Game Review - Close to the Sun

Game Review: Close to the Sun
Score: +9/-4
Close to the Sun is basically a horror/suspense/mystery movie. You are taken on an experience, and it's that experience that is enjoyable. The "gameplay" aspects just help you feel more involved and invested than simply watching a movie, and they cleverly use that to help you discover the differences between the game world and the real world, without a text dump or forcing you through info-dumps which would be required in a movie to properly set up the alternate universe.

If you've played BioShock, it will start out feeling extremely similar and look similar for being in the same artistic time period -- maybe a bit too-similar at first for how it isolates the action and sets up the environment.
+Overall a good story. Right away Close to the Sun draws you in quickly with a good story setup, like any good movie should. Your motivation for being there, the mystery you encounter, the plot points that move the story forward, are all really well put together for a story.
++Great as a horror / suspense movie. The environmental experience is really good. The atmosphere is set up very well with excellent use of music and sound to enhance sudden startling / frightening events that are cleverly proximity-scripted. There's great use of foreshadowing noises to build tension. It does require a bit more than the usual amount of attention to what's going on because sometimes if you turn away just a bit too long (or if your camera is angled the wrong way looking at something else) you'll miss out on a brief scene. But most of the time, they tightly script it so you won't miss anything and you're close enough to the action so it's not diminished by a sense of safety from seeing it at too great a distance.
+It's dark. Which is of course a great backdrop for a horror movie, but beyond that consideration, very few games use darkness very well. Close to the Sun gives you enough reasonable-to-be-there lighting to find and do what you need, but otherwise they are not afraid to let dark places be dim or completely dark. The world feels "realistic". And there is no point trying to get around this because they don't hide things in that darkness and make you grope blindly, so any attempt to circumvent that darkness will just diminish your experience.
+Show, not tell. The wider world outside the shipboard action of the game is told in pieces as you find newspapers to read headlines. You very rapidly piece together the essential differences while reading surprisingly little.
+Convenient replay chapters. The story is broken up into chapters, allowing you to conveniently replay each chapter. Did you miss a brief scene because you were facing the wrong way at the exact moment when it happened? The time required to replay and get to that event can be considerably shortened by the chapter structure. And each chapter has "collectibles" which are not mandatory, but they can really enhance your understanding of the world you are exploring, so it is very useful to be able to replay, sometimes just in part, what you've already gone through. Because of this "chapter unlock" feature, there are basically no savegames to worry about at all.
-+Very quickly you realize that the game is basically completely linear -- just like a movie. There is no "choice", there is only forward progress through the story. Areas are conveniently blocked off to avoid you wandering too far off course, but at the same time, there is nothing out there for you to do anyway: You are already where the action is and a too-wide space would just waste your time. At most, you have to pay attention to optional areas that can be opened or are opened by events, and choose to explore there. The areas are wide enough that you do get some sense of exploration, however.
--+Tricky chases but smart checkpoints. Probably the "hardest" parts of the game will be the chase scenes. You are basically not given a lot of leeway to figure things out -- the enemy is literally a couple of seconds behind you -- so it's actually really easy to "mess up" and sometime not go where you are supposed to go. This can actually get very frustrating when you can't figure out which way to turn in the second and end up doing the scene over and over and over.
Before frustration sets in, however, the fact that you can't actually run that fast and are basically helpless really conveys the panic the character feels (and by extension, that you are meant to feel). When you die, you are conveniently restarted where the chase begins, so you don't have to tediously run around doing boring things just to get to that point again.
+No platforming. Often no-combat story-games will rely on platforming (jumping-related puzzles) for the gameplay. This can frustrate some players who are simply not very good at it. In Close to the Sun, you can't even jump. The gameplay involves primarily exploration and a few chases. Honestly, it's refreshing to play a "normal" person who can't sprint and leap better than an Olympian all the time.
-The ending is on the weak side, not just in dramatic direction but also the collectibles become less and less interesting: More sketches and equations that mean nothing and add nothing to the understanding of the game, and just devolve into a percentage completion of collectibles found.