[REVIEW] Close to the Sun

 I love adventure games with a strong narrative and good environmental storytelling. So far as I'm concerned, if a game is describe to me that way, I'll probably enjoy playing it. And after a positive experience playing The Town of Light, I decided to try another game by the same publisher.

Developed by Storm in a Teacup and published by Wired Productions, Close to the Sun released in May 2019 for PC and October 2019 for PS4, XBox One, and Nintendo Switch, and is a tense atmospheric adventure game that straddles the line between being steampunk sci-fi and horror. Which sounds compelling enough on its own, honestly, but given my positive experience with Wired Productions's games, I was ready to get invested, and had high expectations for Close to the Sun.

STEAMPUNK HORROR WAS NEVER SO INTERESTING

The year is 1897, and you play as Rose, a woman who has been called to the Helios by her sister, Ada. The Helios is a grand ship devised by Nicola Tesla, a city-ship on the ocean where the best and brightest minds of an age can congregate and use their inventive prowess to solve the problems plaguing humanity. Rose arrives on the ship to find... nobody.

Well, almost nobody. While at first the doors slam behind her with "Quarantine" scrawled across them, leaving Rose entirely alone in the ship's reception area, exploring for a little while yields glimpses of people still present, shadows darting behind debris, silhouettes that promptly disappear as lights turn out.

And corpses. Lots and lots of corpses.

Bodies seem to be absolutely everywhere on the Helios, torn apart and bloody, along with more scrawled messages: "Time is not a river." "The circle must be broken."

On top of that, Rose and Ada begin to communicate via the ship's comm system, and Ada has no memory of inviting Rose to the Helios to begin with. How strange. But perhaps if they meet in person, they can figure out what's going on.

Just have to dodge a knife-wielding maniac named Ludwig. And deal with intermittent communications from a strange scientist named Aubrey. And sometimes Tesla himself. All of them giving Rose tiny pieces of the puzzle, peeling back the layers of mystery about the Helios, what its purpose is, and what happened to lead to so many horrific deaths.

THERE'S A MYSTERY AFOOT, ROSE!

 There's so much fantastic environmental storytelling in Close to the Sun, and I love games that give that level of attention to detail. Knocked-over baggage carts blocking off paths you're not meant to explore look entirely natural given the state of the ship; you don't think twice about why they're there, because they don't stand out as unnatural. As you explore more you find occasional blood splatters and trails, though hilariously, one turns out to be nothing more than red paint! You'll occasionally find claw marks on walls and tables, long before you encounter the things that left those marks. Close to the Sun does a lot to forecast the excitement and danger in small and subtle ways, that you can entirely overlook if you're not taking the time to really look around.

Which you should, because this game is dense with lore. Documents all over the place, many of them things you can read. You get character bios, details of experiments that were successful or failures, scribblings on blackboards, even posters of plays that were performed on the Helios to entertain all of the geniuses living and working there.

And since you're spending so much time looking all over the Helios for your sister, and a solution to all the problems still happening on the ship, you get a great grasp on just how big the ship is, and how much it contains. Comfort and culture for all to enjoy, in thanks for their contributions to humanity; you get a sense of all that as you explore crew quarters, a theatre, lavish gathering places, gardens... There's so much to see. And it perfectly sets the stage and establishes just what sort of game you're playing in, going all out with details that could have been omitted without changing the nature of the game, but their inclusion makes everything come together so flawlessly that I can't help but admire the level of work that went into crafting the environments on board the Helios.

TRIAL-AND-ERROR PUZZLES SUCK

Like any good adventure game, there are puzzles that need to be solve in order to progress. Not a necessary part of the genre, I guess, but common enough to be expected. And most of the puzzles in Close to the Sun are pretty decent and not too difficult or obtuse to solve if you put your mind to things.

...Most puzzles. There are a few that are less than clearcut, however. Such as needing to complete a series of actions in order to progress, but needing to do one of them in a room that, up until the very moment you need to be in there, is a room that you just can't go into.

I overlooked that freaking room for so long while I was struggling with that part of the game, because I'd previously explored everywhere in the area and had dismissed that room as just another detailed part of the environment, but not something that I needed to pay attention to. So I ran around for what felt like forever, trying to figure out what to do, because I couldn't have guessed that I needed to be a room I didn't really know existed before. It was practically an accident that I discovered the solution.

On top of that, there are parts of the game where you have to run from Ludwig, the aforementioned knife-wielding maniac. You have to choose paths and jump over things and try to get to the place where he'll just stop chasing you. Problem is that you don't know where that place is, or how long it will take to get there, and if Ludwig catches you, you die and have to restart the chase sequence.

Problem is that there's rarely any sign of what you did to get caught. Did you take a wrong turn? Did your fingers slip off the controller's joystick for a split second, making Rose slow down for just long enough that Ludwig could catch up? Doesn't matter; just do the sequence all over again until you get it right!

It's the very definition of trial-and-error gameplay, and I'm not a fan of that at all. I don't want to be railroaded or never given a challenge, but some sort of indication that the environment has changed, or what I did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake twice, would have been much appreciated.

THE PROOF IS IN THE ONE-ELECTRON PUDDING

The strength of Close to the Sun is absolutely its story. At the risk of giving too many spoilers, the gist of the story is that a team aboard the Helios was working on something that could provide humanity with a limitless source of clean power. Only things went wrong, terribly wrong, and now rifts in reality have opened, letting terrifying and dangerous creatures through into this world. At the same time, these time rifts also screwed up the flow of time on the Helios; nothing is linear anymore. Ada doesn't remember contacting Rose because in one point in time, she hadn't. The Ada Rose communicates with while on the ship is an earlier version of Ada, one who hadn't felt a need to contact Rose at all. They're from different timelines.

The glowing figures that Rose encounters as she traverses the Helios are echoes of the people who used to live and work there, a glimpse of their lives now held outside of the ragged borders of time. Time is now looping back on itself, recursive, so nothing is as straightforward as it should be.

Which means 2 things to me, aside from, "Damn, that's cool!"

1) Every time Rose dies, whether it's from a stabbing, a time demon, or just falling off into the water and drowning, that death might as well be considered canon. If everything's a time loop where "before" and "after" aren't identifiable instances, Rose can die, and then a Rose that didn't die on another timeline just sort of becomes the default. And this is further backed by:

2) Ludwig is so insane and stabby at this point because for some reason, he remembers all the times that he died, and Rose is the reason for it. He tries to kill her every time he sees her, yelling that it's all her fault. Why he in particular remembers it all, I couldn't say, but with the reveal in the ending (which I will not spoil for you; you'll just have to go play the game!), it just makes the most sense to me.

I do love my lore theories...

MIND-BENDINGLY GOOD

Overall, despite some drawbacks, I have to say that Close to the Sun is absolutely worth playing. The environmental design is top-notch, and the story is absolutely amazing. I've played through Close to the Sun multiple times now, even though I know how it all ends, because it's such a good experience that I want to return to it. It's hard not to want to go back to seeing such a sumptuous setting, even if it is in ruins, and experience once more the thrill of running for my life against time-anomoly demon things.

If you haven't played Close to the Sun already, I highly recommend you do. It really is a great game, especially if you're into adventure games and steampunk, and doubly so if you want a game with a fantastic time-loop story that can really suck you in if you give it half a chance.