izigame.me

Overall, I had a great time with Fort Solis, and I don't think it deserves all the negative reviews. There are absolutely things to criticize here, but it seems like many of the reviews are about the "Walking Simulator" nature of the game. Indeed, the game is very linear, story-focused, and there's not a lot of "gameplay" in the traditional sense. It's more of an "interactive movie" type of experience: You are primarily walking around, reading emails and watching video logs, sometimes you need to find keys, and occasionally there are QTEs. It's also fairly short, at about 4 hours.
Personally, I enjoy these types of games, I don't mind a shorter length (I prefer a tight and focused experience over a sprawling open world epic) and I don't think a negative review is warranted just because it's not a traditional action-focused game. So with that out of the way, let's start with what I liked about the game.
I absolutely love the atmosphere and visuals in the game - it's a wonderfully realized sci-fi world, that immediately pulled me in and felt very immersive. Exploring the station was great, and I was always curious to see what I would discover next. There's a lot of nice world building and environmental story telling, and it feels like a believable place.
Graphics, voice acting, and character models/animation are also stellar - it really does look great. And the characters are well done to, in my opinion.
The story arc overall also felt well paced, starting out slow and calm, slowly developing a feeling of unease, then ramping up the tension. The final sequence truly had me on edge, it was quite intense due to the anticipation of something bad happening but it took a while until it actually did. This "horror of not knowing" aspect was very well executed.
Overall, the game did a great job pulling me into the narrative and its world, and kept me hooked right until the end.
Unfortunately, the ending itself left me a bit disappointed - which is my main gripe with the title. It's not that the ending itself is bad - it's mostly fine. The problem is that too many mysteries/open questions in the story are left unanswered. Basically, the whole time you're expecting a big revelation at the end, but it never comes. It doesn't matter if you find all of the optional audio/video logs etc., some key questions are simply not answered. I can only assume that the intention here was to leave things vague, to get players to theorize and come up with their own interpretations. And I get that some people really enjoy that kind of thing, but personally, I prefer a bit more closure.
Without getting too much into spoilers, there is a thing in the game which is supposedly very dangerous, causing one of the characters to take extreme actions to prevent the danger. But it is never revealed what the danger actually is, not even hinted at aside from various characters talking about how "bad" it is. But they only allude to it being bad, without ever going into specifics. I really expected the actual danger to be revealed in the end, which would've put a lot of events into perspective and rounded everything out nicely. But instead, I was left wondering what it might be.
Performance-wise, the game ran ok, but not great on my machine (2080 Ti, i7 9700k). At 1440p with DLSS Quality mode and max settings otherwise, I was getting between 35 and 70 FPS depending on the scene, but most of the time it hovered somewhere between 50 and 60. Thanks to my G-Sync compatible display, the framerate fluctuation was mostly not noticeable, and it's also not the type of game that really needs super consistent performance to play well. But if you don't have a VFR display, limiting the framerate to 30 might be a better option.
What I found a lot more distracting was occasional stuttering, especially when entering a new area for the first time. I'm guessing this might be due to shader compilation, a typical issue with recent Unreal Engine games on PC. Would be nice if that could be fixed in a patch.
There were also some odd artifacts with flickering shadows, and I had a game-breaking bug at one point where an interaction prompt didn't appear. Fortunately, restarting the game and replaying from the previous checkpoints fixed that. And I didn't experience any other bugs aside from this one instance.
One final thing to mention is the QTEs. It turns out that with one exception, these have absolutely no impact on the outcome of the story, which feels like a missed opportunity. And another issue I have is you sometimes get a prompt in the middle of an otherwise non-interactive cutscene, which catches you off guard and thus is very easy to miss.
Ok, so in conclusion - despite the disappointing ending, and some other issues, I still really enjoyed everything before that point, and I would recommend the game if you like this type of experience and aren't put off by the issues mentioned above. It's clearly a very ambitious effort by a small independent team, and I'm glad they took a chance on this.