering info on what has taken place here. Finding batteries for generators, keycards for doors and restarting generators and squeezing through tight passageways is what we experienced in our slice of the game. Quick time events were also experienced as a cart came careening toward us and we dodged out of the way.

Our liaison informed us that failing these events won’t end in a game over as the game will continue but the story will change and perhaps your character now has a limp from not avoiding the danger. Ultimately though, this will culminate in one of two endings providing some replayability for those who want it. Surprising the game is fairly relaxed in what is asked of the player to do all while ramping up the tension of the mystery of the station.

All in all, Fort Solis is shaping up to be a very good game. It should be worth noting that although there is a lot of detail in the animation, textures and environments, the game did show some visual glitches and a little stuttering in some of the animations. The build that we saw wasn’t the latest and the game still has a few months till release this summer, so Fallen Leaf has some time to add that triple A polish that this game deserved.

We are super hyped for Fort Solis and are looking forward to the release later this summer on PC and PS5.