No Man’s Sky and The Solus Project are similar in several aspects. They are both space exploration survival games, and while No Man’s Sky was arguably a bad game when it released, The Solus Project is just a bad game.
The problem with stuffing lore into the game purely in the form of notes and ancient writing, as well as forcing you to wander around, trying everything that may or may not work, and having music that sounds like it’s a 5-year-old’s attempt at spookify-ing Wagner’s Tristan chord, is that it makes for an overall laborious and boring experience. Top it off with a loading screen that looks worse than gameplay from the PS2 era, and the general aesthetic of an Alien knock-off, and you have the recipe for disaster.
The game starts off with the most utterly ingenious and original of beginnings: A crash landing on a foreign planet. You stumble outside, and to your surprise, there is rubble around the landing site. Surprisingly, the plasma flame, or whatever it’s supposed to be, stays on throughout the whole game, hot enough to kill you if you stay too close for too long. It’s also good for setting a torch aflame that somehow also will last you the whole game, and also stay alight if you go underwater, as long as you keep it tucked away in your backpack the whole time.
Like in all great space survival games, fall damage is exponentially disproportionate, because the gravitational constant is obviously different in space. Not only that, but the chance of getting stuck between basalt columns when jumping from one to the next is fairly high, often to the point where you have to restart from the last save because you have no option on how to get out. This is somewhat changed by the teleporter, but the space between the basalt columns is sometimes even too slim for the teleporter disk. However, before you even get the teleporter, you need to make sure that the mysterious rocket is actually where it’s supposed to be, after it was somehow shot out by the planet itself or the science-magic contraption that is still working when everything else is breaking down and the highest level of technology is made out of stone.
Although the game tries its hardest to give you lore, it’s really not helped by the fact that you can only read via your scanner which loads the text slower than Internet Explorer trying to show HTML5. On top of that, it’s highly unbelievable that ancient runes/foreign writing systems would be not only built up in the same way as our alphabet, but also just a literal transcription of the English language with different symbols for letters. There’s a distinct point where you just stop caring about the lore, and it’s roughly between the third and fourth times you get stuck between basalt columns. Another important point about the lore is that The Solus Project takes place in the same universe as The Ball, also developed by Teotl Studios.
The overall atmosphere of the game tries to be creepy, and somewhat manages to be so with the music of the game, but in general feels like an awkward mix between sci-fi and fantasy, with the futuristic space elements and overall design of the world clashing with the mythology and technology found in the caves and occasionally above ground. The largest threats are internal, namely hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, but frost, heat, and giant spikes are also possibilities. With the scanner being a largely monotone blue screen with blue writing, it’s easy to overlook your quickly approaching death until your controller starts buzzing like a chainsaw filled with pop-rocks.
The use of VR, sadly, is barely even as much as a gimmick, with the use of two Move controllers, one being the scanner, and the other helping you move around or pick things up. This gives you more precision with what you want to do, but as PS Move controller tracking isn’t the most accurate thing either, this leads to bugs galore. At least they don’t force you to use a normal Dualshock 4 controller, like some PS VR games do.
At the end of the day, The Solus Project isn’t a game worth investing much time in, unless you’re an avid fan of survival games and want to try something new. It is possible that you might like it, although it is fairly unlikely, as although the idea generally isn’t bad, and the story has the potential to be interesting, it would require a very different execution to be as such. The potential of VR isn’t implemented very well, either – it’s simply used as a different way of looking at the game, and aiming a bit better (if you’re lucky), which is a pity. On top of it all, it tries hard to be realistic, but ultimately the surrealism of the whole situation ruins it.
Review code provided
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