Solarix is a 2015 Stealth Based Sci-Fi Horror First-Person Shooter game by the Turkish indie studio Pulsetense Games. The game is heavily influenced by System Shock 2 and the Thief series, with combat being deliberately bad to encourage the use of stealth. Players take the role of amnesiac engineer Walter Terrace, who is awakened from cryo-sleep by the Ancyra Colony's administrative A.I., A.M.I., to help her combat a deadly plague that has wiped out the colony. Along the way Walter must contend with zombified colonists, hostile soldiers, a crazed fellow survivor named Betty, and a mysterious alien entity known as "The Eye".
A second game, De-Void, was released in 2016. Unlike Solarix, it is a pure Environmental Narrative Game with no combat or gameplay threat. De-Void is an "anti-sequel" to Solarix, deliberately evoking Continuity Snarl as an artistic choice. The game takes place before the events of Solarix and follows an investigator named Elizabeth Woolgather who has arrived on Ancyra to evaluate the health of the colony but finds the place mysteriously devoid of life.
A third game, Planet Ancyra Chronicles, was released in 2017. It's basically Solarix and De-Void combined into a single campaign, with the Solarix sections being converted into a pure Environmental Narrative Game with all the combat removed.
A fourth game, Reframed, was released in 2018. Reframed is a re-tooled version of Solarix with the gameplay of a standard First-Person Shooter rather than the stealth-based gameplay of the original game.
This series of games provides examples of:
- Back Stab: Solarix gives you an electric stunner with an effective range of about 2-3 meters, that you can use to knock enemies out with a zap to the back of their heads.
- Bag of Spilling: In Reframed, you lose all your ammo for all your weapons except for the pistol and shotgun whenever you change levels. This seems to show they didn't bother to code a persistent ammo inventory, except for carrying forward the existing code for the pistol and shotgun from Solarix.
- Borrowed Biometric Bypass: In the first level of Solarix you saw off the hand of a corpse to use to get past a handprint reader.
- Downer Ending:
- Solarix ends with Walter having failed to save a single member of the Ancyra colony, and ultimately committing suicide after being trapped in space clinging to the exterior of an exploded space station with nowhere else to go. He did succeed in killing the Big Bad, but this is a fairly empty victory as the Big Bad itself boasted that it didn't particularly care about its own life and that there are thousands of others just like it sleeping underneath the surface of the planet.
- De-Void ends with a major Gainax Ending which deliberately fails to explain a single thing, but the one thing that is made clear in the ending is that the player character is in the process of dying.
- Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: Solarix takes place on the day before Halloween, and runs over into Halloween.
- King Mook: In Solarix, Gregory Hart can take a lot more hits than a regular Anomaly, but otherwise behaves exactly like them. Oddly, in the more action-oriented Reframed this seems not to be the case, with him having regular health.
- Mecha-Mooks: In the latter half of the game, sentry bots patrol the exterior hull of the space station and will attack any intruders (i.e. you).
- One Bullet Clips: Averted; reloading discards all the bullets in your current magazine, which is pretty significant given how rare ammo is. At no point does the game inform you of this. This was changed in Reframed, which plays it straight.
- Reformulated Game: The first half of Planet Ancyra Chronicles is the original Solarix with all the combat removed, turning it into a walking simulator. Conversely, Reframed is Solarix with the stealth removed and more weapons to compensate, making it much more combat heavy.
- Shout-Out: The game makes many to its late 90's/early 2000's influences.
- The hud elements for interacting with hackable computers and doors is taken straight out of Deus Ex.
- A computer playing System Shock 2 can be found in the space station's crew quarters.
- Prisoner 849, Gordon Freeman, Garrett, Soldier G65434-2, and JC Denton are listed as the names of alt accounts that Walter has made, against company policy.
- Technically-Living Zombie: There isn't a single line of dialogue indicating that the "Anomalies" are actually reanimated corpses; by all accounts they're just colonists who have been "altered" by the random assortment of diseases that is the plague. The space station is also occupied by what appear to be naked cyborg servants that will attack you just like the Anomalies. From magazine ads you can find laying around, these appear to be products of the Corporation called Tangerines (which have presumably gone haywire without maintenance) rather than any result of the outbreak.
