Fort Solis Review (PS5) | Push Square

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There is something calming about a clichéd sci-fi horror, isn’t there? Abandoned space stations, eerie corridors, and the endless possibilities of danger make up a genre that has successfully infiltrated just about every format of entertainment. Fort Solis is just the latest, bringing with it a subdued sci-fi tale, voice acting royalty in the form of Roger Clark (Red Dead Redemption 2) and Troy Baker (The Last of Us), and a gameplay experience that is in parts enthralling and others excruciatingly tedious.

As we first walked the halls of the titular Fort Solis we couldn’t help but be reminded of sci-fi movie classics such as Sunshine, Moon, and even Event Horizon. Responding to a mysterious distress signal, engineer Jack Leary (Clark) makes his way to the Martian station to investigate. With its slow pacing and attention to detail, we were already on edge. Not because of anything we were seeing, but the possibility of what we were missing.

It’s an element of the game that its opening chapters capture so well, made all the better by the back and forth banter between Jack and his in-ear coworker Jessica, played to perfection by Julia Brown. As their conversation progresses from rubbish zombie TV shows to slight pangs of concern, there is a brilliant swelling of tension that only serves to amplify your curiosity.

To satiate said curiosity, exploration is at the heart of the Fort Solis experience. You’ll be reading emails, noseying through personal belongings, watching video logs and generally taking in the environmental details of the station in the hope of discovering what happened to its crew. While nowhere near the density or quality, it does have echoes of games like Gone Home, where you’ll fill in a lot of the context