Solarix

I went into Solarix expecting another budget also-ran and came out with something more complicated than that. The setup is quietly effective: you are Walter Terrace, an electrical engineer who wakes up amnesiac on the colony planet Ancyra in the year 2166, and nearly everyone around you is either zombified or trying to shoot you. An AI named AMI feeds you objectives through radio static while a fellow survivor named Betty alternates between mockery and menace in your earpiece. That dynamic, two voices pulling you in opposite directions while you creep through industrial corridors, is genuinely unsettling in a way the game deserves credit for. The stealth core is more layered than the Metacritic score of 47 suggests. Enemies react to footsteps, to light, and to fresh corpses left in the open. You can shoot out light sources with your semi-silenced pistol to carve darkness out of a room, use an electroshock stunner with infinite charges for quiet takedowns, or ghost entire chapters without being spotted. Ammo is scarce and enemies become more resistant once alerted, so combat is structurally discouraged rather than just harder. Over twelve chapters you move from cramped corridors and rain-soaked outpost environments to space stations and underground facilities, and the variety is real, even if the paths through each are narrower than the marketing implies. There is also some light hacking, environmental object throwing to distract patrols, and occasional puzzle-solving that echoes the immersive sim lineage the team was clearly chasing. Here is the honest part. The AI is the game's weakest pillar and it undermines the stealth loop that everything else depends on. Enemies lose patrol routes and freeze, drift above geometry, or wheel around and detect you from an impossible angle after ignoring you from a few feet away. The checkpoint-only save system means a bad AI moment can cost you a significant stretch of progress. Level design is linear in practice despite open-ended promises, and the writing, while atmospheric in places, dips into clunky monologue territory. Reviewers who came in expecting System Shock 2 left disappointed, and that comparison, which the developers themselves invited, set an unfair ceiling that the game cannot reach. What Solarix actually is, once you recalibrate expectations, is a first game from a small Turkish studio reaching for something genuinely ambitious and landing maybe sixty percent of it. The atmosphere works. The soundscape in particular, creaking metal, distant biological sounds, Betty's voice cutting in at the worst moments, lands with more craft than the score reflects. Some environments, a rain-hammered Aliens-style outpost, a derelict craft sitting in a swampy exterior zone, have a real texture to them. The story pays off in a bleak, considered way. If you come in treating this as a rough genre curio rather than a polished immersive sim, the six-to-seven hour runtime is a reasonable ask.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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