Fort Solis

A Mars thriller sized like a streaming series

Game director James Tinsdale came up with this thriller early in the COVID-19 pandemic, while watching streaming series, and wanted to bring their storytelling to a video game. His team capped the game at five hours, beyond which its systems would grow boring, and the story comes in four chapters that you can play in one sitting or one at a time. His studio, Fallen Leaf, grew to ten people between Liverpool, in England, and Warsaw, in Poland.

First planned in first person, the game moved to a third-person view so that it could play as one continuous shot, with no camera cuts or loading screens. Its grounded, gritty look draws inspiration from the television series The Expanse. Tinsdale described it as the psychological side of Duncan Jones's film Moon combined with the isolated, industrial style of Dead Space.

The Story

In 2080, the engineer Jack Leary belongs to a small crew left on Mars while the planet is at its farthest from Earth, waiting for trade routes to reopen. An emergency alert comes from Fort Solis, a nearby mining station, and with a storm on the way, Jack drives over to investigate, in radio contact with his colleague Jessica Appleton. He finds the station locked down and its crew missing.

Roger Clark, known as Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2, plays Jack, while Julia Brown plays Jessica in her first video game and Troy Baker plays Wyatt Taylor, the station's medical officer. The three actors did the motion capture as well as the voices, and Clark and Baker were allowed to improvise.

The Ideal Audience

This single-player adventure came out on PlayStation 5 and Windows in August 2023, then on macOS and, in December 2025, on Xbox. Critics praised the performances, visuals and sound design but faulted the gameplay, from the lack of a run button to quick-time events that, for Eurogamer, only create an illusion of choice. It is rated PEGI 16 for violence and bad language.