Close to the Sun

Close to the Sun is a narrative adventure game that falters when it comes to its most fundamental part: its narrative. With shallow, boring characters and undeveloped themes, the game even foregoes some conclusion in favor of leaving doors open to a sequel.

The story takes place in 1897 in a reality where Nikola Tesla has built a futuristic ocean linear named Helios, which is supposed to house the best and most prominent scientific minds of the world. Tesla builds a miniature Rapture inside his ship, promising that in Helios scientific research will not be bound by laws or morality. One of the posters you find very early on in the game promises, “Invent and innovate without artificial limitations of capital or politics.”

Just like in Bioshock, however, this dream of unregulated progress leads to tragedy. As soon as our protagonist – Rose Archer – enter Helios, she notices something is off: there’s no one around to greet her, and the word “Quarantine” is written with red paint on the entrance gate.

Rose is after her sister, Ada, who works in Helios and supposedly sent her a letter asking for help. But most of the time, Rose will be talking with a mysterious man called Aubrey over the radio, who claims to be trapped in the ship and is also in need of help.

If the setting of a neoliberal society isolated in the middle of the sea is already reminiscent of Bioshock, and the art direction based on art deco reinforces the comparison, the protagonist following the order of an untrustworthy man under the radio just wraps up the package. But any comparison with Bioshock does Close to the Sun no favors, as it pales in comparison in every respect.

Take the relationship between Rose and Aubrey, for example. Calling the character untrustworthy is a euphemism at best, as he keeps showing increasingly worrying signs of being completely deranged. He’s clearly manipulating her, but shows no effort in trying to conceal this: there’s even a moment when he blatantly warns her that he’s a liar, but Rose still doesn’t seem to mind. She appears oblivious to his problematic behavior despite all the evidence: when Aubrey tells her he’s going to look for the arms of his dead friend to high five them, for example, she answers with an unironic, “Sounds good!” which is just hilarious. Later on, the humor is at least intended, when she asks Aubrey if he’s okay and he answers, “I’m using my best friend’s dismembered arm as a back scratcher, of course I’m not okay.” And she still trusts him, which disconnects any sensible player from her point of view.

Worldbuilding is also lacking. Unlike Bioshock, the notes and diaries you find here are more worried about sounding authentic than adding to the story. Instead of presenting characters reacting to that “society”, confronting and questioning its foundations, the texts you find across the stages reveal mundane problems that happen in any workplace. It’s people complaining about their co-workers or the difficulties that arose in some project. Add the collectibles that award you with the so-important achievements and are of the blandest and most useless kind – masks, blueprints, and passports – and you have a huge missed opportunity to flesh out the setting.

Helios is built on a dream similar to Rapture, but its downfall seems to miss the point of the premise. Here, Nikola Tesla is at war with Thomas Edison, who keeps sending agents to infiltrate Tesla’s ranks, steal information, and sabotage projects. The problem is that if the reason why Helios became a slaughterhouse isn’t the lack of rules and regulations, but just the meddling of a rival, the ideology at its core loses its importance. The story is not even endorsing it – which would be a choice – but ignoring it altogether: even if there were capital and politics at play it wouldn’t have made a difference.

If the art direction is effective in building this fantastic ship – even if it looks a lot like Rapture – it also doesn’t seem to work hand-in-hand with the story. Take the huge statue of Tesla you come across at the beginning: any person who would ask to build a monument of himself must be a tad egocentric and narcissistic, just like Andrew Ryan. But the Tesla you find and speak with is empathetic and humble – and the story never tackles or even acknowledges this contradiction. But even the art direction fails at some times, being too on-the-nose and superficial: when you get to enter the room of a famous chess player, you find in his room… a lot of chess boards. That’s it. In other words, instead of building a character, it doubles down on the caricature.

Moving on to the plot itself, Close to the Sun gradually reveals to be a mess of ideas. It aims and shoots at everything, but manages to hit nothing. There’s time travel, serial killers, monsters, utopic societies, and even alternate dimensions at play, but there’s no cohesion, nothing tying everything together. For example, the monsters prowling the ship, besides having a contrived explanation for their existence, appear only when it’s convenient for the plot and disappear right after. Early on, the serial killer also reveals that he knows Rose, since he speaks of her as if she had done something to him in the past, even though they have never met. This heavily suggests that she will travel in time at some point and do something to him, but this plotline is forgotten, being one of many things that are left open to be explored by a sequel.

This kind of approach to storytelling is problematic because the plot points left for the future game leave the current story unfinished: it introduces mysteries and questions and never bothers to solve and answer them. There’s also an issue with the letter that Rose received from her sister, related to the time it was written, that seems important, but the story never goes back to it. Another letter, introduced in the last chapter, is not even read by Rose: we have to take a screenshot of it to read it, but I doubt many players will bother at this point.

The characters, meanwhile, are nothing to write home about. Rose is defined by her drive to find her sister, who in turn is defined by being the protagonist’s sister. They’re both hard-working and persistent and that’s it. Aubrey is a bit more interesting, since besides being insane, he also has an inflated ego that can cause some problems. Tesla is humbler than one would think, the serial killer is just a plot device… and there are no more characters in the game.

Being a narrative adventure game, Close to the Sun has no tangible gameplay to speak of. You just walk around, open and close doors, pick up notes and solve the rare puzzle here and there. In other words, it can’t make up for the game’s narrative problems. To spice things up, there are some chase sequences spread throughout the game, but they are either boring (when you just run forward) or frustrating (when there are paths you can choose to take but some lead to dead-ends, inserting an unnecessary process of trial-and-error into the proceedings).

Games of the narrative adventure genre live and die by the quality of their story. Unfortunately, with Close to the Sun we are before the latter.

July 13, 2021.