Close to the Sun is the increasingly common kind of first-person narrative adventure game that seems to have taken the “walking sims aren’t games” talking point at face value, spoiling an intriguing setting with unnecessary and frustrating mechanics. As a result, it’s more clearly a traditional “game.” It’s also, clearly, less “good.”

Developer Storm in a Teacup has crafted a gorgeous setting in the Helios, a massive ocean liner where a fictionalized version of Nikola Tesla has invited the world’s best and brightest to live and work in a commune that’s kind of like Hogwarts for really brilliant Muggle scientists. Assuming the role of journalist Rose Archer, you arrive at the hulking cruise ship in the dead of night, responding to an invitation from your physicist sister, Ada. But, Ada is nowhere to be found and with nary a Nobel Prize hopeful in sight, you set out in search of your physi-sister and answers.

As you explore the Helios you’ll begin to uncover a heady narrative cocktail of atomic physics, time travel, espionage and bloodthirsty monsters — both human and not. You’ll find baby blue schematics for a myriad of inventions. You’ll find newspapers that seem endlessly interested with the goings-on aboard Tesla’s ship. And you’ll find the occasional passport for a noteworthy scientist or two (let’s just say Tesla wasn’t the Helios’ most famous inhabitant). Most frequently you’ll find notes, signs, newspapers and more that remind you that Tesla suspects his rival Thomas Edison’s spies are lurking aboard, infiltrating the ranks.

Unfortunately, though, you’ll run past an awful lot of this. Close to the Sun’s “utopia led by a brilliant visionary goes to shit at sea” story and brass statues (mostly in Tesla’s honor) and mahogany set dressing have earned this game plenty of comparisons to BioShock. But, BioShock was a systems-driven shooter with a richly imagined world, and Close to the Sun doesn’t provide either. Instead of shooting, the game offers a few too many bad chase sequences. These require a good deal of trial and error —expect to watch a violent lunatic stab your character with the regularity of a sewing machine—and, sometimes, perfect precision. During one sequence, I questioned whether I even had the right solution at all because of the glitchy speedrun quickness required to complete the chase.

Of course, no one comes to a first-person narrative experience for the action, but the Close to the Sun isn’t the first game to make the mistake of adding “more game.” Observer, Bloober Team’s intoxicatingly atmospheric cyberpunk thriller, spent its first four hours as a detailed character study in a decrepit tenement building, before getting lost in the weeds with a series of bad stealth and dream sequences. Conarium, from Zoetrope Interactive, followed a similar trajectory, introducing players to a beautifully rendered Arctic base, before bogging the experience down in submarine sequences and endless nonsensical puzzles. Occasionally, the “walking sim but with action” approach works—What Remains of Edith Finch is one of the best indie games of this generation—but more often than not it siphons time and attention away from exploring the intriguing world that draws you in early on.

This is my primary problem with Close to the Sun; not so much that the chase sequences are frustrating– though they are– but rather that Storm in a Teacup included them at the expense of their setting. One of the main problems plaguing the game is a lack of any worldbuilding extending beyond the central characters and main plot. Nearly every piece of paper you’ll find on the Helios somehow relates back to Tesla or Ada Archer. But, this game is about an ocean liner—in other words, a massive floating dormitory—full of the most brilliant people alive, and instead of using the papers strewn throughout the Helios to establish this ecosystem, and Close to the Sun constantly fashions them as road signs directing you back to the freeway of the main plot. As a result, the Helios, which looks bigger than the Titanic, ends up feeling extremely small, and the game takes on the same myopic view of its world as Tesla seems to have of himself.

That may seem, primarily, like a thematic concern; like I don’t think Close to the Sun is living up to the potential of its narrative. And, that’s right, I don’t. But, this laserlike focus on the “important people” pushes the game’s structure to be similarly narrow. While a setting like the Helios invites exploration, –curiosity– the game’s hyperlinear structure means that you’ll rarely have a chance to search beyond the beaten path. While there are collectibles strewn about the game’s environment, these rarely offer any insight into the state of the denizens of the Helios.

First-person narrative games have historically been really good at revealing the inner thoughts of the characters at their core and on the outskirts of their story. They invite you to snoop, sifting through a father’s abandoned novel ideas or a couple’s divorce papers, with the hope of revealing something about the human experience. Edith Finch, the most successful action-oriented walking sim, uses mechanics not as a way to inject action into an otherwise boring experience, but rather as a means to explore these stories and characters more thoroughly. Close to the Sun fails because it makes the player feel more like they’re strapped into an 1897-themed rollercoaster, than like a voyeur lurking where they shouldn’t.

There are other problems, too. Chase sequences were hampered further by some technical difficulties I encountered while playing with a controller. During the first big chase, the mantle button just wouldn’t work, leading to me being dying over and over at the same obstacle. Fortunately, the game offers four different gamepad presets and switching to another setting fixed the problem.

Maybe the most damning thing I can say about Close to the Sun is that the main story it’s so interested in telling—the story that everything else on the Helios funnels you back toward—just isn’t the least bit surprising. All of it borrows pretty heavily from the BioShock playbook, and all of the plot points it trots out have been done better (and far more shockingly) elsewhere. The portrait of Tesla it presents seems conflicted—and I hoped Close to the Sun would attempt to close the distance between the egomania that would prompt a man to build statues of himself and the gentle humanity Tesla shows elsewhere — but the game doesn’t do anything to dig into those contradictions.  

That’s the consequence of all those chase sequences. Close to the Sun just doesn’t have the time to dig into anything. It’s got somewhere else to be.

Close to the Sun review code for PC provided by the publisher.

Close to the Sun is out now on PC.