Fort Solis

This review contains spoilers.

There’s this moment early on in Fort Solis when we watch a video recording of a doctor confessing his desire to see his family. He’s on a mission on Mars, and he misses them greatly. But what stands out is not his angsty-laden words, but the prolonged silences between them, when we see his eyes focus on empty spaces, forming a window to his state of mind: we know that he’s homesick because of the text, but we can feel that he’s utterly exhausted, at a breaking point, because of his body language. At that moment, I thought to myself, “The mocap work here is truly great.” And that’s the kindest thing I can say about Fort Solis.

We play not as that doctor – one of the game’s biggest mistakes – but as two workers from another station on Mars, Jack and Jessica, who one day – right before Jack’s vacation starts, no less – catch an alarm coming from the nearby station of Fort Solis, which has just entered lockdown. Jack naturally goes there to check what happened, even though a storm is quickly approaching.

In the game’s first hour or so – of approximately four – we explore Fort Solis with Jack. We pass through the dimly lit rooms and corridors of the station, finding broken machinery and suspicious objects, such as a rock with claw marks on it. One time, we see a pool of blood in the ground near a locked door bathed in red light. On the radio, Jessica jokes about supernatural threats – a woman of good taste, she’s a fan of cheap horror movies – but complains about Jack’s leisurely attitude, as the first thing the dude decides to do in this unknown Martian station in full lockdown is to remove his helmet. It was not very comfy, you understand.

The gameplay here is business as usual when it comes to the genre: we move around the station to find scattered notes, audio logs, and video recordings that tell us pieces of a story that we must put together ourselves. There are times when we’ll need to find a password to log in or open a safe, but Fort Solis never rewards careful exploration – let alone deductions skills – so there will be either a note on a nearby board stating “08/07 Mom’s birthday. Call home!” or, even worse, an audio log literally spelling, “My password is the following sequence of numbers.”

Bob, the cynic, only calls this genre by its derogatory name, Walking Simulator, which indeed came to my mind while playing Fort Solis, as the game manages to prove Bob wrong… in the worst way possible: Fort Solis fails to simulate the act of walking. Jack walks slowly, you see, q u i t e  s l o w l y, veeeery slooooowly. Unnaturally so. He can make a snail’s pace receive a speed ticket, and Harold Halibut feel like Call of Duty in comparison. I had to make a cup of coffee to remember what energy looked like after a couple of hours, and I inevitably got dizzy as I walked to my kitchen because of the sudden burst of speed. When we see a long corridor, barely lit, we don’t wonder what we’ll find on the other side, but how long we’ll take to get there. It’s so slow it doesn’t build suspense, but kills it with a spoon and two decades later salts the earth where it was buried. Using an even smaller spoon. Bob likes to joke that if Fort Solis had a run button, it would be over in two hours, and this time, can we blame him?

Suspense is about slowing down time, stretching the action as if it were a rope to delay the payoff we are already expecting. A character gets to a barely-lit corridor where we suspect – or indeed even know – that there’s something dangerous waiting for them at the end, such as a killer in the shadows ready to strike, but the character doesn’t get there fast. No, for suspense to be built, they take a good while to move through the corridor, allowing plenty of time for our apprehension to evolve into dread and take hold of us. Suspense, in other words, is built in that period of anticipation before the fateful event, where we hold our breaths while the action is unnaturally prolonged. But here’s the thing: to slow down time, it can’t already be frozen solid in the first place. Since our characters in Fort Solis walk with that infuriating (lack of) speed all the time, that metaphorical rope is eventually stretched to its limit… and snaps: the tension is released. We can only hold our breaths for so long, after all.

Walking Simulators – or Narrative Adventures, as Charles, the snob, prefers to call them – are all about their stories. But in this regard, Fort Solis is much like me when, many years ago, I revealed to my parents I didn’t want to go to law school: a disappointment. The main character is not Jack, nor Jessica, but that doctor in the video who longed for home. His name is Wyatt Taylor, and he started to suspect that the research conducted in Fort Solis was negatively impacting his colleagues and decided to do something about it.

The opening quote is “Courage is not a lack of fear, it is acting in spite of it,” but Wyatt proves that, sometimes, we should think twice before acting – courage be damned. The doctor, after all, believed his colleagues were getting sick (people’s hands were starting to shake, and they were claiming strange things, like that they were hearing weird noises coming from the storm. One man even swore an animal was trying to break into the station), and his solution, although technically effective in solving the issue, was also a bit, uh, problematic: he killed them all. Quite a leap in logic, you may think, but you see, Wyatt is precisely the thing my parents accused me of being at the time: insane.

There are no supernatural elements at play in Fort Solis – even the claw marks are a red herring –, which means this is a story about growing paranoia. The people on the station were getting increasingly anxious and suspicious of one another, so it was just a matter of time until someone snapped. When Jack arrives there, basically everyone but Wyatt is already dead. And the good doctor doesn’t want to leave his bloody work half-finished now that more potential victims have entered the station.

