Fort Solis Review (Ghanima)
I had a lot of fun playing this game as a big fan of the Dark Picture Anthology games.
Pros:
- Graphics and lighting. It is sometime s hard to believe you're playing a game, not watching a movie. It is looking better than some of AAA projects from recent years
- Style and Atmosphere. Most notable for me is distinc lighting style based on main 2 colors, light blueish lights and red lights. Overall station looks beautiful as is. Also the background ambient was on point.
- Voice acting. Voice acting is done to the point. Voicelines are weel thought and actors done a great job.
- Slow pacing and barely any horror aspects. For me it was a big advantage to explore the station without being afraid of each corner :D Slow pace is actually making game more realistic, because timing are more close to reality and whole action feels more engaging because of that
- Video logs and emails are interesting and fun to discover and search
- The concept of playign without loadings. Great idea which made the game very immersive
- Easter eggs and signs of respects. Game is full with easter eggs and signs of respects to particular games and genres themselves. Like Objects dropping from lockers is a respect to whole horror genre. was fun to see and discover such small details. Clearly visible that developers love horrow and gaming industry.
- Replayability. With the amount of story scattered around the station I already want to replay it to find more bits of story.
Cons:
- Performance. Many peope been complaining about performance. for me it was stable 60 fps whole game, except stutters during loading new locations. But it was acceptable for how smooth it was most of playtime
- QTE. That was a big pain since i been playing via remote play on my TV. I got maybe only 10% of qte because of that. Same problem like in Man of Medan, you let go the controller for a second and that's QTE time and you just lost it. During hacking i had to solve QTE on PC itself because it was impossible to solve with a little delay.
- Bulliying Jack. FIrst thing Jack does drink beer at work? His female girl boss friend constantly making inappropriate remarks about how dumb Jack is? Really? As a female myself i don't understand why making powerful female characters should go through harming male figures.
- No sprinting. Well i hope it gets fixed by devs. At least when you need to backtrack. I understand the reason why it's done, but if you want to 100% or you recall there's a door back you haven't opened yet, you would think twice before coming back.
- Abrupt ending. There's no clear explanation on what was actually the cause of things happened in the game. Is there anythig supernatural or not?
Overall It's a great start for stuidio. Hope they sell the game allright and create more ambitious projects in the future. Also much respect on how they communicate with community via steam reviews. Wish you all the best with next projects! Hope we see dlc explaining the ending