The Solus Project (Sci-Fi Survival Adventure)

[Dexter]

This one was announced at the last E3:



It's set to Release on Early Access in February: http://store.steampowered.com/app/313630/

A single player exploration and survival experience, played in first person and developed in Unreal Engine 4. Set on a mysterious and uninhabited alien planet.

Earth is on the brink of destruction and you are sent to explore a distant planet. After years of space travel you arrive but experience a catastrophic landing.

With your team members dead and your equipment destroyed you have no way of communicating with - or receiving help from an Earth that might no longer exist... you are completely and utterly alone.

Explore
Survive through exploration. Unlock the depths of the uncharted planet, and the secrets buried deep below. Delve into huge cave systems and tombs and uncover over 200 secrets.

Atmosphere
Atmosphere rich environment that is fully dynamic. A day and night cycle and a dynamic weather system that calculates temperature/humidity/wind. Ocean tides. Plants respond to the climate. Storms form. Earthquakes happen.

Survive
Survive the extreme climate, tornadoes, storms, meteors, lightning, and not least the dark secrets burried beneath the surface.

Depth
Plants grow and rot. Ocean tide based on the moon. Your body responds to everything from getting wet to lack of sleep to walking uphill to the humidity. Hundreds of upgrades to be found. Secret areas within secret areas within secret areas.

Savior
Your death means the end of mankind. Save us and rebuild a communication device to phone home, by scavenging useful items.

Adventure
Be a pioneer, an archeologist, and an astronaut to explore a mysterious alien planet. The adventure has a beginning and an end, but it is a harsh world. A mistake will cost you your life.

Length
Many kilometers/miles of alien islands, caves, and tombs.

The Ball
Spiritual successor to The Ball. Same universe, same backstory, same atmosphere.

THE PLANET
World
Gliese-6143-C is a harsh and barren planet, covered by a vast lifeless ocean. Days are over 45C/113F, and nights under -30C/F.

Archipelago
5 islands, with a shallow sea between them and connected through a system of caves. To travel from one island to the next you must traverse these dark caverns.

Wreckage
The spaceship in which you arrived crashed on arrival, and its debris is scattered across the world. Find and locate debris sites to find additional resources.

Tombs
Megalithic tombs are all over. Clearly you were not the first intelligent being to have set foot on this planet. Who was here before? Where did they go? What happened?

GAMEPLAY
Your Time
Scale the game as you wish. Go from a super hardcore experience to a relaxing stroll on an alien planet. In fact you can cheat oldschool console style even. It is your time, your experience.

Just You
Very little handholding. No obvious enemies. No combat. No characters. It is just you. All alone by yourself.

Oldschool
Fond memories of games from 10, 20 years ago? So do we. Complex level layouts. Dozens of secret areas. Keys to unlock doors. Underground indoor environments.

Exploration
There are hundreds and hundreds of things to find hidden away in the world. Secret areas the size of modern "next gen levels". Secrets within secrets. Just how deep does the rabbit hole go?

Puzzles
Puzzle your way through environmental puzzles left by an alien civilization.

 

[Mustawd]

 

[Pyke]

Pretty.

 

[Dexter]

Early Access Release 18 February: http://store.steampowered.com/app/313630/

Full Release planned for May: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/play-xbox-one-and-pc-survival-game-the-solus-proje/1100-6434446/

 

[Explorerbc]

It goes on my backlog since I love sci-fi.

I feel like those dev videos kinda spoil the mystery though. I think it would be better if they vaguely hinted that you might not be the first one on the planet and let the rest be discovered by you, instead of showing you a dozen alien locations and buildings.

 

[V_K]

Looks neat. Hope my laptop can run it.

 

[Dexter]

It's out on Early Access now: http://store.steampowered.com/app/313630

 

[Aenra]

Bit out of topic, but whenever i see 'oldschool' in modern game descriptions.. doesn't help. Nine out of ten times, it's someone too fucking young projecting his interpretation of a concept he was not around to ever experience.
e.g. Take this one.. will allow you to scale time, scale difficulty, pick a "relaxing stroll" if you fancy all the way down to the finish line.. but hey, it's 'oldschool' "relaxing scroll", not that modern shit, lol, nuh uh

Will wait for the hive's consensus prior to purchasing, but thanks for tip, hadn't heard of it

 

[Daedalos]

This looks pretty interesting, actually. Kind of alien isolation-ish.

Anybody tried it?

