The Solus Project offers deep mystery and intriguing exploration on Xbox One. The title is one of the most remarkable games I’ve played even in its current unpolished state on Xbox Game Preview. The game starts you off as an explorer who is in search for another home for humanity. Your ship crash lands on the planet you were meant to explore and quickly you discover that it was inhabited by an intelligent race not too long ago. What’s most shocking is that the aliens are very human-like in appearance. How did they get here? Why do their remains look like humans? These are the wonderful mysteries you must solve in The Solus Project. You also have to somehow make contact with the rest of humanity to let them know what happened. Both objectives are woven together perfectly and fit the narrative well.
Unlike many other survival games, the difficulty in The Solus Project can actually be modified. I recently played The Flame in the Flood and found that even on the easiest setting it was almost impossible to experience everything the game had. That’s a rather substantial design flaw in my opinion and reflected in our review. The Solus Project lets you play on Easy, Normal and Hard and after trying all three, I can say that it lays out exactly what you’ll see at each difficulty setting. Easy is actually quite pleasant and focuses on exploration. Normal and Hard make survival truly a challenge but it’s never unfair. The fact that the developers were able to cater to all audiences—those who prefer hardcore survival experiences and those who love to play casually—definitely deserves mention and commendation.
The Solus Project also includes puzzles that need to be solved. Usually you use your teleporter for them but you also need to find objects in the environment and place them in appropriate mechanisms. Additionally, there are also buttons hidden around levels that you need to push in order to open secret areas or doors. The variety of the puzzles is another positive in The Solus Project and I never found myself bored or repeating tasks.
You need to keep an eye out on your hunger and thirst mostly. Having a torch next to you will usually keep you warm. I just carried one in my left hand at all times unless I needed to equip another object to solve a puzzle. You need to keep a watchful eye on your temperature and health at higher difficulty settings because you might end up dying. You take a lot of fall damage in the game so be careful. You also need to make sure you sleep often as that replenishes health.
Now let’s get to the drawbacks of a game being in the Xbox Game Preview program. The frame rate of The Solus Project fluctuates all over the place. At times I thought it approached 60 FPS and at other times it was below 30 FPS. The overall graphics are gorgeous though and really make you feel like you’re in an alien world. I wish they were a little crisper but I’m sure the developers will achieve that when the time to optimize the game for Xbox One comes.
If you’re looking for an exploration game with mild survival elements, give The Solus Project a shot. Even in its current state in Xbox Game Preview, it’s a fantastic experience that keeps you hooked. You want to know more about the alien civilization on the planet and why they were wiped out. The game is already quite far into development on Xbox One and once it releases it’ll be one of the best titles out there in my opinion. It’s definitely a must have game in my opinion. The fact that it’s also around $13 makes the purchasing decision that much easier. Do yourself a favor and pick up The Solus Project right now. You won’t regret it.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.