A glance at a few screenshots from Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog is all one needs to get a feel for the game’s surface-level selling point. Visually, The Gun-Dog is a proud homage to sci-fi anime of the late ’70s and ’80s, its mecha designs evoking the titular suits from Mobile Suit Gundam, and its spaceship designs and crewmembers reminiscent of Space Battleship Yamato. Yet beneath its dotingly anime shell, The Gun-Dog is a smartly written adventure that aches to reveal more of its original universe’s implied lore. This is a dense visual novel, with over 300,000 words of text that can mostly be experienced in a single five-hour playthrough, allowing some wiggle room for a series of branching narrative pathways in the game’s third act.
Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog takes place in the distant future of ‘Planetary Calendar 214.’ You play as, well, you, with the game’s opening scene tossing you back amidst the final days of The Solar War that raged between the Jovian Forces of Jupiter, the Martian Front, and the Terrans of Earth. You start as a Jovian pilot in the cockpit of a Juno, this world’s rendition of a giant mecha armor. You watch via pixelated still images as your comrades launch into battle, only to have your Juno jam at the last moment. Unable to engage the enemy, you sit by as your squad is wiped out one by one, leaving you as one of the only survivors. This traumatic moment haunts you as the game’s central narrative picks up four years later, with you stationed aboard the JFS Gun-Dog as its sole security officer.
At this point, the game’s interactivity comes into play. As security officer, you start by touring the Gun-Dog and meeting its small crew of nine. There’re standout characters like the cocky Ensign Hansen Crwys, the only other Juno pilot survivor of your crew from years before, who now bears a grudge against the supposed “coward” who let his squad die. Then there’s lead romantic interest Lt. Commander Cassie Quinn, a bubbly (albeit a tad airheaded) officer who plays on anime tropes in charming moments of lucidity, keeping the game’s tone fun and healthily rooted in its inspirations. The game does detestable characters well, egging you on to just hate Hansen and the stuck-up second-in-command Lieutenant Vanessa Lord. However, I feel some characters get too little attention, like the barely-present Gunner Dylan Dees and nonbinary pilot hotshot Haru Rumney.
You navigate screens of the Gun-Dog’s rooms by a series of commands on the right-side HUD: Move, Look, Use, Talk, Item, and Function (containing a map of the ship, an objective list, and a glossary of lore terminology). The presentation, beyond the pixelated anime portraits of the crewmembers, is functional yet barebones. This is a little disappointing when you see how much of artist Kevin Butler’s gorgeous pixel art and animation goes into the game’s ending scenes, causing the art to feel a tad backloaded. There are, however, three graphic styles you can switch between at any time: the fully colored ‘Vivid’ pixels, the greeny Game Boy style of ‘Studio’ mode, and the game’s original working, and the more hand-drawn characters of ‘Doujin’ mode.
There is also the choice between a retro and modern font. However, for the opening hours, before I was familiar with the characters, I found it hard to follow who was speaking between the crew, me, and the narrator, given the game’s pseudo-first-person perspective of each bare room. More accessibility options like changeable font sizes or colors for distinct characters would have helped. The small size of the dev team at Space Colony Studios is at times evident, but equally evident is the sheer talent each of the four main developers brings, including the cheery 8-bit soundtrack by composer Daniel Goodman and the butter-smooth programming of Ben Keller.
If The Gun-Dog’s first “episode” is a tour familiarizing you with the ship, there’s relatively little in terms of adventure-style gameplay until the second and third episodes, which feature a power outage and the investigation of a non-responsive JFS ship, the O’Brien. As an extra-Jovian mystery and further sinister events start to unfold, there are graphic adventure-style puzzles and choices to make. Despite the choices, I never encountered a fail-state in the game, meaning players will inevitably be herded through samey story beats. When in doubt, simply ‘Look’ and ‘Use’ all three or so interactable objects in the room. There are also two (count ’em, two!) cliché hacking puzzles towards the end of the game in which you spin tiles to complete a chain, suggesting that more effort nearly went into puzzles. You can hit the back trigger to return to previous text lines at any time, meaning you can even overwrite key decisions immediately after seeing their outcome. Combined with the ability to save multiple files at any time, it only takes about 1.5 playthroughs to see all The Gun-Dog has to offer. Overall, your choices will only change how you get to specific cinched points in the narrative, but the thoroughness of the game’s writing and action will nonetheless immerse you.
At times, this was the most ‘novelistic’ visual novel I’ve played, thanks to Creative Director and Lead Writer Jonathan Durham. The amount of detail put into the tech aboard the Gun-Dog goes far beyond any of the manga and anime that inspired it. To get the ship’s power back on during the game’s midpoint, prepare to act out the repairs step-by-step. When inner-crew conflicts come to a head, get ready to thoroughly hear out people’s motivations and arguments before making decisions. This detailed approach frustratingly causes the pace to plod a little in places, as well as with the meticulous amount of detail used in describing the opening of a hatch or changing a spacesuit battery. For all the game’s minimalist aesthetics and gameplay, the exposition and description are excessive.
If I squint past the Japanese exterior, I was very much reminded of the technobabble and diplomacy of Star Trek, as well as the rising tension of classic “submarine films” like Das Boot or The Hunt for Red October. Tonally, though, the balance of lofty drama and light-hearted humor is perfectly struck. Your past traumas are not forgotten, and other characters deal with issues such as alcoholism and career envy in ways that propel the plot forward rather than get bogged down with self-seriousness. The game takes place almost entirely in the rigorously-explored halls of the Gun-Dog, but we learn so much more about the greater world of Stories from Sol. The game’s end is somewhat of a cliffhanger but is satisfying enough in fleshing out the arcs of the major characters you grow so fond of. I may have liked to see more interactivity and impact of player choice—more to distinguish the game from a well-written sci-fi novel. The Gun-Dog, at least, has earned enough of my emotional investment to keep me on for a later, perhaps more technically ambitious entry in the series. According to Space Colony Studio’s site, Stories from Sol is to be an anthology of narrative-focused games, so here’s hoping we can see more beyond the hull and crew of the Gun-Dog, to the remnants of the Solar War they all live in.
Richly detailed and only occasionally derivative, Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog is well worth the few hours of your time it will take for a playthrough and a half. Fans of classic sci-fi anime will get a kick out of its presentation, but more than that, this game will appeal to anyone who enjoys a tense ‘bottle episode’ mystery. The Gun-Dog succeeds less as a branching-narrative adventure game and more as a small-scale proof of concept for the greater Stories from Sol narrative series that I truly hope comes to fruition.
