Close to the Sun

Close to the Sun is a narrative adventure game that falters when it comes to its most fundamental component: its narrative. With shallow, boring characters and undeveloped themes, the game even commits the modern sin of foregoing a proper conclusion in favor of leaving doors open for a sequel.

The story takes place in 1897 in a reality where Nikola Tesla has built a futuristic ocean liner called Helios, which is supposed to house the best and most prominent scientific minds of the world. The engineer has built a miniature Rapture inside his ship, promising much like Andrew Ryan that, in Helios, scientific research will not be shackled by insignificant things such as laws or morality. One of the posters we find very early on makes the promise, “Invent and innovate without artificial limitations of capital or politics.”

Just like in Bioshock, however, and to the despair of neoliberalism, this dream of unregulated progress has led Helios to tragedy. As soon as our protagonist, Rose Archer, enters the ocean liner, she notices something is off: there’s no one around to greet her, and the word “Quarantine” is written with red paint on the entrance gate. Rose is after her sister, Ada, who works in Helios and supposedly sent her a letter asking for help. But most of the time, she will be talking with a mysterious man called Aubrey over the radio, who claims to be trapped in the ship and is also in need of assistance.

If the setting of a failed neoliberal society isolated in the middle of the sea is already reminiscent of Bioshock, and the art direction based on art deco reinforces the comparison, the protagonist following the order of an untrustworthy man under the radio just wraps up the package. This is a game that wears its main influence on its sleeve, but any comparison with Bioshock does Close to the Sun no favors, as it pales in comparison in every respect.

Take the relationship between Rose and Aubrey, for example. Calling the character untrustworthy is a euphemism at best, as he keeps showing increasingly worrying signs of being completely deranged. He’s clearly manipulating Rose, but shows no effort in trying to conceal this – there’s even a moment where he blatantly warns her that he’s a liar, but Rose still doesn’t seem to mind. She appears oblivious to his problematic behavior despite all the evidence: when Aubrey tells her he’s going to look for the arms of his dead friend to high-five them (when I said deranged, I meant deranged), she answers with an unironic, “Sounds good!” which is just hilarious. Later on, the humor is at least intended when she asks Aubrey if he’s okay and he answers, “I’m using my best friend’s dismembered arm as a back scratcher, of course I’m not okay.” Nonetheless, Rose still trusts him, which disconnects any sensible player from her point of view.

Worldbuilding is also lacking. Unlike Bioshock, the notes and diaries we find here are more worried about sounding authentic than adding to the story. Instead of presenting characters reacting to that strange society, confronting and questioning its foundations, the texts we find across the stages reveal mundane problems that happen in any workplace: it’s people complaining about their co-workers or the difficulties that arose in some project. Collectibles follow suit and are of the blandest and most useless kind – we find masks, blueprints, and passports here – rewarding us with the so-important achievements and only that, being a huge missed opportunity to properly flesh out the setting.

To make matters worse, Helios is built on a dream similar to Rapture, but its downfall seems to miss the point of the premise. Here, Nikola Tesla is at war with Thomas Edison, who keeps sending agents to infiltrate Tesla’s ranks, steal information, and sabotage projects. The problem is that if the reason why Helios became a slaughterhouse isn’t the lack of rules and regulations, but just the meddling of a rival company, the ideology at its core loses its narrative importance: Close to the Sun is not even endorsing neoliberalism – which would be a choice – but ignoring it altogether, rendering its own political discussion moot.

And if the art direction is effective in making this fantastical ship look striking – even if Helios looks a lot like Rapture –, it’s not cohesive, failing to work hand-in-hand with the story. Take the huge statue of Tesla we come across at the beginning: any person who would ask to build such a monument of himself in his own ship must be a tad egocentric and narcissistic, just like Andrew Ryan was. But the Tesla we find is empathetic and humble – and the story never tackles or even acknowledges this contradiction. It’s often very on-the-nose and superficial, too: when we get to the room of a famous chess player, we find… yes, a lot of chessboards. That’s it. Lots of them. In other words, instead of building a character, the art direction doubles down on the caricature.

Close to the Sun is a mess of ideas, aiming and shooting at everything, but managing to hit nothing. There’s time travel, serial killers, monsters, utopic societies, and even alternate dimensions at play, but there’s no cohesion, nothing tying everything together. For example, the monsters prowling the ship, besides having a contrived explanation for their existence, appear only when it’s convenient for the plot and disappear right after. Early on, the serial killer also appears to know Rose, since he speaks of her as if she had done something to him in the past, even though they have never met. This heavily suggests that she will travel in time at some point and do something to him, but this plotline is eventually forgotten, being one of many things that are left open to be explored by a sequel.

This kind of approach to storytelling is problematic because the plot points left for the future game leave the current story unfinished: it keeps introducing shallow mysteries and questions and never bothers to solve and answer any of them. There’s an issue with the letter Rose received from her sister, related to the time it was written, that seems important, but the story never goes back to it, for example. Another letter, introduced in the last chapter, is not even read by Rose: we must take a screenshot to read it, and I doubt many players will bother at this point.

Characters, meanwhile, are nothing to write home about. Rose is defined by her drive to find her sister, who in turn is defined by being the protagonist’s sister. They’re both hard-working and persistent and that’s it. Aubrey is a bit more interesting, since besides being deranged, he also has an inflated ego that can cause some problems. Tesla is humbler than one would think, the serial killer is just a plot device… and there are no more characters in the game.

Being a narrative adventure game, Close to the Sun lacks substantial gameplay to make up for its narrative problems. We just walk around, open and close doors, pick up notes, and solve the rare puzzle here and there. To spice things up, there are some chase sequences spread throughout the game, but they are either boring (when we just run forward) or frustrating (when there are multiple paths to take, but some lead to dead ends, inserting trial-and-error into the proceedings).

Games of the narrative adventure genre live and die by the quality of their story. Unfortunately, Close to the Sun digs its own grave.

June 20, 2025.