This is a continuation of my ongoing review of The Solus Project. Having played a good deal more of the game, I'd like to comment on a few more impressions.

In my last post, I noted that the underground space appeared far less diverse and interesting than the outside world - but that I got the impression there was more to that part of the game. Well, this is certainly true. Without giving much away, I think it is safe to say that there are fairly extensive ruins underground to be explored, with striking architecture and additional hints about other intelligent life-forms, These underground spaces are interesting as well because they can contain secrets - creative thinking of the tools available and consideration of the physical space around you can reveal passages to upgrades and other goodies.

The underground spaces have helped solidify a bit of the vague... perhaps not "narrative" but "theme" of the game. There is a loose plot tied to survival on this harsh world, with context provided through notes and audio logs as noted before, but your personal story is given more context as you learn more about the world as well. It's not just a "space" you are trying not to die in, but there's a history here as well.

The environment

I remain somewhat disappointed in some of the variety of the natural underground - there have been some striking locations in the caves, as well as some hazardous ones, but more or less it's fairly repetitive scenery until you hit the next exit to the surface or underground structure. A few noteworthy components are immense glowing crystaline features that are also characterized by a dramatic decrease in temperature in their vicinity. They are beautiful to look at, add variety to the space, and because you actually care about body temperature they carry physical meaning to the player (that being said, I have yet to feel endangered in their presence. This is in part because you won't get far anywhere in the game without some basic supplies to help regulate your body's needs, including temperature. And because of that, I have yet to be in their presence without protection against hypothermia already at hand). Another noteworthy experience was when I stumbled across some benign organisms that look and sound terrifying in motion, while resembling some sort of plant when static. These little buggers scared the life out of me. I have also (once only) encountered some not-so-benign organisms in the tunnels... this was a refreshing change of pace given the aforementioned complaints about the caves, and certainly got my blood pumping.

As I have played more through the game, the hazards of both the environment and the ruins have drawn me in. I've been seriously injured by traps that looked to the clumsy wanderer like decoration, but upon reflection a wiser and more scarred me could appreciate the clues that should have warned me to give them a wider birth. Similarly, who knew weather and meteorological phenomena could be dangerous, right? Sure, some games you might take damage in severe blizzards, but here you really do not want to get caught at night in a pouring rain or snow - and don't get wet or that situation will really become untenable. Ever seen a meteor shower in a game and thought "ooh, pretty lights" and left it at that? That was my reaction during the first few I saw. Until one of the meteors actually hit me and instantly ended my suffering. Suddenly I realized that hail of fiery lights I'd been treating as "atmosphere" was in fact equivalent to a German shell bombardment in WWI and I was a poor sap in a trench.

I am really enjoying the manageable but tangible and realistic challenge the physical world poses in this game. It gives meaning to features that are just eye candy in so many games these days.

The sound

Another feature of the game that deserves some attention is the sound. In general, so few reviews comment on audio these days, and I think I would be particularly remiss if I neglected to give the audio any mention when discussing this game. This is because it's so good, and plays such an important part in the atmosphere of the game. There is a musical score that fades in and out times, but it's very subtle (in a good way. Read: unobtrusive) and the simple reverberating notes mesh well with environmental sounds in the game. Contextual shifts in this underlaid score only enhance this organic feeling (e.g., when a significant change in the environment is emerging). Most actions, entities, and events in the game have a sound, and most of the time the only thing you hear is your breathing, your footsteps, and these ambient noises. Sometimes there are important cues in the sounds - for example critical physical conditions or states of exhaustion result in corresponding changes in your breathing as well as your vision, and sounds can warn of, or amplify the gravitas of, incoming atmospheric dangers (earthquakes, the aforementioned meteors, etc). Of course you have many visual cues signaling these issues and events; nevertheless, the sound effects are skillfully done and really add to the sense of presence. They help make the world feel more alien, your body more real, and your actions more physical.

Overall, I'm loving the game.

