A sci-fi survival game that wants you to live
We have to admit, we’d never previously considered whether windmills were cool. Then again, we hardly expected we’d stumble across one while exploring an alien planet in Teotl’s sci-fi survival game. And yet there it is, proudly protruding from a large outcrop. “It makes no sense from a practical point of view,” creative director Sjoerd De Jong concedes. “But it’s really cool!”
Strange as it may seem, we’re inclined to agree. The windmill is a delightfully incongruous sight, only adding to the ambience of inscrutability that makes the early hours of The Solus Project so absorbing. Discoveries like this, after all, compel players to explore more, if only to see what other oddities might await around the next corner. “I think if you have an exploration game like this, you need these mysteries,” De Jong adds. “You need something that drives you.”
This is, perhaps, the key difference between De Jong’s game and the welter of survival sims that have washed up on Steam’s shores in the past few years. As publisher Grip Digital is keen to underline, The Solus Project isn’t your typical sandbox adventure, but a more linear game with a stronger narrative. There’s a natural fascination in how survival games explore the human will to live against the starkest odds, but after a time the appeal of self-preservation starts to wane: for existence to have meaning, we need a sense of purpose, a reason to plod on, and that’s something The Solus Project handles better than most. Once you’ve crafted a makeshift torch and found some shelter, it’s not long before you locate a teleportation device that allows you to bypass an obstruction blocking the entrance to a cave, with subsequent findings convincing you that you may not be, as you’d first thought, alone.
On the default difficulty and above, there’s a lot still to think about just to keep going: happily, a portable device carried in your left hand will let you know when your body temperature drops or spikes, and when it’s time for a snack or to start looking for a source of water. If you’d rather the challenge of looking after yourself took a back seat to more leisurely exploration, however, you’re in luck: Teotl has included a difficulty slider that entrusts players to set a challenge that suits their needs. “We’ve scaled it down a lot over two-and-a-half years of development,” De Jong tells us. “In the beginning, it was far, far more difficult and everyone seemed to die within a minute. But people who maybe aren’t seasoned survival players can get through on Medium [difficulty] – they’ll probably die a few times, but it’s more fairly balanced.”
Even on the very lowest setting, there are environmental hazards that represent a threat to the player, but for the time being, at least, there are no enemies to worry about. This was, in part, inspired by the response to Teotl’s 2010 puzzler The Ball: people enjoyed the firstperson conundrums enough to find the game’s enemies a needless distraction. Likewise the ability to toggle waypoints and other visual aids. “There really does seem to be a group of people who just want to explore in a relaxing way,” De Jong says. “I mean, you still tend to die every now and again, but we want to make sure you have a nice time, that you’re not walking around aimlessly through some sandbox environment, not knowing what to do. We want an experience where you can dream away in this magical, fantastic environment and [still] make progress.”
If this combination of otherworldliness and earthy realism is particularly on trend at a time when so many designers are preoccupied with space and survival, De Jong’s no bandwagon-jumper: this has evidently been on his mind for quite some time, even before development began in earnest in the summer of 2013. The Solus Project is at once a product of his expertise as a level designer and environment artist, and his love of the natural world. “I think as an indie, you can do two things,” he muses. “You can either build the games you think people want to play, or you can build the games that you want to play, and hope your passion shines through – and that a lot of people share that same passion.”