 

[paintinggrey]

Looks great. Reminds me of Robinson's Requiem, loved that flawed game and that fucking t-rex

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Looks like another hackjob a' la Solarix, minus shooting.

 

[J1M]

All threads about early-access games should be moved to retardo.

 

[V_K]

Looks like it was released two weeks ago. Anyone tried?

 

[Forest Dweller]

Yeah, the whole's things out now. I'm interested in impressions.

 

[Trojan_generic]

Finished this game a couple of days ago. Some opinions:
- nice atmospheric graphics and sounds, also cool but quite realistic light effects
- some nice weather effects, you can actually die. Also, about half of the game is underground in dark environments, bring your light.
- after the start, not much stress about survival and not much horror either. You constantly have a magic waypoint showing where to go, but can still get somewhat lost; also, secret and significantly big areas can be found and looted in many places.
- the plot and the background story is somewhat interesting; I was sold as usual on the idea of discovering an ancient civilization on a foreign planet.
- the ending destroyed a lot of the game for me; looks to me that the ending has about 75 % haters and 25 % likers; a spoilerish discussion or two can be found on Steam, even with developers chiming in. It was apparently so rushed that even the credits rolling end abruptly and the game jumps to the main menu where it crashes.

Also, this game was originally released episodically, so it looks a bit that the team did not totally agree how to go forward with the plot. Also, there are items in the game that don't make any sense whatsoever in the gameworld.

I also read that at any time no more than 5 people worked on this simultaneously - in that light it is quite a remarkable creation.

This game had potential to be a lot more if the story/plot would have stayed better together till the end. It would in fact only have needed very little effort.

 

[Spukrian]

TL;DR: I like this game and I'm interested in hearing your opinion on it, if you've played it.

The story is that a rogue star enters the solar system and destroys Earth and most of the planets. The last of humanity occupies three colony ships orbiting Pluto. They build five explorer ships, to go to planets that might be the future home of humanity. This is called the Solus Project. It's unclear if the ships were sent to the same planet or different planets, but personally I feel it makes more sense if each ship went to its own destination.

You play as Sken, part of Solus 3, which crashlands on the planet. You can choose to be a man or a woman, the only difference is the voice acting. Sken talks occasionally and the acting is... adequate I guess. However Sken sometimes isn't the sharpest tool... you know, like Simon in SOMA. You also choose difficulty, measuring systems (metric system or the inferior system) and one starting item (works like traits in Fallout).

The objectives are:
1. Survive.
2. Build an antenna and phone home.

Surviving means eating food, drinking water, sleeping and most importantly keep tabs on temperature. Don't go swimming in the middle of the night, you'll die of hypothermia. In fact, hypothermia probably counts for more than half of my deaths in this game. Anyways, you scrounge to find plants to eat, tincans and water bottles from the crashed ship.

The antenna is built by scavenging parts from the crashed ship. However these are spread out on different islands in an archipelago. To get to other islands you need to go through caves.

A big part of the game is finding and reading notes, which gives lore. YMMV whether it's interesting or not.

I wouldn't call this game an immersive sim, but it has a few simulated systems like gravity and temperature. I guess you could say that it has metroidvania elements as well, you find equipment that unlocks new areas (e.g. a hammer to break down walls)

The jump controls feel good in this game. There are a lot of basalt pillars that you can jump on, sometimes you can find a secret. Secrets increase your stats, e.g. a backpack increases you inventory size.

Early on you find the teleport device. It fires a disc which you could teleport to. The disc is affected by gravity, you could teleport while it's still in the air (but that's not recommended). Also if you time a jump correctly when firing, the disc will go further. This device is used to reach areas that are blocked off or to find secrets. It can also be used to reach areas that you're not supposed to go.

There are environmental conditions that threathen you. There's some flora and fauna, but I don't want to spoil them. There are also some other dangers.

Some people would call this a horror game, I didn't think it was particularly scary. Sure, there are some tense situations in the game, but on the other hand, some of the things meant to be scary just feels a bit silly to me (again, I don't want to spoil anything).

If there is one thing I don't like it's the PDA. It's always in your left hand, I would rather it be stashed away and only pop up when accessing the inventory. Also, the PDA talks too much, it's a bit annoying.

A missed opportunity is that you can use cable as rope, but there are very few places to do so and in every case there another path to reach the same place without rope.

I have some other nitpicks/criticisms but again, I don't want to spoil the game.

So, anyone else played it? What did you think of it?