Editor’s Note: The Red Solstice is currently available through Steam’s Early Access program. This preview only covers what is available in the Early Access version of the game.
“I’m being murdered,” I said. My partner spoke at the same time: “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Then a giant monster beat us to death with its ball-and-chain arm. We had woken up early to play The Red Solstice, determined to do “adult things” at an “adult hour” during the humid Atlanta summer. We had played the prologue independently, both stumbling through the demo mission, and when we linked up that morning we immediately dropped into making fun of the entire aesthetic of the game.
Because, really, I don’t know how you can take it seriously. The hilarious opening monologue that begins with “The year was [PREGNANT PAUSE] 117 After Earth” is intoned by someone doing their best impression of the toughest space marine in the world. The units themselves, each controlled by a different player, spout off the toughest tough guy lines in the universe. The missions themselves, played on a single large map, are full of viruses (to be aware of) and Martian insurgents (to kill). None of it is reflexive or self-aware in any discernible way, and so we filled that in ourselves.
“Murderman comin’ to the murderzone,” I said in my best cigar-chompin’ voice. We followed it up with many more Golden Classics of space marine killing lines, including “killin’ and spillin’,” “I ain’t got time to stand, I’m murderin’,” and “I keep running into things instead of shooting them.”
That last line is a little different, but for a good reason: after one game, we were getting into it. Once we ran out of jokes, there was really nothing left to do but play, and playing The Red Solstice is very difficult. The mission prep screen itself is immensely complicated. You choose a character class from staples such as Assault, Medic, Heavy Support and several others. Each of these classes has a number of very fine-grained customization options, as well as power add-ons that we never quite understood even after discussing them.
When we played, I hosted the game, and as we talked about the character options, the lobby filled up. The Red Solstice bills itself as a game for between four and eight players, and that number is incredibly significant for two reasons. The first is that while we never had a problem filling up our roster here in the early days of the game, I don’t know what that will look like in even a couple months’ time. The second is that the minute the game began, about half of our party seemed to know what to do. The rest of us stood around and shot almost-zerglings and then eventually followed them.
That was most of my experience with The Red Solstice: I shot things, used special abilities and followed other people around. Part of the reason for this is that I’m totally willing to follow someone who seems to know what she is doing in a space nightmare game taking place in 117 After Earth. The other is that The Red Solstice dumps so much information on you at a time that it is incredibly difficult to understand what is actually happening without investing a lot of time either playing or carefully reading a wiki. In the first five minutes of my playing, there were blinking lights that wanted me to level up abilities with incredibly slow-to-appear tooltips, boxes of supplies, and a proliferation of icons around the sprites of the savvier players the likes of which I have never seen before.