Quick Answer: A shift is one loop: read your tasks, assign four crewmates to compartments on the duty roster, do your own minigame, work the sonar and route planner, then submit. Energy is per-crew and drains with assignments; Hull Integrity and Biohazard are the two ship-wide meters your tasks feed. The single most useful non-obvious thing on this page: the route planner rewards messy routes. Drawing lots of small direction changes gets you further than a clean straight line, and that is what gets people past the late sonar shift they think is broken. Budget three to five hours for a route.
Version note: Written August 17, 2026 against the build after the developers' August 15 hotfix. Mechanics come from official screenshots and the store page; the route-planner behaviour, the interaction quirks and the timings come from named player reports and developer replies on the Steam forums, linked inline. We have not completed every route and do not publish step-by-step story walkthroughs we have not verified.
Your entire cast. The game is small enough that every crew member is load-bearing for both story and achievements. (Screenshot: solarsuit.games)
What Kind of Game This Is
Set expectations first, because this is where most of the disappointment in the reviews comes from.
It is a story game with a management layer, not a submarine simulator. You do not drive the Ares in any granular sense, you do not manage systems in depth, and the compartments are places to send people rather than machinery to operate. One negative review's phrasing is harsh but a fair warning: "mostly static assets masquerading as game systems."
The management layer front-loads. Several players report the crew assignment being genuinely interesting early and then mattering less — one puts the turn at "after the 5th shift." Do not build a strategy expecting the roster to stay the centre of the game; it hands off to the story.
The minigames are simple by design. Expect hold-a-key and fill-a-meter tasks. The hull repair task is the one players single out as tedious, and it is unavoidable — one player notes the route planner "was intentionally awful forcing you to do the hull repair task."
The Duty Roster
Shift 3. Michael's Energy is at 1/10 and shown in red; Captain's Quarters, Research Section and the Mainframe are locked. (Screenshot: solarsuit.games)
Everything you decide happens here.
Compartments run the length of the boat — Reactor Control, Technical Corridor, Central Stairway, Bridge, Officers' Quarters, Captain's Quarters, Engineering, Mess Hall, Torpedo Room, Storage, Pumps, Research Section and the Mainframe. Icons on each tile show what can be done there this shift: a magnifier for investigation, tools for repair, a knife-and-fork for cooking, a checklist for a completed assignment.
Red tiles are closed to you, not broken. On the shift above, that is the Captain's Quarters, the Research Section and the Mainframe. They open as the story opens them.
Energy sits under each crew portrait, out of 10, and turns red when it is low. Assignments spend it. Rest recovers it.
Two ship meters sit to the right: Hull Integrity and Biohazard, both out of 10. Your repair and containment work is what moves them.
Then you Submit Roster and the shift resolves.
One Thing Energy Does Not Do
Crew Energy does not limit how far the submarine can move. This is worth stating plainly because a player stuck near the end of the game assumed it did, and planned to reload an earlier save to let his crew rest. Another player corrected him — "Energy of crew shouldn't affect speed of boat" — and the real cause turned out to be the route planner. See below before you sacrifice a shift to resting.
The Route Planner: Draw a Messy Route
This is the most useful mechanical thing anyone has worked out about this game, and it is not in the tutorial.
A player who could not reach the objective zone on the final sonar shift — with two torpedo events that were supposed to have opened new paths, and no visible change to the map — solved it himself and posted the answer:
"I had to make very small movements resulting in a lot more 'pips' along my route and that for some reason gave me just enough movement to reach the green zone. If I tried to get to the zone in as few direction changes as possible and minimizing those pips I would run out of movement."
So: the number of direction changes you draw affects how far you get, and drawing efficiently costs you range. He is right that this is inconsistent and says so — "I feel like this should be adjusted for consistency or the tutorial changed to clarify" — but until it changes, it is the difference between reaching the objective and concluding the game is broken.
Two supporting facts from the same thread: you can route through orange zones, and another player reached the green zone without using torpedoes to clear obstacles at all.
Sonar
Sonar is how you identify what is out there before you commit to a route or a torpedo. The store page frames the ambiguity as the point: "Is it another submarine, or something alive?"
Communicating via sonar for the first time is an achievement (Broken Phone, 45.9%), as is launching your first torpedo (Fire and Forget, 34.5%). Both arrive naturally.
Doors That Will Not Open Are Usually Not Bugs
Two interactions cause most of the "I am softlocked" threads, and the developer answered one of them directly.
Stiff hatches need repeated presses. A player blocked at the biohazard section — life support restored, hatch giving a turning animation but never opening — was told by the developer account solarsuit:
"Try pressing it multiple times — to open those hatches you need to apply force to the valve. Do it by hitting the button rapidly to open the door."
It worked, and the reporter's reply is the fair verdict: "You really need to make this a lot clearer in the game." Mash the key on any hatch that animates but does not open.
Some doors are timing, not permission. A player unable to enter the Captain's Quarters on day 4 was told by another that the coffee pot is once-per-shift and that it may simply not be the right moment to see the captain. Check your task list before you conclude the game has broken. The cases where it genuinely has are in Bugs & Fixes.
Reading Your Notes
Your crew will tell you that notes have been uploaded to the Mainframe, and you will go looking for somewhere to read them and not find it.
You are not missing a menu. The developers confirmed on the forums that the console to read them is missing and committed to adding it. In the meantime, the notes are readable from the mess hall — a player confirmed that, and flagged that they look important. Details and the promised date: Bugs & Fixes.
Choices, Flagged and Otherwise
The game marks its important decisions. Players notice this and are split on it — "it's clear when the important decisions pop up" from someone who liked it, and "the game basically tells you what choices are important which removes the actual fun in figuring out what you want to prioritize" from someone who did not.
Either way, the practical consequence is that you will not miss a branch by accident. The flagged decisions are the ones that steer your ending: whether you take the pills at night, how you answer the entity, and whether you join the mutiny. Route detail, as far as anyone has published it, is on the achievements guide.
First-Run Advice
- Save deliberately, and keep old saves. The recovery move for every genuine story break so far is loading a save from well before the problem — often further back than your last two. Captain's Report (91.7%) is just for saving once.
- Mash stiff hatches before you assume you are blocked.
- Draw wandering routes, not efficient ones.
- Do the two arcade achievements when you find the machines, not on a completion pass. One reviewer spent two of his five hours grinding the darts achievement at the end.
- Do not expect the roster to carry the whole game. Enjoy it while it is the focus and let the story take over.
- If your speech and subtitles disagree, trust the subtitles. That mismatch is a known defect, not a narrative device.