Close to the Sun is a narrative adventure game that falters when it comes to its most fundamental part: its narrative. With shallow, boring characters and undeveloped themes, the game even foregoes some conclusion in favor of leaving doors open to a sequel.

The story takes place in 1897 in a reality where Nikola Tesla has built a futuristic ocean linear named Helios, which is supposed to house the best and most prominent scientific minds of the world. Tesla builds a miniature Rapture inside his ship, promising that in Helios scientific research will not be bound by laws or morality. One of the posters you find very early on in the game promises, “Invent and innovate without artificial limitations of capital or politics.”

Just like in Bioshock, however, this dream of unregulated progress leads to tragedy. As soon as our protagonist – Rose Archer – enter Helios, she notices something is off: there’s no one around to greet her, and the word “Quarantine” is written with red paint on the entrance gate.

Rose is after her sister, Ada, who works in Helios and supposedly sent her a letter asking for help. But most of the time, Rose will be talking with a mysterious man called Aubrey over the radio, who claims to be trapped in the ship and is also in need of help.

If the setting of a neoliberal society isolated in the middle of the sea is already reminiscent of Bioshock, and the art direction based on art deco reinforces the comparison, the protagonist following the order of an untrustworthy man under the radio just wraps up the package. But any comparison with Bioshock does Close to the Sun no favors, as it pales in comparison in every respect.

Take the relationship between Rose and Aubrey, for example. Calling the character untrustworthy is a euphemism at best, as he keeps showing increasingly worrying signs of being completely deranged. He’s clearly manipulating her, but shows no effort in trying to conceal this: there’s even a moment when he blatantly warns her that he’s a liar, but Rose still doesn’t seem to mind. She appears oblivious to his problematic behavior despite all the evidence: when Aubrey tells her he’s going to look for the arms of his dead friend to high five them, for example, she answers with an unironic, “Sounds good!” which is just hilarious. Later on, the humor is at least intended, when she asks Aubrey if he’s okay and he answers, “I’m using my best friend’s dismembered arm as a back scratcher, of course I’m not okay.” And she still trusts him, which disconnects any sensible player from her point of view.

Worldbuilding is also lacking. Unlike Bioshock, the notes and diaries you find here are more worried about sounding authentic than adding to the story. Instead of presenting characters reacting to that “society”, confronting and questioning its foundations, the texts you find across the stages reveal mundane problems that happen in any workplace. It’s people complaining about their co-workers or the difficulties that arose in some project. Add the collectibles that award you with the so-important achievements and are of the blandest and most useless kind – masks, blueprints, and passports – and you have a huge missed opportunity to flesh out the setting.

Helios is built on a dream similar to Rapture, but its downfall seems to miss the point of the premise. Here, Nikola Tesla is at war with Thomas Edison, who keeps sending agents to infiltrate Tesla’s ranks, steal information, and sabotage projects. The problem is that if the reason why Helios became a slaughterhouse isn’t the lack of rules and regulations, but just the meddling of a rival, the ideology at its core loses its importance. The story is not even endorsing it – which would be a choice – but ignoring it altogether: even if there were capital and politics at play it wouldn’t have made a difference.

If the art direction is effective in building this fantastic ship – even if it looks a lot like Rapture – it also doesn’t seem to work hand-in-hand with the story. Take the huge statue of Tesla you come across at the beginning: any person who would ask to build a monument of himself must be a tad egocentric and narcissistic, just like Andrew Ryan. But the Tesla you find and speak with is empathetic and humble – and the story never tackles or even acknowledges this contradiction. But even the art direction fails at some times, being too on-the-nose and superficial: when you get to enter the room of a famous chess player, you find in his room… a lot of chess boards. That’s it. In other words, instead of building a character, it doubles down on the caricature.

Moving on to the plot itself, Close to the Sun gradually reveals to be a mess of ideas. It aims and shoots at everything, but manages to hit nothing. There’s time travel, serial killers, monsters, utopic societies, and even alternate dimensions at play, but there’s no cohesion, nothing tying everything together. For example, the monsters prowling the ship, besides having a contrived explanation for their existence, appear only when it’s convenient for the plot and disappear right after. Early on, the serial killer also reveals that he knows Rose, since he speaks of her as if she had done something to him in the past, even though they have never met. This heavily suggests that she will travel in time at some point and do something to him, but this plotline is forgotten, being one of many things that are left open to be explored by a sequel.

This kind of approach to storytelling is problematic because the plot points left for the future game leave the current story unfinished: it introduces mysteries and questions and never bothers to solve and answer them. There’s also an issue with the letter that Rose received from her sister, related to the time it was written, that seems important, but the story never goes back to it. Another letter, introduced in the last chapter, is not even read by Rose: we have to take a screenshot of it to read it, but I doubt many players will bother at this point.

