The Solus Project

Grip Games' first dive into the adventure genre, The Solus Project, brings a lot to table. The game threads together a combination of strong story, fantastic scenery, and survival elements to create an interesting science-fiction journey.

You play as either a male or female colonist who is part of The Solus Project, out to save humanity and find a new planet so the human race might survive. However, after a sudden crash landing you find yourself alone on an alien world, with nothing but your wits and a broken shuttle to help you survive. As you progress and learn more about this seemingly barren planet you find more clues to its history and what is going on beneath the surface.

If you want to get to the core of the game, it's pretty much a walking story book. You play as the protagonist in a story that unfolds around you as you travel between objective points. As beautiful as the scenery is, it doesn't add anything to the gameplay beyond atmosphere. Apart from a few basic puzzles and the odd but of stealth, your game will consist of walking around and staying alive. The survival aspect requires you to keep checks on hunger, thirst, sleep and body temperature, however with your handy PDA and an abundance of food and water around, it doesn't ever become too much of a problem. This can be ramped up in the settings, making survival harder, and we'd recommend you do just that if you're to get the most out of this game.

As interesting as the story is you'll find yourself waiting for the next thing to happen, looking for more to do than wander around and find the next key for the next door. The pacing isn't the best. The Solus Project is focused on adventure, and Grip Games delivers in terms of immersion, giving you the feeling of being on the planet, of being alone on an unknown world.

The storyline explains what has happened on the planet before you arrived, and as you find out more and delve deeper into the planet's elaborate cave system, the game gets progressively more intense in terms of story. Backed up with a great soundtrack, you find yourself lost in the experience, and as tension builds a primal urge to keep going overtakes any frustrations regarding the pacing.

The great music flows and builds the atmosphere. Because it's so story driven, and with so little voice acting or supporting characters, the music and atmosphere are vital for explaining the story, but it helps put yourself into the mind of a wandering space explorer. The music mixed with the stunning scenery makes it easy to sit for a solid few hours, discovering more and becoming immersed in the world and story before you.

Solus also incorporates an inventory and crafting system, which adds to the survival element of the game. But, with limited inventory space comes the words "inventory is full" - it's a phrase you'll hear a lot, like an electronic Navi who only wants to spoil the fun. The crafting system is simple, giving you options to interact with certain objects. However, if you miss something important, have fun traveling back for half an hour to find it, because there will be multiple occasions where random and seemingly useless objects (like rocks) become useful. This is where the problem with difficulty comes into play. The game holds the player's hand and steers them along for pretty much the whole time, but when it comes to items you're thrown in at the deep end. With a lot of games that have crafting elements you find yourself wanting to pick everything up, however the limited space here means that you need to sacrifice objects in place of others. This is realistic and not the issue, the issue is knowing what is useful. For example, keeping hold of a flaming torch is a good idea, but switching it for an solar-powered one is not, as the game doesn't tell you that just after you pick up your new torch you will be heading underground for the next couple of hours. This is one example of how there could have been a better balance between helping the player and leaving us to explore.

The Solus Project is a somewhat laid back story game that guides the player thanks to easy to follow objectives and slow-paced events. The interesting story should keep you intrigued, but you really need to up the challenge otherwise it will leave you somewhat bored and everything will feel slow. At the end of the day it's still a beautifully visualised world, and there is nothing wrong with stopping to take in the star filled sky on a moonlit beach.

This is Grip Games' first step into the adventure genre, and it's a solid first attempt. The Solus Project is available on PC and Xbox One. The PC version, which is the one we tested for this review, also offers VR compatibility (which we can only imagine makes things even more immersive).