Close To The Sun In The Test: It's Just Not A BioShock

2023 Author: Sheila Hailey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 11:17

You slip into the role of journalist Rose Archer. Her little sister Ada is a passenger on Helios and asks Rose in a letter for her arrival. What initially sounds like a nice family visit quickly turns out to be a deadly trap on board. The ship is under quarantine. Every corner of the steel giant is lined with shredded corpses and severed limbs. What happened at Helios? Where's Ada? Finding the answers is the goal of the game.

Let's talk to the elephants in the room right away: At first glance, the game is reminiscent of the cult BioShock series. Not only because of the more than vivid design in the Art Deco style. It is above all the Helios utopia that we already know from Bioshock's underwater city Rapture and the cloud city of Columbia. The motif of the last independent bastion of an elite society also comes into play in Close to the Sun.

How BioShock-like the game looks can be seen in the trailer for Close to the Sun:

Close to the Sun - Launch Trailer

And yet the game is different. For example, a special focus is placed on Nikola Tesla - a real person and not a fictional one. It's all about what the world would be like if the inventor had been successful in all of his research. No wonder that there is a real cult of men within the title. Yes, even an entire museum of his work is accessible on the ship. In terms of staging there is nothing to complain about.

Horror? Too little - puzzles? Too simple

We come to gameplay. Most of your tasks in the game consist of small puzzles that can be found distributed in the tubular game. Pull a little switch here, turn a crank there and tada: the way is clear. The little puzzles are really not demanding, but they are good breaks between the exploratory sections. There's always something to discover in the floating metal construction. Whether letters or newspapers: the written legacies always give you a good impression of the background story. And that's where the gameplay variation ends again; Close to the Sun really doesn't have much to offer in terms of play.

You can really scare yourself in these upcoming shockers:

Start photo gallery (27 photos)

And the setting is also more or less given away. The horror adventure has a dark atmosphere in its ten chapters. However, it never gets really creepy - even though protagonist Rose does not know how to defend herself and would be exposed to enemies without resistance. Instead of thunderstorms, there are occasionally scripted chase sequences. Unfortunately, these are not only extremely undemanding, but also incredibly fiddly in the control and thus nothing more than annoying accessories.

My test conclusion: it is not BioShock

Close to the Sun has a lot of potential. The setting around the utopian ocean liner Helios and its creator Nikola Tesla arouses curiosity. Unfortunately, the indie title does not reflect on these strengths, but gallops away very early in an increasingly epic story. Given the already small size of the title, this is not really beneficial.

It takes just five hours to complete a game. The subsequent replay value is limited, the levels are too tubular, the story for 0815 and the playful demands too low. Close to the Sun is not an organic shock …

You will like it if you like short-lived adventures in the Tesla punk setting.

You won't like it if sophisticated gameplay is more important than the story.

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Scoring

5.5 / 10