Solis review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Stylish narrative side-scroller overshadowed by its hour-long length and abrupt end

If you have an hour to spare and enjoy puzzle-free, artsy-looking games that end abruptly, Dutch developer Gibberish Studio’s Solis is just the thing for you! Its protagonist, Billie, works in the marketing department at eLiXeR, a company that professes to have found the cure for old age. One night she discovers that not all is as it seems, and after some intriguing linear investigating of the titular city where the company is based, Billie goes to bed, reminiscing about her decisions throughout the night. She has lots of questions floating around in her head, particularly about what she should do next… only for the game to end there and then.

The first thing you notice about Solis is its unique graphical style. The character designs almost put me off from playing it, as they look more alien than human, with exaggerated facial features. Billie, the main character, wears a stylish trench coat and has a blue tuft of hair atop an otherwise large shaved head, with bulbous eyes and a small mouth, giving her almost an insectoid appearance that makes her very recognizable. The other characters, both in their cartoonish physical designs and unusual attire, give the game a near-future, tech-noir vibe. These aren’t modern contemporaries, but rather caricatures in a world slightly detached from our own reality; familiar yet subtly different with an undercurrent of sci-fi running through the topics they discuss.

The backgrounds have a similarly extravagant graphic novel aesthetic, taking players from Billie’s own apartment to the streets in four different city districts via their own distinctively designed subway stations. Destinations include the company office party, eLiXeR’s corporate headquarters, a museum, and an ex-employee’s house. These painterly hand-drawn environments are crisp and quite colorful, especially when night turns to dawn and everything looks brighter. It’s impressive that for such a short game, each outdoor location has two different versions.

You’ll navigate these environments with the WASD keys or gamepad, moving Billie either left or right. Billie moves fluently across the screen, and the side-scrolling itself feels very natural. In a nice touch, she’ll slip through any doors in her path automatically without having to stop and open them. The cursor is context-sensitive, most of the time turning into an eye when Billie draws near a hotspot she can examine and/or use, but changing to door, stairway or subway icons when she’s in the vicinity of such exits, and even elevator buttons when she can switch floors inside buildings. When something Billie examines can be interacted with, a pop-up window appears with menu-styled text options to choose from.

In addition to its own unique aesthetic, Solis showcases many different art forms throughout the city, with loads of paintings to look at, as well as a variety of street graffiti. The text-only narration describes them all in detail, as well as Billie’s feelings about them. The sculptures you’ll see in the museum are actually based on real works by Milius, a Dutch artist based in Brussels.

Then there’s the soundtrack, yet another art form. The background score’s spacey instruments sound truly out-of-this-world, but after a while it really ingrains itself into the experience. There’s even a concert hall in Solis, giving you the option to attend a performance of the band Rock Drop, and you can choose whether Billie likes them or not. (Personally, I thought they sounded like they were playing their music backwards and at half speed.) There are also very realistic sound effects throughout, like the chatter of the crowd at the party, and loudspeaker announcements in the subway.

Solis

Genre:	Mystery, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Side-scroller
Theme:	Conspiracy
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Quest, Choices matter, Narrative
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

Along the way you will meet random strangers on the street – or rooftops – and key characters at the office party Billie is invited to as an employee of eLiXeR. You can talk to anyone who displays a speech bubble above their head. Everyone is human except for one bizarre character wandering around outside Billie’s apartment that comes straight from a cartoon: Wine-Beer, whose bottom half is a wine glass and whose top half is a beer bottle, but with eyes and a mouth.

In conversation you can choose between available dialogue options, though not everyone you meet will have anything interesting to say, which mimics real life. Dialogues come with close-up portraits but the characters aren’t voiced, so you have to tap through their lines. The text appears typewriter-style, but thankfully you can make it all show instantly with yet another button tap. Because the character portraits remain visible when the narrator is speaking, you have to pay close attention to the quotation marks to distinguish between the two. The problem is, they aren’t used consistently, and sometimes a character’s speech won’t have quotation marks, while the narrator’s comments will.

The narrator will usually tell you exactly what Billie thinks, feels and does, with no room for personal interpretation, over-explaining both her and others’ reactions. However, sometimes you’ll shape Billie’s personality by choosing from a couple of possibilities, like whether or not you like a statue at a person’s home, or by choosing to tell the truth or lie about things, such as why Billie is dressed so peculiarly for a fancy party. At the end of the game, Billie goes over these choices, wondering how people felt about her replies, but without any further consequences. There’s no manual save system, so if you want to do things differently, you have to start from scratch.

While at first there doesn’t seem to be much going on in Solis, Billie is soon sent on an errand to find her boss, and in each location she receives new information about where to go next. However, other than when it suddenly becomes morning after talking to an important character, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of time passing, so you can choose to ignore your assigned task and set your own priorities, like visiting a museum or entering the concert hall. Ultimately, though, while there’s a degree of freedom to explore as you wish at times, progress is restricted by the need to fulfill certain conditions first.

None of those conditions involve solving puzzles, as Solis is devoid of them. At the start of the game you need to charge your phone, requiring you to search for your nearby charger. Near the end you need to remember a computer password, choosing the correct digits from a dialogue list. Other than that, you only walk around, talk to people and decide what to say.

The story itself explores themes like the dangers of social media, fast-advancing technologies coupled with lust for money and power, personal privacy matters, the ethics of global deception, and you might say a form of identity theft. It proposes a theoretical possibility for our own world, which in today’s AI-charged environment is something that could conceivably rear its head, similar to all the cloning discussions right after the world’s most famous sheep Dolly took her first steps. It also makes you ponder the morality of it all, sure to inspire both supporters and opponents among the general public, bringing it back to the age-old question: even if something is possible, should it really be done? 

Final Verdict

Despite offering only an hour of “gameplay,” by the time the credits rolled Solis had grown on me. The unique graphical style and unusual choice of soundtrack had come together nicely to make quite a beautiful whole, though it is certainly an acquired taste. The story pulled me in as well, and I was able to relate the information Billie discovered to the technological evolution we currently live in ourselves. But that’s why the game’s unexpected ending just when things were becoming interesting felt like such an uppercut. Perhaps the option to make different decisions provides some replay value, but for those like me who prefer single playthroughs, the experience is too linear to offer enough incentive to return for another night. I would, however, be interested to see what comes next if the story of Billie and her shady corporate overlords were to continue in a bigger, fuller installment later on. 

Johnny played Solis on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.