Review Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog Review (Switch / Switch eShop)

It's safe to say that Stories from Sol: The Gun Dog makes a strong impression.

Developed by an international group of developers called Space Colony Studios and released with the help of the global publisher Astrolabe Games, the sci-fi-themed adventure game serves as a homage to the NEC PC-98 home computer and '80s/'90s anime. It boasts beautiful pixel art, a story filled with weird, wonderful, and expressive characters, and, of course, a ton of retrofuturistic tech and giant robots.

For me, it was the perfect combination of things to immediately get my attention, and I'm happy to report, after completing the game several times now, that it managed to live up to my initial hype, even if there are some additional improvements I'd like to see added to smooth out the experience further.

In Stories from Sol, players take control of the new security officer aboard The Gun-Dog, a small military vessel crewed by a bunch of misfits, with the ship's mission being to rendezvous with your fellow officers aboard The O'Brien. Things eventually go sour, though, when The O'Brien stops responding, leading players to have to unravel a conspiracy involving an unknown saboteur.

In addition to this, there is also a subplot that focuses on your character's prior involvement in a botched military operation and their experiences with PTSD, as well as a romance with the ship's lieutenant commander — both of which help to add some depth and lead to some satisfying emotional payoffs.

The action is primarily told via text displayed at the bottom of the screen, with some story branching also being present based on your conversations with the crew or whether or not you decide to take certain actions. As an example, if you react one way in a particular conversation, certain crew members might later become distrustful of you, altering the story slightly and leading you off on a temporarily different path through the ship's interiors.

From what I found, these paths are a great way of uncovering some additional context about the mysterious events that are unfolding on board, but will often fold back in on themselves later on in the story at the next logical meeting point. In other words, these paths are not about fundamentally overturning the story being told, as is the case in some other adventure games, but more about simply changing the expression of how you solve specific tasks when faced with a problem and how those choices eventually impact each crew member.

As well as these dialogue options, there are also some very light inventory puzzles included in the game that we should probably mention, as well as a couple of hacking minigames I encountered that tasked me with redirecting the flow of an electrical current. Again, though, these are relatively few and far between, so don't go in expecting to regularly have to combine inventory item A and inventory item B to produce some Frankensteinian puzzle-solving device. It's not that kind of game, with the excitement coming from seeing how the story develops, getting to know the different characters, and weighing up your choices as their circumstances take a turn for the worse.

As for additional features, there was one in particular I wanted to highlight, which is the game's graphics mode featured in the options. This lets you pick between three different styles of pixel art, including: doujin, studio, and vivid. Doujin mode seems to be based on the artwork of the early demo from 2023, whereas studio mode is the same as vivid but is represented in a Game Boy DMG-style palette. It's a lovely extra and one that I had a ton of fun with, switching between the different modes to see the earlier designs of the characters.

In fact, during my time with Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog, I was only able to come across a few of what you might call flaws, the first of which was the text size. As an example, as far as I'm aware, there's currently no way to alter the size of the text in the game, with the only option available being a way to change the "text speed". I can definitely see this becoming an issue for some people, as there are various moments where longer blocks of text are represented in a smaller font to fit on the screen, which is hard to read at a distance.

To add to this, there are also some other similar instances where I feel the game could stand to improve. For instance, right now, the game doesn't include a text log to refer back to — a standard feature of many modern visual novels — with the title instead opting to have players use the ZR and ZL buttons on the Switch to cycle back and forth through the pages of speech.

This felt a little inelegant at times and made me long for a way to see more of the conversation onscreen all at once, as it was easy to accidentally skip backwards and forwards too far and get slightly lost in the dialogue. There's also no direct "Continue" feature here either, meaning you have to dive into your saves every time you want to load up your previous save file. But, at this point, I'm probably splitting hairs.