If the Resi 4 remake was the sequel to the Resi 2 remake, here's your spiritual successor to 3.

I don't know anybody who wanted a remake of the deeply forgettable Separate Ways campaign. After the pleasant surprise of the 4 remake, I think most were just quietly awaiting more of that reasonably enjoyable content. It's maybe a little more faithful than we'd hoped. This is largely a story about Ada's journey from canon cutscene to canon cutscene. The appeal of this confident, elusive spy, run into the ground as we see her do all the same shit as Leon and respond to an on-screen hookshot prompt as she sees him choked by Mendez. She must think this guy is a right fuckup. Every time she bumps into him, he's shit outta luck.

Look - I like Ada. She's a fun idea, and a good wildcard to toss into the mix after the wholesomeness of the Resi 1 cast. She makes a rotten protagonist, though. Her whole appeal is tied to popping up out of the shadows to turn the tables at the most exciting moment. Watching her do all the standard civvie Resi shit is rubbish. She's supposed to be above mixing herbs. Giving her a canon campaign (Assignment: Ada does not count) was a tacky idea to make the PS2 port look cool. I wouldn't be surprised if Mikami put God Hand into production entirely out of spite for it.

- ̗̀ New ̖́- Separate Ways also attempts to address a problem with the main campaign; the annoying fans who pointed out a couple of memorable omissions from the original. They're back, sweaty, and waiting for your applause.

Ada's secret agent role encourages the team to lean harder into everyone's favourite new aspect of the remake; THE STEALTH! Yup. Get excited to enter more rooms with ganados facing the wrong way for ages. There's a whole bunch of them here. Ada also gets some Spy Vision shit, where she can make footprints glow blue to solve a couple puzzles. It's nothing. Don't pretend you've got an idea, Resi 4 remake DLC.

The campaign does pick up after a brutally dull opening. It isn't a complete slog throughout, and as pandering as they often felt, the old Resi 4 bits did make me smile a couple of times when they were brought in as a surprise. There's a wee coda at the end that leads into 5 a little more cohesively too. I'm not telling you not to play it, just that you totally don't need to. The best addition here is easily Ada and Wesker in Mercenaries, but you get that as a free patch anyway.

The Resi remakes have been Capcom's safest bet for chasing the Triple A crowd for the last decade. Monster Hunter and Street Fighter have a lot of fans, but they're not appearing in the "Similar customers also bought" tab when you put The Last of Us: Part I in your cart. I'm sure they want to keep going, but I don't know if they can confidently put as much money into a 4K Steve Burnside model. They might be stuck pandering to the hardcore fans, and I really can't get excited about a faithful remake of 0. I don't know. Is it worth speculating? This is me writing a lukewarm review because I was let down after the high standards set by the Resident Evil 4 remake. We're in unprecedented territory, here.

Close to the Sun was clearly inspired by two games, Bioshock and Outlast. It has the visual aesthetics and environment of Bioshock, with the chase sequences and horror elements from Outlast. Despite mixing some of the art and gameplay together from these two series with the intent to create something new, Close to the Sun comes off as nothing more than a cheap Dollar General knockoff.

Well to be fair, the art design wasn’t too bad at times because there were some really cool locations like the opera house and the garden section towards the end of the game. Actually, it was the only marginally good thing about this game. Everything else is pretty terrible.

Like I mentioned before, Close to the sun tries to come off as a horror game by having enemies such as these stupid looking electrical monsters, and some poorly written stab happy lunatic. Every time you encounter either of them, your only option is to run. These sequences may seem like you have options by giving you different places or routes to go, but you don’t. These sections of gameplay are very scripted and if you make one wrong mistake you instantly die because unlike Jack in Bioshock, Rose in Close to the Sun isn’t provide with any weapons.

So that’s a good segue to dig into the fact that there is no combat at all in this game. It’s actually a walking sim, which in and of itself doesn’t bother me. The lack of exploration and any actual creative gameplay is what bothers me. The game gives you some interesting locations to look at, but exploration is boring because as large as the Helios is made to be in the story, the areas are actually kind of small and there isn’t really anything to discover. The game does toss a few puzzles at you, but they’re really easy to solve which honestly makes it feel like the developers put in the puzzles just to pad out the game.

Sadly, the story in Close to the Sun doesn’t balance out the awful gameplay either because the narrative is just as bad, if not worse. It’s a complete mess. The game is written to be a mystery where nothing is explained and it’s clear that you’re meant to get all the answers in a direct sequel. Questions like; who is Ludwig and what made him so psychotic? Who sent Rose the letter to go to the Helios if it wasn’t Ada? Well, you never get those answers because there is currently no sequel or DLC to answer those questions and to make matters worse the game ends on a cliff hanger.

In all honesty though, I don’t know if I’d care enough to get those answers if there was a sequel. I didn’t really like or care about any of the characters after playing Close to the Sun. None of them were that interesting. I found the main character, Rose to be more grating than compelling if anything. Her motivation wasn’t bad, but her dialogue, just like the rest of the characters, was written really poorly and just made me cringe. I might as well say it now, the voice acting is some of the worst I’ve ever heard in a video game.

Rose’s sister, Ada, is a complete Mary Sue in the fact that she’s the smartest and the best at everything. Almost all the dialogue referring to or involving her pretty much boils down to “Ada is the greatest, Ada is the best. No other scientist on Helios is smarted than her.” Other than that Ada has no other defining traits just like Rose, or any other character in this god awful story.

I don’t know much about Tesla as a person because I’ve never read up on his history, but with the way he’s written I almost feel like he was written with the a clear attempt at character assassination. From what little I know of Telsa, I don’t think he was really that big into capitalism so for the writers to make him the richest and greediest person in the world just felt that they didn’t really understand him and felt more like a pro-Edison campaign. Or maybe they took out their feelings on Elon Musk onto their fictional Nikola Tesla. Either way, it just felt very strange to take Tesla and turn him into this character… who also still isn’t as smart as Ada.

Now let’s talk about some of the main antagonists, Aubrey and Ludwig. Honestly there’s not much to say about either. Aubrey is just your poor man’s version of Frank Fontaine whose only sole motive is to impress Tesla, I guess so that’s why he does bad stuff? Ludwig comes off as a lame Outlast killer who got rejected from the final version of the game and then went over to Close to the Sun because no one wanted him. His motive for killing people is never explained and is one of those mysteries that I talk about earlier that was never answered.


Overall:

Close to the Sun is an awful game and an awful horror game to boot. This game fails at almost everything it tries to do and little good can be said about it. If it was on sale for a dollar, I would tell you to skip it, because it’s really that bad.


Pros:
+Decent art design at times

*Cons:
-bad and frustrating gameplay
-no combat
-awful story
-bad voice acting
-poorly written characters
-pointless narrative that goes nowhere due to no sequel, making the whole experience a waste of time