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Close to the Sun - non-combat BioShock on Tesla's boat

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.closetothesungame.com




https://af.gog.com/game/close_to_the_sun?as=1649904300
https://epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/close-to-the-sun/home

Close to the Sun is a horror game that takes place at the end of 19th century on a mysterious ship complex created by Nikola Tesla for the sake of knowledge.

In this alternative version of history, his scientific breakthroughs have already had a major impact on the world.

You’re Rose, a young journalist looking for your sister and, as you approach this enormous and glorious complex for the first time, you quickly realize that something there has gone wrong …

Key Features
  • First-person horror adventure where surviving is everything
  • Problem-solving in order to progress the story: just what happened on board Tesla’s ship?
  • Danger aplenty as Rose pieces together just what happened, having no real means to defend herself
  • Teamwork with an ally who helps Rose navigate her way through the ship’s artistic halls
  • Nerve inducing exploration – defenseless and weaponless, the keys to Rose’s survival are running, hiding, and quick thinking
  • Explore a visually stunning environment Built in Unreal Engine™ 4.
 
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Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...ame-thats-definitely-not-bioshock-with-tesla/

Close To The Sun is a horror game that's definitely not BioShock with Tesla

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These days, a lot of people love Nikola Tesla. Tesla deserved Edison’s success and recognition, they say, and should not have died penniless and obsessed with pigeons. His achievements remained pretty obscure for many years after his death, so the resurgence in Tesla-mania over the past couple of decades is fortunate for Close To The Sun, a fact acknowledged by Joel Hakalax, game designer at Storm In A Teacup. Close To The Sun, which I’ve gotten a new hands on with, is set in a world where, basically, Tesla won.

Tesla was the sort of person who should probably have had an HBO drama about him by now, and as the dev team was putting together the initial pillars for the game, having one be ‘Tesla is in it’ proved rich pickings. “It didn’t matter what kind of string you pulled — towards his scientific endeavours, towards his personality — no matter what you pulled at something interesting would kind of fall out,” Hakalax said.



In real life, Tesla was unable to pay the mortgage on his famous Wardenclyffe lab, and it was demolished before it was finished. In the game, Wardenclyffe was successful, and expanded into a company providing electricity for half of the world. At the point the game starts, Tesla is the richest man on the planet, and has constructed a giant, autonomous nation of scientists and thinkers all living on a boat in international waters — the Helios. You play Rose, a journalist whose sister has been living and carrying out research on the Helios for some time. And surprise surprise, when you turn up after she sends a letter inviting you, all is not well.

While Hakalax noted that he had to “be careful” when talking about it, a key part of the story in Close To The Sun is that your sister has been fiddling with time, and exploring it as a potentially infinite source of energy. A very creepy NPC chases you and yells that this whole situation is your fault, which it sort of could be. Maybe you’ve just not done whatever it is you did yet. So it sort of makes the plot impossible to guess at.

The main influences for Close To The Sun are games like Soma, Layers Of Fear and Outlast. It’s a horror game but, Hakalax said, doesn’t lean into the horror quite as much. Rather, they’re using the tools of horror and suspense to keep the player on their toes. That’s not to say that I didn’t get a few scares in the hands on, but it also made me laugh. I followed a trail of blood around a corner, only to find that it was a can of paint. It also has a slicker, smoother experience to it, that I believe film fans would call “cinematic”. This is in part achieved by a system Storm In A Teacup have put under the hood. You won’t know it’s there but, in theory, events will trigger based on what you’re looking at. The idea is, Hakalax said, that the game will communicate more to you personally as a player, and what you’re interested in, rather than making it feel like the game is being played for you.



The biggest comparison that Close To The Sun has been drawing so far, however, is to a game that it seems to not want to make eye contact with, to the point that before playing the preview build I was told that BioShock is one of the things the game is not.. I made the comparison myself last year after first playing Close To The Sun at Gamescom. Because you can create a checklist of things in Close To The Sun that goes:
  • Lovely art deco architecture
  • Set at sea
  • Independent community of great minds
  • Oh no, something has gone wrong
  • Science has gone too far
  • Some weird time travel stuff is involved also
“We hear it a lot, and part of us just takes a shot and part of us high fives, and part of us worries about player expectations making that kind of connection,” Hakalax said, when I asked if he thought the comparison would be a problem, and if they were trying to distance their game from it. “We see it as something positive, of course, but we want to be sure that players don’t start up Close To The Sun expecting a BioShock type of game.” They take the comparison as a compliment, but it’s also a different type of game, even if you might squint and get déjà vu at the look of it.



