The Haunted Hoard: Close to the Sun (Xbox One)
Horror and historical fiction come together aboard the steampunk ship known as the Helios in Storm in a Teacup’s horror title Close to the Sun. Storm in a Teacup has improved quite a bit since their first narrative adventure title N.E.R.O.: Nothing Ever Remains Obscure, with Close to the Sun having a much clearer vision, well-realized world, and more interesting plot at play, but this game developer’s evolution might still have a ways to go yet.
Despite that somewhat negative note to start on, there is actually a lot to like in Close to the Sun, and it can feel like it is on a strong course as you first begin to play. This first person narrative adventure has the player step into the role of Rose Archer as she’s given an invitation by her sister to climb aboard the Helios. The Helios is a monumental ship powered by the inventions of the greatest minds of 1897, and that year was picked for a very deliberate reason. The owner of this mammoth vessel is none other than the darling of nerd culture Nikola Tesla, and while the hero worship for this historical figure has become rather strong in the video game space, here he is portrayed with more depth than simply a marvelous mind of his time. His famous rivalry with Thomas Edison is in full effect here even though you only ever interact with Tesla of the two, and Tesla is portrayed as an imperfect man who makes for a more complicated figure in the plot, especially since you are onboard against his wishes and right after an incident had caused him to quarantine the entire vessel.
The horror elements of Close to the Sun are tied to this quarantine, the ship having been sealed up after a time experiment has completely thrown the ship off in time and space. Strange creatures kill those who have been unstuck in time, and memories and moments are scattered about in the timeline, Rose sometimes stumbling across a scene from the past or future while also needing to untangle events when she can’t keep the relationships between objects lost in time straight. Exploring the Helios becomes a grim affair though as you find the aftermath of these chaotic events, and yet, while this game features areas absolutely littered with blood and mutilated bodies, it handles its horror quite sensibly. It doesn’t spring cheap scares on you and gives you plenty of breathing space before more direct threats to your life crop up, but whether you’re dealing with man, creature, or the dread of the effective atmosphere, the game knows it can afford to hold back to make the chases and tense exploration more effective. It does have a few jump scares admittedly, but they’re so tepid and easy to see coming that their ineffectiveness robs them off being bothersome.
Sadly, some of the chases are exceptionally tight in their demands. You have no means of fighting back and often your advantage over an enemy is a head start, and if you barely slow down or miss the right path in an escape, you’ll see a surprisingly slow death scene that isn’t as tonally impactful when you need to repeat the chase again and again to get it right. Were speed not an issue, the chase design does have moments that work in its favor. Subtle clues are used to push you towards your destination or the right choice in a branching path, and while they aren’t perfect in design either, you can usually manage well enough, and the game even uses a few clever deceptions if you become overly reliant on these clues.
Exploring the Helios itself is a treat, the interior of the giant ship beautifully rendered with attention to its concept and imaginative choices for the areas you can find aboard it. Tesla invites many important scientists of his time to form a think tank independent of allegiances to any nation, and while you’ve come to the ship after the disaster, finding secrets about who else was along for the ride is a nice reward for exploring without feeling pointlessly included like the game Another Sight’s approach to historical fiction. The ship has distinct areas thanks to serving as the living space for so many scientists, areas meant for entertainment, study, and daily life all good fits for the quiet navigation and moments where they’re coated with blood for a scary scene. The environmental storytelling and acceptable reliance on notes adds quite a bit to the plot, and when something is introduced to the story, your own absence of knowledge is reasonable and the game tries to avoid overloading you with confusing details. The few characters you do speak to like the unstable engineer Audrey and your sister guide you well while adding personal complications to the plot to make it more meaningful, but as the mysteries begin to pile up and the desire to learn the truth swells, Close to the Sun drops the ball.
Mostly successful in its world-building, plot elements, and scares, Close to the Sun reaches a crescendo and then concludes its plot without wrapping up its many mysteries. It’s not an ending that could reasonably be filled in with player interpretation, the science at play demanding more details to make sense of the events left unexplained. You could concoct something that could tie up loose ends, but it would be no more valid than someone grasping at straws with the similar incomplete set of information you drew from. The game basically ends with an assertion that everything does make sense without letting you in on how it does, and while there could be potential for a sequel that addresses it, it still leaves a sour taste in the mouth to have so much build-up end up going nowhere for now. In the moment they happen, many things are interesting and entertaining, but Close to the Sun doesn’t know how to conclude it story and decides it doesn’t have to, undermining all that hard work quit a bit.
With a strange end to a nearly satisfying story, Close to the Sun’s gameplay instead has to carry some of the slack, and Storm in a Teacup once more treads the line of a narrative exploration game with puzzles put in to spice it up. Other than the chase scenes, your path through the Helios sometimes asks for you to either act in certain ways or decipher a puzzle, and these both have their moments. Avoiding a deadly electrical pulse by scrambling to cover achieves a type of tension different than outrunning monsters and figuring out small riddles and codes is a good way to ask for some thought in how you interact with an area, so the game keeps you active rather than this just being a tour of their imagined world. The setting and characters are definitely going to need to click with you to have the puzzles feel like a fine contribution to the plot though, as its gameplay side is mostly just a suitable supplement for the narrative path you’re on.
THE VERDICT: The Helios is a captivating setting and concept, and Close to the Sun does it justice in quite a few ways. The historical fiction side feels appropriate since so much attention is given to its components and the horror achieves its aims well for the most part. The chases can wear down your resolve a little and the puzzles are mostly just a more enjoyable way of getting you involved in navigation beyond breathing in the atmosphere, but the real thing that kept Close to the Sun from being outright good is its hasty incomplete conclusion. To have an interesting cast who deals with a set of compelling mysteries be pushed out the door before their tale is properly wrapped up really taints the finale, but the experience getting to that unfortunate end at least feels intriguing enough to satisfy before that unsatisfying end.
And so, I give Close to the Sun for Xbox One…
An OKAY rating. Little problems like the chase sequences being touchy and the limited substance to some scares and puzzles would have been easy to overlook in Close to the Sun if it only stuck the landing. It went from a Good game to merely mediocre once it decided it didn’t have the time to tie up the loose ends that compelled you to get so far in the game, but the narrative exploration is still solid because of the effort put into the plot and world up until then. Close to the Sun deserved to end on a better note despite its flaws, and while its gameplay isn’t too compelling, the focus was clearly on story and the varying quality in interactive moments levels out so you could enjoy the plot on its merits instead. A bit more time spent aboard the Helios was all it would take to at least give you some possible answers to reflect on, but instead you have to shrug and start every answer to an incomplete plot thread with the phrase “I guess”. You aren’t left with an incoherent mess and guesses could make sense in the context of the world, but just because you know a bridge could unite two sides of a river doesn’t automatically make it sturdy.
Close to the Sun was close to greater success, and Storm in the Teacup at least seem to be getting better at balancing how their tales are told without sacrificing their reasonable dependence on environmental storytelling and exploration. Close to the Sun closed the door on its story too soon despite being on track to something swell, so now it walks the tightrope of players having to decide how important a solid resolution to events is to their enjoyment of an experience. There’s still enough to appreciate on show, but the Icarus allusion in the title is apt not just for its chapter structuring, but for how its quality turned out in the end. It’s rise was wonderful, but before it could reach too high, its ideas came apart and Close to the Sun became characterized by its fall rather than lauded for the successes before then.