There have been a few design choices that are annoying. For example, in one instance a very important item to progress was hidden in the whole, vast, dangerous world, underneath a pile of items I didn't need (and didn't have room to pick up). Here you might argue "it's your fault if you aren't exploring the world deeply enough" - but the reader should bear with me: there is no "item list" when looking in a crate like you might find in RPGs. Everything is interacted with in-engine, such that if opening container reveals a pile of objects... it is literally a pile of individually-rendered items that must each be manually moved in order to see if there is anything underneath. This is very realistic; I appreciate that. I can hear the indignation at this line of complaint rising already, and there may be a lesson for me here (to go rifling through every pile of crap you find). But even in the context of a survival game it came off as an unnecessarily frustrating level design choice in this one instance. Maybe hide goodies this way, but a quest item? It's not a "puzzle" - you aren't challenging my executive functions so much as my dumb luck and an unhealthy predisposition for dumpster diving. One assumes the developer figured "hey, the player will want these items, so when they pick them up they'll find stuff underneath!" - but if you are a diligent survivalist, effective scavenger, and resource manager, then that assumption may be very very wrong because you in fact have no need for those items and this can lead certain players *cough* to spend ages wandering the region and overthinking the issue ("maybe it's an elaborate puzzle I need to solve! What can I click on in the environment that could be relevant to the barrier in front of me?". Nope). You are strongly disincentivized from manually dropping 5 items you need from your inventory in order to pick up 5 new items in front of you which you do not need.

These are minor grumbles. I have yet to experience any bugs, and these experiences are more questionable design choices at worst. I can't wait to play more, and feel comfortable already saying that it has been worth more than its early access price to me.

I decided to pick up The Solus Project on GoG today, and begin to see what the world has to offer. For those of you unfamiliar with the title, it is currently in development for PC and XBox One, and is being released "episodically" at the moment with a complete final product release aimed at May 2016. It is a sci-fi survival game, not unlike many first person survival games on the market already except for 1) the striking alien planet setting, and 2) it has a somewhat crystalized plot and provides clear objectives to the player related to said plot.

You can read more of the official information about the game here: http://www.thesolusproject.com/#WhatIsSolus

My aim here is to give some initial impressions of the game as I work my way through it, and these will ultimately form a sort of "stream of consciousness review". At the moment, I plan to avoid spoilers - there are none to speak of so far that I could share anyway. If that changes, I'll take care to warn the reader :-)

In this first post on the topic, I'll give some of the broader impressions of the game (graphics, performance, gameplay) and we'll see where that foundation takes us in later posts.

Firstly, some relevant details of my PC hardware:

Windows 7 Pro, 64bit

8GB DDR4 RAM

i5-6500 @3.2 GHz

GeForce GTX970

Without further ado... after about 2 hours of play so far, what I can say is:

Visuals:

The graphics in the game are good, not remarkable. The polygon count and texture quality could be higher, but they are by no means *bad*. The artistry is rather good, however - the game wins back a lot of points on style. There is a fairly rich color palette being used, effective use of lighting and fog, and the game accomplishes one of the main graphical goals quite well: to make you feel immersed in a strange alien world. Any improvements, if any can be expected before final release (I think not), would only enhance the experience and not fix something that needs fixing.

The starting area of the world appears as a love child from a meeting between a No Man's Sky planet and the Storm Coast from DA:I (image from the developer site):

Other regions diverge somewhat from the Storm Coast In Space appearance, but not dramatically (not that I have seen yet). The plants don't look all that special in person either - in general the assets are mid-level in quality, as seen in 1080p with all settings maxed. However, the overall package is excellent - the combination of beautiful background scenery with striking celestial bodies in the sky sphere, frequent meteorological phenomena, dramatic night and day cycles, and - again - a rich color palette sells the setting. I will say that, at least so far, the caves have been disappointing from a visual perspective - they are very important to the gameplay (for survival and exploration purposes), but they have been wholly less remarkable than the in-your-face sci fi experience you get outside. I DO think this will change as I explore further and encounter some of the areas designed to impress for the story; but so far the outside world is clearly more interesting to look at.

Performance:

On my machine, performance is great. At 1080p with all settings maxed, load times were fine and in-engine experience was very smooth. After 2 hours, at least, I didn't notice any hiccups. For those curious, by the way, at these settings it used a max 2.24 GB VRAM and 4.83 system RAM.

Nothing to complain about, certainly, and I think there is headroom here for the devs or modders to enhance the assets a lot and still have it run well on a good range of systems.

