Close to the Sun

Close to the Sun is a first-person narrative horror game set aboard the Helios, a colossal ship built by Nikola Tesla as a floating sanctuary for scientific minds. You play as journalist Rose Archer, searching for her sister in a vessel that has clearly gone very wrong. There are no weapons, no combat mechanics, and no inventory puzzles of meaningful complexity. What Storm in a Teacup built here is closer to a guided horror experience than a game in the traditional sense, and understanding that upfront saves a lot of frustration. The comparison to Bioshock is fair on aesthetics alone. The Helios is stunning. Brass fixtures, art-nouveau archways, bodies in evening wear slumped against Tesla coils, blood streaked across mosaic tile floors. The environmental art is the strongest argument for your time. Every corridor feels curated, like someone spent real hours deciding where a candelabra should be knocked over. The sound design reinforces this consistently. Footsteps echo differently depending on the floor material, and the ambient audio shifts from eerie quiet to something that makes your shoulders tighten without announcing itself loudly. For a smaller studio, the craft here is genuinely impressive. Where Close to the Sun separates from its obvious inspirations is in what it strips away. Amnesia gave you a sanity system, objects to throw, a reason to explore dark corners. This game gives you a torch and a run button. Chase sequences replace combat entirely, and they are tense the first time, repetitive by the third. The story, told through notes, environmental clues, and radio transmissions between Rose and her sister Ada, is competent science-fiction horror with a few genuinely unsettling revelations about what Tesla's experiment produced. It does not reinvent anything, but it earns its atmosphere honestly. The pacing is slow in act one, intentionally so, and the payoff in the later sections justifies sitting through the quieter early stretches. The criticisms that land are fair ones. The runtime is short, around five to six hours on a first playthrough, and some players will feel the lack of mechanical depth as a genuine absence rather than a stylistic choice. A handful of chase sequences recycle the same logic too many times. The voice acting is serviceable but uneven, and the story leans heavily on a Tesla-as-visionary-gone-wrong premise that has been visited before. The mixed Steam reception reflects a real split between players who wanted something closer to a traditional adventure and players willing to meet the game on its own quieter terms. If you respond to atmospheric walking horror, strong environmental storytelling, and art direction that punches above its budget, this one rewards attention. It knows roughly what it is and does not overstay its welcome. Approach it like a short novel you read in one sitting rather than a puzzle box to crack, and it holds together well.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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