Solarix Review

Allow me a moment to paint you a rough picture. You're at home alone on a Friday evening, recovering from a long week doing whatever it is normal people do. The doorbell rings, startling you out of your doze, and you unsteadily lurch to your feet, wondering who could possibly be visiting at this hour as you blearily move in the general direction of the door. An old friend, perhaps, dropping in on their way back from an embarrassingly awful reboot or bombastic CGI trailer. Maybe they just want to sit down and chat about the old days before Looking Glass was... oh dear.

Well, you recognise him. Or rather, you recognize them, their disparate features partially-melted together in the uncanny-valley visage of the not-quite-humanoid creature on your doorstep. It smiles nervously, revealing teeth that are just a little bit too regular, and extends an arm to the faint, dreadful sound of bone grinding on bone, flesh rippling restlessly under the clammy, loose-fitting skin. How on Earth does something this horrific seem so... earnest?
“What?” it asks, with the kind of forced, fake cheerfulness normally deployed by kindergarten teachers. “Don't you recognise me?”
“Who are you?”
“I'm your friend!” it says, enunciating every syllable with care as its neck twitches and its eyes unfocus. “I am all your friends.”

Get the picture yet? Right, well that's Solarix: a strange, friendly, broken creature, unconvincingly clad in the skins of the games I once loved, for which I feel a conflicted mixture of revulsion and pity.

System Shock 2, I think, was the one it was outwardly trying to pass itself off as. You wake up in a dark sci-fi facility with plot-convenient amnesia, there's a lady AI called AMI yelling instructions in your ear, and the few people who aren't trying to tear out your entrails are shooting at you instead. If they renamed the unspecified disease affecting everybody to 'The Many', you could almost convince yourself you were playing a lost System Shock sequel where all the server racks with SHODAN's wit, malice and megalomania on them were blasted out of an airlock. Oh yes, and there's a woman in a space-suit who phones you up every now and then to chatter about stuff that might make sense in context or might be so much meaningless creepy filler. It's kind of hard to care long enough to concentrate on any of it, since for the first three or four hours her only impact on events is to drive up your bills and drop obscure plot titbits. So it's a horror-themed immersive sim then, which as far as ambitions go is up there with trying to tow an icebreaker by letting your lips freeze to the bow and attempting to walk away, but you have to admire the developers for trying all the same.

Let us start with the stealth, which works. Sort of. You have the basic Thief ensemble of stealth techniques - a light meter, conspicuous footsteps that turn silent when you bend your knees, the ability to toss handy bits of useless clutter to distract enemies or expend ammunition on destroying light sources - but without anything else to bring to the table, that's exactly how it feels: basic. Hacking and lock-picking feel very Deus-Ex-esque - although since it's the much more distant future, all you have is a hacking device and another functionally indistinguishable hacking device - but neither activity consumes any resources or even gets used that often, so there aren't any risks or costs associated with using them. Your futuristic stun prod also runs on a magical infinite energy source, but don't imagine this means there isn't any risk involved with it either: hitting enemies anywhere except the back of the head - a difficult proposition, considering the jerky animations - gives them nothing more than a mean headache and a fine excuse to show you the colour of your own spleen, which feels especially punishing for what could be a tiny targeting mistake. Allegedly the game is supposed to support “combative and stealth-focused play styles”, but I'd really like to see how anybody pulls off the former, since even thorough scavenging turns up barely enough ammo to blast a couple of light-bulbs, let alone take down the walking bullet sponges that blindly walk up and down, spouting the same four or five monologues with the frequency of demented parrots.

Yeah, the AI leaves a bit to be desired. You remember how the genome soldiers in Metal Gear Solid, with their 'augmented senses' and 'enhanced reflexes', could be endlessly thwarted by running in circles around a crate? Imagine those, but considerably more prone to bugging out, incapable of seeing you in darkness unless you're close enough to smell their space-suit sweat, too socially-awkward to communicate with one another or raise any kind of alarm, and about as interested in pursuing you as they are in pursuing medical attention for their rapidly decaying bodies. Of course, a horror game where the enemies pose no threat might as well just disable the lighting and let you party your way through with an airhorn and an entourage of bikini girls, so to compensate for their legendary stupidity, enemies appear to have had their strength and reflexes lifted from Quake 3. It creates a frustrating binary where tap-dancing through the shadows earns you nothing but a couple of idiots stumbling cluelessly around in the dark, but putting one foot in a spotlight means being vaporized by an instantaneous hail of bullets or swarmed by bloodthirsty mutants without so much as a startled yelp to warn you. For a game fundamentally reliant on atmosphere and immersion they behave incredibly unnaturally, and that's when they aren't getting stuck on level geometry.