The characters, meanwhile, are nothing to write home about. Rose is defined by her drive to find her sister, who in turn is defined by being the protagonist’s sister. They’re both hard-working and persistent and that’s it. Aubrey is a bit more interesting, since besides being insane, he also has an inflated ego that can cause some problems. Tesla is humbler than one would think, the serial killer is just a plot device… and there are no more characters in the game.

Being a narrative adventure game, Close to the Sun has no tangible gameplay to speak of. You just walk around, open and close doors, pick up notes and solve the rare puzzle here and there. In other words, it can’t make up for the game’s narrative problems. To spice things up, there are some chase sequences spread throughout the game, but they are either boring (when you just run forward) or frustrating (when there are paths you can choose to take but some lead to dead-ends, inserting an unnecessary process of trial-and-error into the proceedings).

Games of the narrative adventure genre live and die by the quality of their story. Unfortunately, with Close to the Sun we are before the latter.

---> If you liked this review, visit us on Lit on the Spot for more!

Wonderful design and an engrossing story in a well fleshed-out world that I really wanted to explore. The characters are fun, the setting is exciting and the story grasps your curiosity right from the get-go. I really thought this game was going to be a winner for me.

Unfortunately, the game is let down by very clunky controls and boring puzzles. The worst of which are the chase scenes where you have to plan your route perfectly or you'll fail. This could be great but when you're constantly failing because of clunky controls it stops being exciting and quickly becomes tedious.

NINTENDO SWITCH - avoid playing on the Switch. The graphics really struggle and the frame rate regularly drops even when docked.

BIOSHOCK - It absolutely shares a lot of it's main writing points with Bioshock but the story successfully stands on it's own. If you're looking for another Bioshock look elsewhere because this is not an action game or a shooter in any form. It's a horror adventure so expect a slow pace.

CONCLUSION - I was really looking forward to playing this especially on Switch, it was a great game for my long commutes on the train but despite the fantastic setting and entertaining characters the gameplay made it a bit of a chore to get through.

Did not like this game. Mustered up the willpower to finish it just so I could write a fair review about how much I didn't like it. It's not horrible or unplayable by any means, but it's painfully mediocre. Gameplay is nothing special, plot is nothing special, feel no emotional connection to the characters, and for a game that is clearly similar to if not directly inspired by BioShock, you'd think it'd try harder to set itself apart rather than basically copying the same plot twist from BioShock so that you can see it coming from a million miles away.

Things I did like: the theme song, some of the environments were nice (although there wasn't much variety, when there was there were some nice things to look at), some of the collectibles were interesting or amusing, and I guess the glowy figure things from the past were kind of cool so you can see glimpses of what all the bodies lying around were doing before they became corpses. That's pretty much it I think.

This is supposed to be a horror game but it wasn't really scary. The monsters were boring. There's a knife maniac who's kind of scary but his motive or backstory is never explained (unless I missed something along the way) which is kind of stupid. Speaking of backstory, I don't really get the whole time travel element of the plot and what happened at the end. The idea of having all these great scientific minds on this big crazy ship working in all these laboratories was a high-potential concept but the execution was lackluster.

I didn't like how the characters would make all these sassy comments, it took away from any sort of horror the game was trying to bring. It's not that I don't like dark or juxtaposed humor, but if you're going to have that, it should actually be funny. And while I'm ragging on the game, I don't like that it's set in the 1800s but way the characters talk doesn't reflect that at all. If it was a good game I wouldn't care but it just took me out of the whole atmosphere more, along with the misplaced and unfunny humor.

On top of that, the controls are kind of wonky, the camera felt really slow even when I tried to turn up the sensitivity, at some parts you have to be standing in the exact right spot to perform an action, which was annoying (i.e. you're already standing right in front of a switch but you have to slightly nudge yourself into a precise place to pull it and if you overshoot you have to nudge yourself back). There's a useless jump button, you can only use it during certain chase sequences to jump over things which could have easily been switched out for the action button like the rest of the obstacles (in fact I'm pretty sure you only use the jump button during chase sequences and can use the action button to jump over things otherwise).

The puzzles were easy and unoriginal, the only puzzle that was actually kind of complicated was a code you had to translate and when you did it literally just said "Oh my god! You actually did it! You are the best. Enjoy the rest of Close to the Sun." Which would be a hilarious easter egg in an actually good game but feels kind of insulting thrown into a game that otherwise had me bored to tears.

And this is another stupid thing to complain about but there's literally an objective that comes up in this game for something that happens directly afterward in a cut scene, thus completing itself. I feel like that's just the cherry on top of the stupid game sundae.

This game is free on Epic Games through April 15 but I would skip it unless Nikola Tesla is your dead scientist crush or something. It's kind of laughable that this game is $30 at regular price, especially since it can be finished in about 6 hours. Probably less if you don't pick up any collectibles.