Does Anyone Remember Polaris?
i'd like to say that i remembered it like it was yesterday, but yesterday was 2015 - in other words, falling apart by the second.
i was super bored while browsing through whatever singleplayer games there even were on my ipad, and one of them caught my eye. it was a story driven singleplayer first person shooter game that was constantly updating. i no longer remember the name of the studio that developed it or the studio that owned it, but the studio that owned it was a big name.
i downloaded the game and it was my lifeblood for its year-long lifespan. the plot went a little something like you waking up from a life pod in a spaceship that wants to kill you, so it sends what i think are either robots or aliens to try and pacify you. meanwhile, you went out guns a-blazing, beating the everloving shit out of the place while completing objectives as fast as possible, all while trying not to die. it was relatively unforgiving and death was part of the experience - stages were 5 minutes long give or take, but often felt like they took more than that. the environments sort of reminded me of Halo? they were incredibly detailed and had this very well-lit glow to them, just enough to trace out the shadows while still letting you see all the enemies. rooms would lock down until you defeated a certain number of enemies before letting you through; all you'd do is collect data chips from one area and insert them in another. it was cathartic.
near the end, you manage to get on an escape pod to a different spaceship controlled by a different ai. well turns out, the ai on that ship actually wants to kill you, meanwhile the ship you just escaped from just needed you to hibernate a little longer so it could make a proper escape. as the both of them start to bicker over your heads, you try to find a way out of the new ship you just got into, and the very last level the game gives you ends with you getting ejected into the nothingness of space through an airlock.
the game, as far as i can remember, was called Polaris. the app icon was the name of the game rendered in white with a large red star in the background. it was discontinued in 2015 or 2016, and was pulled from the app store shortly after. there is not a single piece of footage of this game, and i know for a fact it exists. this isn't some kind of tumblr bit or arg transition, no i shit you not this is a game that is real. my desperation to find it now is just from the fact that it has lived in my mind rent free because it was good, like really good, and i need to fucking know what happened to it.
each level had a very unique difficulty system in that the game was built to be speedrun. if you complete certain objectives in each stage, you'd get up to 3 bronze stars. bronze? yep. the minute you complete a bronze star challenge, the challenge would tighten its existing conditions and become a silver star, then a gold star, and then finally a platinum star. this effectively meant that the game had deep replayability per stage, as the stage conditions were not 3 stars - they were 12. each stage had its own kind of gun, from a rapidfire gun with limited ammo to a high-damage shotgun with limited range. they were tailor-made to the actual stage environments, ranging from very close encounters with enemies in tight corners to wide gaping bridges where you have less cover than you think you do. the game always allowed some level of pause to admire the environment, especially when you needed to heal, but they did nothing to forgive the incredible heights of difficulty the game had.
also, just in case you couldn't see the enemies with your grubby mobile fingers, every enemy was color-coded. i don't remember much outside of vehemently avoiding the purple-colored ones since they would hurt like a bitch, and that the enemies themselves weren't the ones with the coloration, but rather their attacks and their highlights. i'd show you footage but i no longer have access to a download of the game, which would've been my one hail mary.
if anyone can find even a MORSEL of this game, please tell me. it'd be an incredible challenge: it's a game from 2014 or 2015 which lasted only a year to basically zero fanfare, and i'm pretty sure the only footage that was out of that game was from the developer studio itself, which deleted the channel when the game lost all funding. i'm 90% certain they were owned by Ubisoft, but an uncertain lead could be the pitfall of any deep investigation into it.
i don't know how to plead to, but tumblr is a pretty cool place, so might as well plead here, eh?
