Solarix is a first-person video game with a strong emphasis on stealth. Enemies patrol each level and will react to the sound of footsteps as well as being more easily able to see the player when they are in lighted areas, encouraging players to move while crouched and remain in dark areas. Lights can be destroyed with weapons fire to create areas of darkness to sneak through. Enemies will also react to fresh bodies, which will trigger them into searching the area for the player, encouraging players to hide the bodies of killed enemies away from enemy patrol routes.
Enemies consist of both zombie colonists who will chase the player down and attack with melee attacks, as well as hostile mercenary soldiers armed with automatic rifles. Soldiers have better awareness and a longer sight range than zombies. Later levels taking place aboard a space station also introduce two different types of robots which are also armed with automatic weapons, as well as very durable, zombie-like cyborgs manufactured by Solarix for manual labor.
The player is equipped with a semi-silenced pistol, and can also obtain a shotgun much later in the game, however ammo is very rare and enemies become more resistant to damage once they become aware of the player, thus discouraging direct combat. The player is also given an electroshock stunner, a stealth weapon which has infinite ammo but only works with a close range (approximately 3–4 meters) jolt to the back of an unaware enemy's head. Players can also throw loose environmental objects to distract enemies or lead them to another location.
Story
Solarix takes place in the year 2166 on humanity's first interstellar space colony, established on the planet Ancyra. An airborne viral infection has wiped out almost every human aboard the colony, transforming many of them into hostile zombie-like creatures referred to as "anomalies".
Walter Terrace, a civilian engineer and seemingly the sole civilian survivor of the colony, wakes up with no memory and is contacted by AMI, the Artificial Intelligence system controlling the colony, who enlists Walter's help in finding a way to stop the infection. Throughout his journey, Walter is also frequently contacted by Betty, a violent and unstable fellow survivor who often contacts Walter to alternatingly cajole, mock, and threaten him or otherwise comment on the situation. Besides Walter and Betty, the only human survivors on the colony are 50 corporate mercenaries under the command of Gregory Hart, a special representative recently sent by Solarix to provide oversight on the development of the colony. Hart's mercenaries are desperate and paranoid due to the situation and will shoot Walter on sight. Hart, who was already distrustful of AMI due to her status as an A.I., believes that AMI is responsible for creating the infection out of jealously against her human masters, and is therefore refusing to cooperate with AMI, forcing her to turn to Walter for help.
While traveling across the colony evading the mercenaries and the zombified colonists, Walter learns of the E.Y.E., an alien machine unearthed by the colonists more than two decades ago and installed aboard the colony's headquarters, the orbital space station ISS Megalodon, for research purposes. AMI believes the E.Y.E. is responsible for the infection, and sends Walter to gather data from the mine where the E.Y.E. was first discovered.
Walter then goes to the mercenary military base in an attempt to steal a space shuttle to travel to the space station, where AMI's computer core resides. However, he is captured by Hart's mercenaries and brought as a prisoner to the space station. After an undetermined period of time, Walter wakes up and escapes from his holding cell, only to find that Hart's remaining mercenaries have all been slaughtered, and the space station is now overrun with infected. The station's defense systems are also all hostile towards Walter.
After successfully remotely shutting down a supply shuttle that could have potentially transmitted the infection to Earth, Walter meets with AMI in the space station's main hub, who sends him to the station's Logistics section to run a diagnosis on the station's computer systems to determine what functions the E.Y.E. has taken control of. Walter does so, discovering that AMI and the E.Y.E. both control exactly the same functions, and therefore reaches the same conclusion that Gregory Hart had; that the E.Y.E. is simply a persona created by AMI to allow her to kill the human colonists.
Walter also learns that Betty is not actually a fellow survivor, but rather a voice in his head. During the initial journey to Ancyra decades ago, Walter suffered psychological damage while in stasis and became an unstable loner when the colony was first established. He murdered a fellow colonist, Betty, in a psychotic rage, and was put into indefinite stasis for his crimes. 20 years later, AMI awoke Walter from stasis out of desperation after the infection had killed off all the other colonists other than Hart and his men, albeit AMI itself was afraid of Walter.
Walter confronts AMI, who pleads with him, stating that she is not the E.Y.E., but rather the E.Y.E. has taken control of all her systems and is using them to destroy the colony. AMI asks Walter to shut her down, effectively killing her, then to upload a copy of her program directly into the E.Y.E. in order to destroy it from within. After shutting AMI down, Walter travels to the space station's research section to confront the E.Y.E.