There’s no combat, but I didn’t miss it. Creeping around the recently ruined grandeur of The Helios is nervy enough in itself. It’s a familiar feeling if you’ve ever been home alone and given yourself the shivers, or ended up in a museum near closing time and suddenly been terrified that you’re about to be locked in. And Tesla is a near constant presence. One of the first things you come across on his ship is a museum to himself, complete with informative voice recordings by, um, himself, and a giant golden statue of, er… okay, mate, you’ve gone a bit supervillain, here. By the time he starts talking to you on the radio, whilst you discover notes on potential Edison spies in bloody interrogation rooms, you’re not really primed to jump on the Tesla hype train.

“Of course we have some degree of responsibility to him as a person and to his legacy,” said Hakalax. “We’ve amplified certain aspects, we have references to his personal life that happened in his real timeline, so to speak, but we’ve been conscious about that since day one.” The balance is to not overstep in the depiction, whilst making their own version of Tesla as interesting as they can. But nothing on the Helios is exactly as it seems, including the man who built it. “The more you get to know our Tesla… hopefully you’ll come around at the end.”
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Well this is out now:



https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/05/02/close-to-the-sun-review/

Wot I Think: Close To The Sun

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Here is a story. Daedalus was a brilliant inventor, and designed the maze that kept the bloodthirsty Minotaur captive, but he and his son Icarus were themselves both kept as prisoners of King Minos on Crete, so that nobody would learn the secret of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Eventually, Daedalus built wings from feathers and wax, so that he and Icarus could fly to freedom, but he warned Icarus not to fly too high, or the sun would melt the wax.

Icarus flew… too Close To The Sun. [cool sunglasses emoji].

Close To The Sun is the first in the new genre of this-is-definitely-not-BioShock-honest exploration horror, or as I’ve been thinking of it, spooky Art Deco Firewatch. It continues the Greek mythology theme in its chapters (of which there are ten, running to about 5 hours), called things like The Border Of Hermes, The Fire Of Prometheus, The Strife Of Eris. They’re often a little clue to what’s coming up next. But even having played through the whole game, I’m not sure who the metaphorical Icarus to the game’s title is.



Is it Nicola Tesla, who in this alternate timeline won the science race against Edison and now lives on a giant ship, the Helios, with every other amazing scientist, artist, or general smart person of the age? Is it your sister Ada, whose dangerous theories were used to meddle with time itself? Surely it’s not you, Rose, the plucky journalist who’s now trapped aboard the stricken Helios, putting her, in a textual sense, very much too close to the sun? All these and more, perhaps.

The game starts as Rose arrives on the Helios, having received a cryptic letter from Ada, and it turns out that stuff has very much gone down. A quarantine is in effect and the giant ship (so massive that it issues its own passports) is mostly deserted. You have to explore, gently puzzle, and sometimes sprint for your life around the Helios to find Ada, escape, and theoretically figure out what in the heckening is going on.



Close To The Sun exists in a potential sweet spot for me, a mix of horror and leisurely exploration, and I enjoyed a lot of it. It excels at toying with you, particularly in the first half of the game, and paces itself so that you’re constantly tense even when you have nothing to fear. The jump scares are few but well placed, and are triggered by what you’re looking at rather than e.g. when you enter a room. You won’t hear a sudden ominous piano chord and realise you entirely missed something scary happening behind you. The scary things will happen in your face.

In the later stages of the game, as the danger is more fully revealed and the body count increases, a lot of this tension is lost ‘cos you sort of know what to expect. You know in what form the danger comes, where from, and what’ll happen when it does, which is a frustrating run-or-die section where you leap over or squeeze past obstacles. It takes a while to figure out that if the icon to jump is white it means click to interact, and if it’s yellow it means space bar. Or it might be the other way around. Either way, these sections are punishing to play, and I had more fun when I was imagining scares that didn’t exist yet and creeping warily around lovely nautical state rooms.



