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Short, talky golden-age sci-fi, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I grew up reading Golden Age sci-fi, and for all that even at the time I recognized its corniness, I still have a big soft spot for that kind of thing. As a result, while I can’t tell whether or not the opening of The Enigma of Solaris is intentionally camp, I loved it all the same:
”Agent Grey,” the colonel announced, his voice carrying the weight of gravitas that only a military man of his rank could muster, “we have a situation on Solaris.”
Grey leaned in, her senses alert to every word. “The Solaris, sir?”
(The use of “muster” so close to “colonel” is an argument for intentional silliness, it occurs to me).
If you guessed that this is immediately followed by some exposition where the characters explain to each other things they already know perfectly well, points to you. It’s a formula, but it’s one that’s not presently overused in IF, and like I said I’ve got some affection for it, so after the briefing established the situation (research station mysteriously losing power, go investigate and save the day), I was ready for adventure.
Things get a bit more serious when you arrive at the station, and the early sequence of poking around to gather clues is pretty engaging. But this turns out to be quite a short game, and what initially seemed like it was going to be a high-tech investigation quickly turned into an extended NPC interaction sequence with few if any choices for the player to make. Said NPC is another sci-fi caricature – he’s a scientist who’s lost perspective on the risks of his research – but trying to reason with someone like that isn’t particularly fun, and the eventual reveal of what’s going on on the station struck me as a bit underwhelming.
While the prose never loses its over-the-top charm, I couldn’t help but wish that the plot matched that tone rather than staying relatively grounded, and I wished too that there was a little more for the player to do. This partially could be due to the extreme concision of the game – it’s really maybe 10 minutes at most – so I could understand it if the author didn’t feel like it was worth fleshing out too much. A game that took this same basic approach but which had more robust gameplay and leaned further into the far-out elements of its inspirations could be a lot of fun, but as it stands, there’s just not that much to the Enigma of Solaris.