Why it matters
It is a modern Teslapunk horror game, using Nikola Tesla, alternate science, a vast ship and technological hubris to explore the darker side of retro-invention.
Close to the Sun puts Nikola Tesla on a giant ship full of alternate science, proving once again that isolated research facilities should never be allowed to float.
Developed by Italian studio Storm in a Teacup and released in 2019, Close to the Sun is set aboard the Helios, a giant ship created by Nikola Tesla as a floating haven for scientific advancement. The player controls journalist Rose Archer, who arrives to find that the usual dream of unchecked genius has developed the usual problem: bodies, warnings and corridors that do not bode well.
The game's relation to steampunk comes through Teslapunk, a neighbouring mode built around electrical invention, Tesla mythology and early modern technological wonder. It is less brass-and-boiler than many entries, but its alternate-science premise, period flavour and grand machine environment put it firmly in the same family of old futures gone wrong.
The Helios is the central object. Like Rapture in BioShock or Columbia in BioShock Infinite, it is a sealed ideological space: a place built to embody one man's vision and therefore doomed to become an argument with plumbing. The ship is lavish, isolated and full of systems. That makes it a perfect setting for retro-scientific horror.
Tesla's presence gives the game its mythic inventor. Steampunk often uses historical scientists and engineers as figures of possibility, rivalry or caution. Here Tesla becomes the centre of an alternate technological project, with scientific ambition scaled up until it becomes architectural. The problem, as ever, is that genius is rarely good at fire exits.
The horror works because the setting is already theatrical. Huge halls, laboratories, Art Deco surfaces, strange devices and empty corridors create a mood of magnificence after the party has gone terribly wrong. The player is not merely walking through a haunted ship. They are walking through a failed promise of progress.
Its relationship to The Prestige is useful, since both works draw on Tesla as a symbol of dangerous invention and impossible technology. The Prestige uses him inside a rivalry about illusion and obsession. Close to the Sun builds a whole environment around the same glamour of electrical impossibility.
The game is not as mechanically influential as Dishonored or as politically dense as Frostpunk, but it earns its place through atmosphere and theme. It is a late modern example of the genre's recurring warning: when someone promises a new world through technology, check the doors, the ethics and the lower decks.
It also belongs to the long line of speculative ships that function as societies in miniature. The Helios is a vessel, laboratory, hotel, nation and tomb all at once. That compression makes the horror efficient. There is no normal outside world to retreat to, only more corridors built by people who were too excited about the future to ask whether the present was screaming.
The game therefore works best as mood-rich Teslapunk theatre. Its pleasures are environmental, architectural and thematic: the gleam of impossible science, the loneliness of a ruined ship and the dawning suspicion that human ambition has once again confused scale with wisdom.
Is it really steampunk?
Adjacent. Close to the Sun is Teslapunk and retro-scientific horror rather than core steampunk, but its alternate technology, inventor mythology, grand vessel and period machinery make it a strong neighbour.
It suits players who like their old futures polished, electrical and already making ominous noises in the next corridor.
Find it
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