Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog Review (Switch) – Life In The Old Dog Yet

Stories From Sol: The Gun-Dog is a visual novel in the style of the classic and very Japanese PC-9800 home computer. It’s about as era-accurate (early 90s) as you could wish for, from content and story to visuals, controls, and gameplay. But with the nostalgic beauty of all those aesthetic choices, comes a lot of very dated gameplay and graphics.

Without anything else like it currently on the market, Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog comes off as something of a novelty piece, but modern-retro reimaginings and recreations are amongst our favourite kinds of indie games right now. It’s a rediscovery for some and something of a history lesson for others. So it was with my rose-tinted spectacles changing the green to a murky brown, that I embarked into the void of space and the adventure of Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog.

Dog Eat Dog

While there is a fair amount of backstory explaining the sides in the Jovian conflict in the opening spiel of the game I won’t go into it here. Suffice it to say you start Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog experiencing your worst day during the war. Your mech malfunctioned and left you in the hangar while most of your squad got wiped out. You’ve felt guilty about it ever since and anxious in combat.

A few years later the war is over and you’re transferred to the Gun-Dog, a kind of dumping ground ship for insubordinate, erratic, or otherwise behaviourally compromised members of the JCF so that they don’t bother other ships. You are their new security officer. You’ll start with the obligatory tour, get to know the interesting and often hard-to-like cast, and find out your girlfriend pulled strings to get you here. But that is where the relaxing atmosphere ends.

The Gun-Dog has been tasked with rendezvousing with another ship, only everything goes wrong en route. Act 1 of the story sees you dealing with communications going down and the critical failure of the entire ship, power systems, and backups, and finding every single door locked. With life support and air running out, you have to find systems, portable computers, keycards, you name it, to try to recover your (largely ungrateful) crew and restart the ship’s computer before everyone suffocates.

And that’s just Act 1. Act 2 sees you on board the silent ship and while the search of the O’Brien seems like a cost-saving re-use of background assets, it’s actually kind of a creepy mirror of what could have happened to the Gun Dog had you not been able to complete the objectives in Act 1.

Act 3 is quite long and concerns the aftermath of what you find onboard but I’ll not say much more. It’s a fairly action-packed story for a game where you are largely looking at still backgrounds and reading text. The narrative here is pretty much the most important aspect of the whole package because if that doesn’t hook you, there’s very little else to keep you playing.

I found the story thrilling throughout, and well-written. I’ve never been a fan of second-person adventure text in a novel, but in the medium of video games it works and you feel right there in the action, responsible for getting shit done. The game’s writers have also packed the short narrative with dialogue choices that affect character relationships and branch the story in a few ways (such as who you work with and who survives), especially towards the end. It was nice in what looks like a simple package to find plenty of complexity.

Hired Gun

Tiny History Lesson – For those of us in the West the PC-98 was virtually unknown. In Japan, it was an exceptionally popular business computer, that like many of the 80s and 90s machines, could support homebrew games. In its heyday in the early 90s, developers turned to the PC-98 for higher resolution and better graphics and it became popular as the system of choice for the resurgence of adventure titles in the form of visual novels and dating sims. The clear on-screen button prompts, decorative borders, anime visuals, and reliance on narrative and text were all indicators of PC-98 titles. Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog is imitating that style in beautiful fashion.

Think of the puzzle elements of the old PS1 Resident Evils for the type of gameplay you’ll be asked to do. It’s keycards, navigation, a bit of investigation, opening doors to get to another area where you find something to open a previous door. It’s a lot more (a lot more) than your average visual novel – I mean in some the advance dialogue button is the only button. It’s fun, it’s not too demanding, and because of the multi-branches, there are not that many ways to fail – you just end up finding a different way to accomplish the same scene/task.

Things it does like a PC-98 game? Virtually everything. From the advancing screens to the heavy second-person dialogue to the character avatars to the gameplay requirements. It’s about as era-accurate as you could hope to get, even down to a jarringly long load screen straight off the Nintendo Switch system screen – that was just like a PC-98 game.

Old Dog, New Tricks

Graphically Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog is also very era-accurate. No avatar for the player for the most part, and you move from screen to screen, without seeing the characters in that space unless you are directly talking to them. Each background is a stark military ship environment but they’ve been handled with care and attention. Each character has a great recognisable design and animations in the foreground – all of them in gorgeous 80s anime style looking like they’ve come straight out of Gunsmith Cats or something. They’re very comparable to VA-11 Hall-A from a few years back, which is itself far closer to a PC-98 game than I’d ever previously realised.

Once you start in on the action The Gun Dog has scenes and moments that have been animated, usually at the height of the action and the pivotal moments. There’s background movement sometimes, explosions happening in the distance or stars moving, but it’s pretty minimal. Otherwise, for the vast majority of its runtime, things are very still. If I had a complaint about the translation of PC-98 style to modern gaming, it’s that I wanted a lot more animations on the average screen.

I wanted to see Dawson tinkering in the Hangar, or Vanessa and crew on the bridge. I wanted to see a torch light swing across the interior of the dark and silent O-Brien, or the crew in their multiple moments in ducts or zero-gee areas. I feel it’s a matter of personal preference in updating this type of game, but I don’t think it’s what the team was going for, so it won’t be a reason to mark them down. There’s updating and there’s era-accurate, and this is the latter. However what animation there is, especially in the game’s final hour, is pixel-perfect.

Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog has a dozen or so chiptune themes that play out through different sections of the story. There’s one for the peaceful ship scenes, one for intrigue, one for tension etc. I really enjoyed all of them and again, they are era-accurate, sounding tinny and midi and like they are coming out of a Gameboy, or of course, a PC-98. I will seek out the soundtrack to sit alongside my other chiptune favourites.

Dog Days Are Over

You know those episodes of Ster Trek or [insert other similar space opera franchise here] where inevitably the budget runs out and instead of being able to shoot a script as they wanted to with effects and lots of locations and characters, they had to instead do an entire episode in the maintenance shafts, as the crew try to access parts of the ship in an emergency. There’s one in every franchise. Red Dwarf’s Duct Soup episode springs to mind as a personal favourite.

Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog feels like one of those episodes. Adhering so particularly to the constraints of emulating PC-98 style and soft/hardware capabilities means that you spend an inordinate amount of the narrative of this game trying to work out how to open doors, or get around the Gun-Dog’s ducts and elevators, and then the same on the O’Brien. The narrative and gameplay options are very clearly designed with that in mind – you have no avatar beyond what screen you are on.

In many ways those types of episodes lean into character development and plot, demonstrating the creative abilities of the writers – and Stories From Sol is no different. The self-imposed constraints have likely forced the development team to be so much more creative to overcome them in interesting ways, to still tell a suspenseful and tension-filled story without a hero on screen or even much beyond text for most of its runtime.

I don’t think Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog is going to appeal to everyone. If you don’t want to spend 98% of an eight-hour narrative reading text (which is close to reading a full 350-page novel), this is not the game for you. But it will absolutely appeal to the modern-retro crowd, who want new games in retro styles. I’m talking about fans of 2064: Read Only Memories and its sequel Neurodiver. I’m talking VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action and World of Horror. Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog is a brilliant game, a great example of PC-98 gameplay, and should take its rightful place alongside this tiny, hallowed, and high-quality group.

Stories From Sol: The Gun Dog is out on 20th February 2025 for Nintendo Switch (review platform), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam.

Developers: Space Colony Studios

Publisher: Astrolabe Games

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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