ABOVE: A brief gameplay clip from Radiosol. You can't spend too long in the sunlight.
Story time
After a tutorial prompt instructed me to check out my little robot's settings menu, I noticed that I had the option to turn off essential-sounding subsystems like "hearing" and "life support" and "thinking."
I wasn't not going to press bunch of juicy red "KILL" buttons, and sure enough, I instantly lost the ability to hear, see, move, and not burn up in the scorching sun.
With my ability to think also disabled, the text in the game became garbled, and that remained true even after I died from sun exposure and was kicked back to the menu. I had to remember which button would load a save (made before I lost the power of cognition) so that I could read the text again.
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"A journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm"
I related this experience in PC Gamer's work chat and multiple of us bought Radiosol, called by its developers "a journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm," on the spot. It helps that it's only $9 on Steam, and that its jaggy megastructures look exceptionally cool.
As has become habitual when I see anything that looks mildly uncanny these days, I scrolled down to the generative AI disclosure on Steam: It was used for translations, the Moscow-based developer says, but not to generate any audio or art.
On X, developer TripletConcept also states that they used AI for "some coding and utility stuff like handling Git merges." The artist has been making art in this style since before the 2020s, as evidenced by their ArtStation profile.
I'm not far into Radiosol yet, so I'm still working out what I think—this is just my first impression, not a review. But so far, it's pretty sick.
You're a little wall-climbing spider-robot in the deserted ruins of megastructures, on your way to some kind of final battle for the fate of… it's unclear. Multiple subjects are broadcasting information to you as you work your way toward a pyramid for the big fight, leaping between shadows to stay out of direct sunlight.
So far, there's nothing in the way of combat. It's fun just being a spider-dude, executing big hops in the low-G environment—I have gotten the impression that this is not quite earth—to traverse unshaded stretches of desert. Currently, I'm seeking a "Megapol station" in the territory of the "Locus Group of Companies."
If you decided to check out Radiosol, my suggestions are A) prepare to have a lot of proper nouns thrown at you without context and B) commit the important parts of the menu layouts to memory, in the event that you can't help yourself from hitting the red button that turns off thinking.
