Close To The Sun

Love this game and the story. Graphics are stellar. Team did an great job

Atmosphere is awesome, story is intriguing. That is what kept me going even when the "trial and error" chase sequences were really badly designed and annoying. Then came the ending... there is so much mistery introduced throughout the game but NONE of it is answered in the ending, on the contrary. This is literally one of the most aggregious and unsatisfying endings I have ever witnessed in any type of fiction.

The game has an interesting setting and the visuals are very well executed, the voice acting is very good and the characters are believable (playing in english). The lore is presented through messages, posters and letters that can be found and read. The atmosphere is rather dark and there is no shortage of maimed bodies in later chapters, the preview images didn't do it justice IMO. Sadly, the special architecture and grandness are often drowned out by that, possibly intentionally. The more technically inclined should not look too closely at the devices presented, but the "artistic freedom" doesn't show as boldly as in other titles. There seems to be a collectible system judging from messages when finding some objects, but you cannot look at the collection from ingame. Sadly, there seems to be no way to rebind controls, which makes it hard for me to play, especially during the occasional "action scenes". Screen resolution is detected OK but not applied properly (1280x1024 in my case). Thus, the main menu text is offscreen, but once you find the correct entry you can set it to windowed and adjust the vertical resolution until it fits horizontally (in fullscreen mode, the videos are OK with horizontal bars, but the game runs in max. vertical size and scales off screen horizontally). Another common issue is that the intro is quite long and unskippable, even after having an ongoing game. This is just not good design practice. The intros are cool, but after the first five times I'd still like to skip them most of the time. Loading times are long, but that's on max. settings running off an old harddrive on my Athlon X4 950 with GTX 760. It's struggling, but playable with some major stutters, even the "action scenes" are doable (but not pleasant). I'm not sure they actually add to the game, but they're not too bad (until now at least). Lastly, the game only autosaves, and only at certain points, like old console titles, so you cannot play in short sessions (not good)!

It's a first person horror visual novel with a single ending divided in 10 chapters. You end up isolated on a ship that had the most brilliant scientific mind on board to conduct experiment without limit, so what can go wrong right ? Yes, it's reminiscent of Bioshock. Immersion and atmosfear are good though and the horror/gore part grow nicely with story. The game can be played, voice and writings, in multiple languages which is also good. On the bad side though, there is no save feature; you have to finish a chapter or you'll have to redo it. In my book, it's bad design. That said, there are several places where you'll have to literally run for you life and the game will automatically do a quick save prior so when you die (and you will !) you start only the chase, not the whole chapter. Those chases unfortunately don't have any room for errors and the dying cut scene can't be skip. Overall, it makes those chase repetitive instead of immersive. Several items can be interact with like newspaper and memos. While it adds to the immersion, some but not all of them, will be counted for achievement although with no obvious reason or purpose. It looks like they try to get an open ending but it fell a bit off.

I want to give it around a 3.5, The plot line is really interesting and the first 3 chapters do a good job of keeping you interested in the plot. But after that, the game does a hard job of going over the player and our main character's head about what's going on. You can use context clues to figure out what is going on but there is still a lot of clues and details missing in the bigger picture. Graphically, the game looks great, doing a great job of looking like a modern Bioshock setting, but the actual gameplay leaves a little to be desired. I wish the sprint did a better job of making you feel as if you're running. Other than all that I enjoyed it. The ending is very easily predictable but that's not always considered a bad thing. But in the case of a mystery game, leaves something to be considered.