Stories about growing paranoia are built through incremental increases in tension. We see the events escalating gradually, the conflicts bubbling up until the violence finally erupts. But Fort Solis’ epistolary structure – where we piece together notes, audio, and video logs – sabotages this gradual build-up of tension: we get notes out of order, without context, and there are even time skips between them. Consequently, we only fully get that the story is about paranoia by the end, when it’s already too late. For Wyatt’s story to work, we should have played as, well, Wyatt himself, experiencing those things in real time, doubting the same events that he does, but as you are beginning to understand, Fort Solis is the place in Mars where tension goes to die.

It certainly doesn’t help that the game holds its cards very close to its chest, being artificially elusive just to keep us in the dark for more time. When Jessica arrives at the station, looking for Jack, who got knocked down by Wyatt as soon as he met the guy, she immediately bumps into the doctor, who decides to go after her, too. But he’s got access to her radio frequency now, so he can talk to her about his motives, explain why he’s doing all that killing. Or so you’d think.

“You haven’t seen what I have,” he says, “You have no idea what you’re doing,” he says. Well, just bloody explain then. But Wyatt never does, he keeps teasing Jessica, uttering her name like he’s Killgrave, and saying stuff like “come to the Greenhouse and discover everything for yourself.” And then we get to the Greenhouse, and we learn… nothing new, for the game can’t decide if it wants a plot twist or ambiguity at the end: it builds for the former, but delivers the latter.

Wyatt keeps teasing us that there’s going to be some big reveal at the Greenhouse, that there’s something he can’t just say out right, that we must see with our own eyes to believe. And what’s the shocking twist? Well, we learn throughout the game that the lead botanist in Fort Solis was experiencing on plants, trying to make them grow on Mars’ soil, which is both deprived of nutrients and quite toxic to them. And this botanist indeed accomplished her mission, creating a compound that allows plants to grow on Martian soil, but at an accelerated rate. However, this is even better, because Earth is in bad shape – the game doesn’t go into details here – and more plants with rapid growth could help us out when it comes to the production of oxygen. So, when we arrive at the Greenhouse, we find… her research, which just repeats the same information with just a few added details. And we’re like…is that it? We already know that. When is the twist coming? And that’s the fun part: it is not.

What we get is just ambiguity. Wyatt believes that this research is making people sick, that there’s something in the Martian soil that’s bad for us. He never goes into detail, though: what’s exactly in the soil? How contagious is the disease? Is there a cure? He doesn’t seem interested in these questions; he seems interested in just killing “the infected” to contain the spread. To be fair, when he reported his findings to the company, it immediately shut him down and suspended him from service. The leader at the station agreed with him, but the company people didn’t: they’re after money, after all, and safety precautions cost precisely that.

This is when the good doctor snapped and started to murder everyone, even his commander… who was on his side. So, Wyatt, sweetie, let me be real with you for a second, you may be onto something here, but we can never really know for sure now, since you’re getting too psychotic about it. There’s such a thing as a quarantine, you know, you don’t need to hunt infected people down with an axe; they’re not turning into zombies, their hands are shaking. His psychosis, of course, may precisely be one of the symptoms of the disease: there’s an even audio log where Wyatt reveals that he’s hearing the sound of deliveries coming from the storm, showing the same strange symptom as his colleagues.

But this ambiguity – is the disease real or not – doesn’t work because it muddies the waters thematically. The story is about a doctor warning people of a disease and getting shut down because the work – the moneymaking – cannot stop. But since the disease may not be real… the moneymakers may be right. Maybe it’s all a conspiracy. Maybe Wyatt is just blowing things out of proportion. Maybe you should go back to work and not worry about it. Don’t even wear masks, they’re just like Jack’s helmet, after all: quite uncomfortable. If you’re having tense flashbacks from some years ago, you’re probably thinking right now, “Oh, no.” And, well, oh, no, indeed.

Jack and Jessica, of course, don’t add anything to the discussion. Jack gets knocked out as soon as he meets Wyatt face to face, and Jessica is too busy walking slowly through Fort Solis’ many rooms to ask real questions to Wyatt, like “how is the disease transmitted? Is it lethal? Are you yourself infected?” or anything that could open a window to the real story being told. But no, she just accuses Wyatt of being mad over and over again. Jessica, sweetie, you’re right, but that doesn’t help your current situation right now, does it?

Even the construction of certain scenes feels cheap in Fort Solis, such as when Jessica stabs Wyatt right during the climax, falls down, and three seconds later, when she gets up, realizes he has vanished as if he were Batman. There’s not even blood on the ground; the dude simply teleported away like a supernatural monster from a cheap horror movie (I hope you appreciate irony, too, Jessica). In another moment, we find an audio recording of the lead botanist quoting Jurassic Park, which doesn’t make sense, because you’re not cloning a dangerous extinct predator for a Theme Park, you’re trying to solve an oxygen crisis. Yes, you should be doing your research, sweetie.

In the end, Fort Solis lacks a good story, fascinating characters, well-developed themes, a powerful atmosphere, and even engaging gameplay. It’s a nothing burger, then. And unfortunately, after five hours of slowly waking around, we were quite hungry.

The mocap is quite good, though.

December 20, 2025.