The Solus Project

The Solus Project is a game about exploring and surviving in an alien environment. The game is set in the far future and it starts in 2115 when scientists discover a rogue Class-B star is travelling towards Earth. The collision is said to destroy our entire solar system. Three giant Prolus colony ships are launched in 2149 to a safe zone near Pluto. When Earth is destroyed two more years later, resources already start to dwindle and five scout ships are sent out to five distant worlds. The player's character is aboard of one of these ships when fifteen years later Mission TSP-3 (The Solus Project 3) arrives at Gliese-6143-C. The ship is shot out of the air and the character (male or female) awakens in an unknown environment with some scattered items in the ship's wreckage.

Most of the game is spent exploring the new planet, both on the surface and in deep caves below the surface, looking for traces of ancient civilizations and a way out. At the same time attempts are made to contact the colony ships or the other scout ships. To progress it is often needed to use and combine items in the environment, especially for crafting, and with a large amount of freedom. At the same time it is also mostly a survival simulation. There are parameters such as body temperature, calories, water, sleep, world temperature, humidity, and wind that need to be taken into account, tracked through a PDA. At the start of the game the player decides how tough survival conditions are, ranging from Easy with a focus on exploration first, to the balanced Normal and eventually Hard as a hardcore survival game. It influences the available resources and how often they need to used. Harder difficulty levels removes visual helpers and objective markers. Later on artifacts and special equipment can be found that upgrade certain abilities and resistances, and improve attributes. This affects for instance inventory space, dive time when swimming, movement speed, climate resistance and health.

Stones can be sharpened into tools, water can be collected and drunk from sources, oil and dry roots can be attached to a bar to create a torch, and so on. There is however also a small amount of technology available, from what is left of the scout ship. This includes the PDA, but also rations for water and food, or a teleportation device, beacons, medpacks, backpacks, glowsticks etc. There are also many notes scattered around. The planet has capricious weather conditions and careful planning is needed when venturing too far from shelter. When caught in storms or freak weather conditions, the character can die, also from hypothermia, heat strokes, starvation and dehydration.