Fort Solis Review: Gameplay Impressions, Videos and Speedrunning Tips

Fort Solis from developer Fallen Leaf Studios is unapologetic in its pursuit of telling an immersive story.

A non-standard science fiction horror experience, the effort sticks to storytelling goals and quickly shakes free of comparisons to genre mates such as Dead Space.

The eyebrow-raising backdrop that is a marriage between a smaller developer with an absolute star-studded cast of big names says this at first glance.

And once Fort Solis gets its hooks in a player, the first glance, like the game itself, becomes much, much more.

Graphics and Gameplay

Roger Clark, largely known for his historic work as Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption II, headlines the jaw-dropping cast of talent in the lead role. Troy Baker, Joel from The Last of Us, to name just one of his many iconic roles, plays a key part in the story's unraveling too.

Not to be outdone is Julia Brown, who turns in a wonderful performance as the third primary voice players will hear the most and very much holds her own, if not exceeds the two bigger names sharing the spotlight.

Which is to say Fort Solis is an incredible experience from a sound design standpoint. The consistent ambient sounds throughout the game, including a heart-thumping ratcheting up to emphasize certain moments, is downright engrossing.

So too is the banter between the characters, especially early when a routine mission merely features a back-and-forth as two lonely people on Mars grip to anything human, such as the zombie show they were watching together. That, before the mission erupts into sheer horror.

Graphic design punches at the weight of the fantastic voice acting, too. Everything built within Unreal Engine 5 looks fantastic here, in part because the game isn't trying to do too much at a massive scale. Shadows, reflections off helmets, a flashlight that turns with the player's head, mirrors, screens that relay programming and info, everything looks fantastic.

As players explore, the game handles environmental storytelling better than most to date. Each area is packed with little details, be it the personal belongings of a crewmate stuffed into the locker, little notes left around an area or contextual clues about what happened at the station.

Aided by the fantastic performances, the mannerisms of characters who progress the story through mere videos on the player's wrist display are wrought with emotion that quickly leaves one invested in what happened to them on what feels like a personal level.

Fort Solis is more than happy to go Hollywood in certain moments, such as the opening credits during a drive across Mars where the camera pans back to show the scope of the lonely station. It's also happy to make sure a camera can only pan slowly, as if priming players for a jump scare.

All of this unfolds without much of a HUD at all, only furthering immersion. This can cause frustration at times when needing to pull up the wrist display to check an objective, but the tradeoff is quite worth it.

The third-person perspective is intimate, only serving to enhance the feeling of dread and isolated companionship with the main character. This isn't Dead Space or similar—there is no overarching monster waiting to jump out of the shadows. Much of the dread comes from how normal everything feels.

Where Fort Solis feels oddly older in design is through the use of quick-time events. Some players won't mind them, which is fine, but there are moments where there seems to be just enough input lag to create mistakes.

Otherwise, this is a methodical, weighty gameplay experience, to the point the pace might turn off some players. But that's part of the charm in the storytelling, as the station itself and the mystery quickly becomes a character in its own right.

Much of the gameplay is merely looking for clues, interacting with minor puzzles and doing quick side activities—such as early on, sitting down with a beer (to which the main character quips on comms about it being important to stay hydrated). The expected backtracking via increasing security clearance unfolds nicely.

There's a charming overall gameplay loop in Fort Solis that feels almost cozy, which maybe is the point—when the narrative decides to rip that rug out from under players, it's impossible to not react and applaud.

Story and More

In some respects, the story of Fort Solis feels familiar.

It's the delivery that makes it stand out.

Players control engineer Jack Leary (Clark) as he responds to an emergency signal, finding a deserted station and plenty of mysteries to boot. He's not a self-talker often, instead consistently trading barbs and thoughts with Jessica Appleton (Brown) as guide over comms.

The setup oozes inspiration from Firewatch and similar games, while voice and video logs deliver context to the world.

While it seems somewhat at odds with the inclusion of the video game-y quick-time events, the game leans into narrative moments instead of cutscenes to great effect. There are certain decisions that appear to impact how things play out to some degree.

Much of the interactive things players find in the environment are optional, but it's hard to understate just how much characterization they give to the world and, more importantly, the people closest to the player.

Players might not necessarily head into a sci-fi horror experience expecting to register characters as some of their favorite in recent games or to care so deeply about what unfolds, but the narrative and delivery combine to simply make it so.

Besides QTEs, the most game-ish thing Fort Solis does is permit the rounding up of collectibles such as movie posters. But even those are optional, yet spark dialogue and thoughts that add to the richness of the immersion and connection.

Even the pacing of the story feels nice, especially once a player gets settled into what the game wants to do. If there's a complaint, it's that it ends too soon—which is a pretty good problem for a game to have most of the time. The narrative endpoint makes sense, but that yearning for more speaks to the quality of the story and surrounding elements.

There isn't much to Fort Solis beyond the story and a by-the-books photo mode. Achievements earned through little easter eggs are nice and the suite of options, graphical or otherwise, hit the necessary marks.

Performance can be where Fort Solis hiccups at launch, with textures sometimes lagging into existence and minor slowdowns when the game loads up a new area.

The biggest issue by far, since it can harm immersion, is an objective marker on the wristwatch that is sometimes at odds with what the player needs to do, at one point pinpointing an area where the player can do nothing until they travel somewhere else. But it's fixable and, annoyance aside, the tension of slowly backtracking through the halls never abated.

Speedrunning Tips

In similar games, somewhat-healthy speedrunning communities can pop up because the variability of weapons and things like skill tree selection make it fun to watch and/or discover best practices in pursuit of record runs.

Not so much here.

Fort Solis probably doesn't have a long-term shelf life as a speedrunner's haven because of the linearity and lack of skill checks. That said, proper pathing and the ability to hit those QTEs reliably will come into play.

Standard tips otherwise apply, such as skipping optional things. And the player can even speed up the mandatory things such as audio logs by backing out once activated. The audio will keep playing and the runner can right on to the next mandatory thing, to the point of even having the prior audio cut off by something new.

Conclusion

Fort Solis is a great example of where video games as a medium can branch off further in the future.

It's in no way an insult to suggest the experience feels akin to binge-watching an excellent six or seven-episode series of the utmost quality—but players are in control at all times, ideally with good headphones.

Fort Solis is a little on the short side and the pacing won't be for everyone. But it's hard not to pound the table for its success because the story and feelings the entire package can provoke are unmatched by most games.

Given this, it's fair to position Fort Solis as one of the breakout sleeper hits of 2023, which is saying something with how near-historic this year has been and will continue to be.