Sadly, this is far from the only example of Solarix slam-dunking the atmosphere into the bin in a shower of confetti. Now look, being a little rough around the edges doesn't entirely preclude a game from being atmospheric - the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games in particular have mastered the draining sense of desolation when there aren't any NPCs bugging out on-screen - but there are at least a couple of targets you have to hit. I want to believe that the sound design was balanced by somebody falling asleep on their keyboard during crunch time and accidentally messing up a load of sliders, because the chilling alternative is the possibility that it was intentional. Overbearing ambient noise assaults you from all directions, shockingly overblown in numerous areas to the point where you can barely hear yourself think, and occasionally the game plays creepy_sound_clip.wav right in your ears for no better reason than it being a cheap way of making you turn around. Voices, by comparison, are often near-inaudible, even the audio logs that by all rights ought to be playing in your ears, and while the game believes itself to be above jump-scares - except for one or two really hilariously amateurish ones, obviously - it has no qualms about making sure that the first indicator you have of an alerted guard is when you are startled out of your chair by their sudden, loud, sustained gunfire.

Solarix really does feel like a game of loose ends, full of features thrown together with little reasoning about the underlying systems beyond “hey, Looking Glass did it, right?” You can move corpses around, but enemies treat the discovery of one with all the concern of finding a moth in the biscuit jar, so what's the point? You can open the inventory screen and peek at its contents, but there's no means of actually managing the contents, and with the lack of item variety turning the window into a glorified medkit counter, no real reason to either. You can explore the levels looking for stuff to scavenge, but in the interests of preserving the survival horror angle - I hope; I'm giving you a lot of credit here, Solarix - they're almost utterly empty, full of pointless space, rewarding you less for poking around in obscure nooks and crannies and more for just homing in on the same caches full of medkits and ammo. At one point you even get two of the same hacking device, but again, the device in question is impossible to consume, lose, or destroy, so why even bother? It's a complete mess, and not even in the E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy way where you can lose yourself in ludicrous RPG elements or the absurdity of hitting a man with a sword so hard that he literally explodes; this is like writing a fantasy novel by taking a hundred pages from The Hobbit, a hundred pages from some tatty pulp novel you found in a second-hand shop, shuffling them all around, and gluing them into a binder.

Speaking of which, let's return to the pressing matter of storytelling. As you'd expect from a game that lurches around in System Shock 2's wake, there are quite a few audio logs and computer terminals to peruse at your - for lack of a better word - leisure, and if you've played any sci-fi horror in the last decade or so then their contents are not going to be a surprise. What is surprising is that not even the aforementioned glue binder project would prepare you for the gulf in writing quality on display. In places it's really quite engaging, chilling stuff, and I dare say that if the game hadn't already driven me into a state of catatonic apathy by the time it started to demystify things, I might have even cared about the conflicts between the various characters that it sets up. In other places, though - particularly the objectives screen, which you actually need if you want to get anywhere - it appears to have been written by somebody hastily typing out their feverish thoughts over IRC. No, that's not how ellipses work. Maybe this was supposed to be somebody's idea of notes being desperately scribbled down in a hurry, but when there's so little meaningful direction already at work, I'd rather just have clear orders, thanks. Heck, I'll take an objective marker at this stage, as blasphemous as that may sound. Anything that means I don't have to look at the illegible overhead screenshot of the level that constitutes the map screen.

Things get stranger still. Like in System Shock 2 - goodness me, somehow these parallels just keep piling up - you're playing a faceless dork who goes around carrying out the will of an untrustworthy AI, but it's a wee bit more complicated in Solarix since the dork in question isn't entirely faceless. You play a bloke called Walter, who is an engineer. That pretty much summarizes everything I know about his character. There's a seriously odd dissonance here where you're playing as the standard issue silent protagonist, incapable of interacting with other living beings in any capacity besides the language of mute stares and sustained violence, but the game continues to do everything in its very limited power to act as if you're an actual character with, you know, existing thoughts, opinions, even goals. Do you know how surreal it is to read an email that your character allegedly wrote when he hasn't displayed the slightest flicker of humanity throughout the entire game? It's like stumbling upon a computer in Black Mesa and finding Gordon Freeman's Twitter feed. Either make your protagonist a nice featureless vessel for us to slip into, or actually develop their personality to the point where they have more memorable traits than a glass of pond water. Going halfway isn't going to work.

It's not easy to condemn a game like Solarix: it tries to follow in the footsteps of a couple of extraordinary games very close to my heart, and the fact that it got this far down that path with an indie team is a testament to how much they must treasure those games too. Unfortunately, what matters to you and me at the end of the day is the end result we're forking over for, and the end result in question is a dull, frustrating slog through a shoddy wannabe immersive sim that has missed the mark on so many levels. Depth? Atmosphere? Emergent gameplay? No, we'll have none of that. Just a lot of dark corners, light towers, and men in space suits who don't react kindly to being tazed in the back of the neck.