General gameplay remarks:

I found the overall experience of the gameplay at "normal" difficulty to be pretty well balanced. You have sufficient stamina, but not too much. You get hungry and thirsty quickly, but as long as you are actively thinking ahead on providing for yourself on that front you shouldn't die. Temperatures are easy enough to maintain, but also require a satisfying-and-not-frustrating level of attention; it is cool that the developers make you adjust your concerns in that regard based on time of day, whether you are indoors or outdoors, your proximity to fire (and other!) heat sources, and whether or not you are exposed to moisture.

One negative hit me at the outset and hasn't gone away yet in the first couple of hours: the game puts a lot of emphasis on scrounging for supplies to maintain your health (a positive given that it is a survival game) but the environment is largely NOT interactive. There are plants and things that give you resources that you need to survive and progress, but because of this it is disappointing that the majority of the scenery doesn't let you ATTEMPT to interact with it. It breaks some of the immersion and the learning experience when you can only interact with THE things you need and not things you think you MIGHT need. Thus, to find things you need you simply look for things with which you can interact (a vast minority of the environment). As a concrete example: say you want to build a fire to stay warm and give your crummy cave hideout some light. You found yourself a rudimentary cutting device and a source of fire (both of which are pre-determined options - no experimentation necessary), and now you need something to burn. Well, it appears that you are surrounded by things you could attempt to burn - yet the game doesn't let you even attempt to fail. That dry looking tree thingy? Nope, no interaction button, so keep searching.

For many types of games, this level of limitation would be unremarkable, but it takes a bit away from a game where you are, on the surface, supposed to be channeling your wits and your inner Robinson Crusoe to survive.

Nevertheless, this has been a minor disappointment so far - it's still rewarding to play "Where's Waldo" with the resources that you need (because, in essence, that's what the aforementioned limitation does for that aspect of the game). And you need to actively keep on top of this task to survive, so it's not "a joke" at normal difficulty.

I should note two things here: first, admittedly if my wish for more interactivity had been introduced, it would still lose its luster once you had experimented around and learned the rules. Once you know what the useless stuff is, it might as well not be interactive, right? But I maintain that it would add a lot to the immersion if it was and you had to use some wits and experimentation. I was surprised at how LITTLE of the world you could interact with. The second point is that I don't know yet how/whether the challenge in this regard ramps up in subsequent hours of the game, and I don't know if any of this would become unreasonably hard if it were included and you were playing on the hard survival setting. The fairly zipped-up world you are thrown into seems to have a good difficulty level, well balanced around its design choices.

Specific gameplay remarks:

I don't want to offer up too much here yet, because 2 hours does not an expert make. I'll update thoughts on other aspects of the gameplay in future posts. But I will say that there's an interesting, sometimes-compelling sometimes-frustrating tension between the survival and exploration dimensions of the game. In order to progress the story (and to simply avoid running out of resources) you have to keep exploring. And I love this so far - not knowing what is around the next cliff head on the pretty alien beach made me WANT to explore, and it was nice to see how compatible this desire was with the driving factors in the game. On the other hand - and this is true of most good survival games - exploring is hazardous because it moves you away from your paltry stores that you have accumulated to locations where you may or may not be so well supplied. I had a rewarding experience with this survival/exploration tension about an hour into the game, where rising tides and frigid night setting in left me trapped in a little nook on a sea-side cliff, where I had to shiver it out with my torch and some dribbling water far from my home cave. I can't be sure how intentional this level design was, but I ultimately found myself in a position where I could move farther down the beach to try to find more sustenance to survive, but couldn't return to my "safe place" until the tide went out. This got me thinking hard, in future forays into the wild, about how the environment could trap me and to make sure I had a strategic supply of necessities with me.

An interesting aside - there are "stat upgrades" you find periodically. This was unexpected, and kind of interesting (e.g. resistance to hypothermia). They are subtle modifiers, and I doubt it is possible to become overpowered except through one's own skillz.

Story remarks:

There seems to be much more of a plot here than I've experience in some survival games (e.g. 7 Days to Die), but it's also delivered in a fairly measure way. You learn in little bits and pieces what happened and what's going on from finding scattered diary pages, an occasional garbled radio broadcast, and my understanding is you learn about the world's story in a similar way and through discovering artifacts and buildings (which I have only had vague hints of so far). This is a pretty well-trodden way for devs to tell a story in games of this sort by now, so it doesn't really earn them any points, but I will say it meshes well with the structure of the game and I'm intrigued to learn more as I continue to play.

I hope these initial impressions are useful, and there will be more to come soon!