Not only is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey blowing up the box office, but it’s also blowing up the career of one of the lesser-known actors in the film… lemme quickly check IMDB for his name… ah, here it is: Matt Damon.
Just kidding, Matt Damon is in everything, everywhere, every movie, all the time. You know those little movies Facebook makes of your photographs without asking? I just watched mine and it starred Matt Damon. (Not his best work.)
But forget about Trojan Horses and giant cannibals for a minute: if you want to relive another of Matt Damon’s movie roles where all he wants to do is get home, there’s a new survival game out this week that looks like it follows the plot of 2015’s The Martian to a tee.
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It’s called Sol One, and if you’ve seen the movie or read Andy Weir’s novel, it all sounds a bit familiar:
“The mission is over. Your crew left you behind. You’ve got a pressure suit, whatever you can pull out of the ground, and a long way to go before you see Earth again,” developer yeetgench says.
In the Sol One announcement trailer, your astronaut awakens much like Matt Damon did in the movie: all alone and surrounded by wreckage after a deadly Martian storm with his spacesuit blaring critical warnings. And, also like Matt Damon, you have to get to work surviving by using the red planet’s resources, scavenging gear from prior Mars missions, and the most memorable part of The Martian: growing a shitload (literally) of potatoes.
(It’s unclear if you use your crewmate’s poops as fertilizer for those spuds in the game, but I wouldn’t be surprised.)
Don’t worry, it doesn’t follow The Martian’s blueprints exactly. For instance, Sol One’s abandoned-naut isn’t waiting around to be picked up by the asshole crewmates who ditched him: he’s going to have to escape on his own.
“There’s a rocket between you and home. You just have to build it first,” yeetgench says. “Mine iron, copper, silica, ice, and uranium out of the red planet. Run the raw materials through smelters and fabricators and manufacture the parts you need to turn a cramped shelter into a thriving base.”
You can also do a few things that dummy Matt Damon didn’t think of trying, like automation. “Drive out across the surface to find what’s worth finding, or send your autonomous rover ahead to scout and haul while you handle things back in your base,” yeetgench says. “Mine enough, learn enough, and build enough to finish a rocket that flies, climb in, and return home.
Sol One is “made for people who like grounded, science-driven survival where the problem-solving is the point,” says the developer. “The sky behaves like the real thing, from rusty daylight to a cold blue sunset to the gorgeous Milky Way after dark. Dust storms brew on the horizon and roll in over the ridge, and your solar panels drop off, visibility closes in, and the comfortable margins you were working with are suddenly gone until it passes.”
Sol One arrives in early access this week, coming to Steam July 30.