The nature of the beast
The Solus Project chewed me up and spit me out. After spending mere minutes with the game, blood spots started appearing inside my space helmet as it started to crack in an unsettling manner. It was ruthless. I knew I wasn’t long for this world.
That’s kind of the point, though. In The Solus Project, the world’s your greatest enemy. It’s unforgiving, hostile, and can turn in a matter of seconds. When I first stepped out of my crashed spaceship, the beach landscape was serene, even amongst all the disastrous refuse. Before I knew what hit me, it started sleeting and my body temp plummeted. The end was nigh.
The kicker is that the end of me meant the end of mankind. The Solus Project — slated for release on Xbox One and PC in first quarter of 2016 — is a savior story in which the player is humanity’s last hope. Earth’s in rough shape and this planet might hold the answers to right the ship.
Exploration and narrative go hand-in-hand in The Solus Project. Technically, your goal is to find a way to communicate with Earth, but there’s more at play. An alien civilization used to inhabit this planet, and that’s a mystery you get to unravel. That is, if you’re not too busy getting ripped apart by the elements.
If this demo had gone correctly, I would have scurried inside a cave which would have offered some much-needed shelter. That didn’t happen. After finding two requisite keys, I scrambled back to unlock a giant ruinous door. Cycling through the loads of water in my inventory, I didn’t quite have enough time to put that second key in the lock. Who would have thought that picking up survival equipment would be what eventually damned me?
As quickly as I was pummeled into submission, I definitely didn’t see the worst of what The Solus Project had to offer. In fact, I may have seen it at its most forgiving. Firestorms, tornadoes, and earthquakes are all in play. Who knows what’s waiting underneath the surface?
My time with The Solus Project was mercifully brief. It was a weird look, but what I saw seemed like it was both misrepresentative and completely representative of the experience. Like, it was too short for anything meaningful to happen, but it also wonderfully captured the fickle nature of the environment. That’s a beast that we’ll probably never tame; we can only hope to sidestep its wrath.