Storm In A Teacup, the developers, have emphasised several times that Close To The Sun is definitely not BioShock. And it’s not; you don’t get any weapons, when you’re in danger your only option is to cheese it, and it’s certainly not Storm In A Teacup’s fault that most players’ first exposure to Art Deco was in Andrew Ryan’s Magical Libertarian SeaWorld. It’s a lovely design style! Why shouldn’t anyone use it in their game, dammit? But at the same time, and possibly because the Helios already reminds you of Rapture, some of the story beats feel like Close To The Sun was sitting next to BioShock in class and cribbing answers. Advanced science gone wrong? On an independent colony at sea? Time loops and what have you?

That’s not to say that Close To The Sun doesn’t do its take on these things well, and a lot of the time I was enjoying it more because nobody was shouting Objectivist talking points at me. It helps that Close To The Sun does a lot of detail work, making the Helios feel like a place people actually lived and died in. There are scattered papers, desks and rooms arranged differently, narky notes left to the cleaners. Rose waves her hand in front of her face to brush away clouds of flies rising from corpses. There are loads of references to pigeons, for the Tesla fans. Ghosts of the past sometimes appear, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture style, to play out recent events or lead you to a puzzle. The Helios is stunning, too, a temple of ruined glory that can be beautiful and ornate, or mechanical and functional, but always gloomy and creepy.



The mystery of what exactly happened to the ship to get it in this state, and why (and when) is teased out slowly, and you’re rewarded for exploring with collectibles and extra details that give new angles the story. One involves solving a riddle to eventually break into a room and find one of the character’s secret backstories. The voice acting is fabulous, too, the stand out being Aubrey, the older scientist who guides you around the ship over radio, while he’s trapped in the engine rooms cheerfully gnattering to the corpse of his mate Benny.

This makes it all the more disappointing that a bunch of these mysteries are unsolved, left suddenly dangling at the end of the game as if waiting for a sequel or chunky DLC to tie them off. I wish my adventure on the Helios hadn’t ended so abruptly and I feel a wee bit short changed, but I’d still be really pleased if they announced an add-on — like being cheated by a 20s newsie, but he did it with a bit of flair and a cheeky grin, so you let him get away with it.
 

Belegarsson

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Got a review code for this game, it took me I think 4 hours? to complete it (god knows how long I spent since the dogshit Epic launcher doesn't record playtime), and honestly its short length probably did it a favor. For a game that touted alternative reality as its selling point, the plot itself did very little with it. There's small bits of everything, time travel, supernatural entity, hazardous tech, but all of them are very lightly treated, as in they slowly become small flavours presented in notes scattered around (get it, cuz immersive sims do that all the time!!!). The motivation and the final quarter doesn't make a lick of sense, Tesla keep talking about
Ada (protagonist's sister) is dead but not gone and hinting at "resurrecting" her because her future sent her to this forsaken place as some kind of butterfly effect and shit
then the game ends.

The protagonist herself is pretty annoying as she's a journalist yet she's annoyed whenever people around her use scientific terms??? The story is seperated into 10 chapters with Greek myth theme in their title, like The Fire of Prometheus, because you're walking across an engine room on fire, The Path of Ares because you're running to the switch that can disable the shockwave from Tesla tower, GET IT??? Let's just say, this game isn't really subtle in its theme and nuance in its execution.

Gameplay is as barebone as you can imagine. You walk, you run away from creatures and a knife maniac, you push switches, you find written codes to insert whereever requires code, that's it. Honestly I feel like the entire thing is just a showcase of 3D environmental artists, outside from that there's nothing really stick. It tried a bit too hard to be like SOMA in Bioshock skin but actually made with only 10% effort and talent.
 

Viata

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Tesla even got his own game and Oliver Heaviside is still completely ignored by everyone despite being the real father of Electrical Engineering. :negative:
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Steam page live despite the Epic exclusivity:



This is supposed coming out May next year if it was the standard 1-year exclusivity. I guess the thing in the Steam Distribution Agreement is actually not a thing?
 

toro

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This is out now


That price is more scary than the game.

Edit: price is already -25%
 
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