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And that’s without including the emergence of floating islands that oh so briefly turn the game into some sort of gravity-less 3D platformer. There are the clouds, the oceanic waves, the sheer spectacle at flying thousand of feet above ground. There are wide shots of the planet’s surface and the skyline - of the distant beams of light you’re heading towards to make your next jump to light-speed. Instead, what Exo One gets right is, to refer back to that previous point, is in its balancing of the general mood of what far-flung, sci-fi exploration musters. If anything, the alien worlds in of themselves - so far as what colors they are or the actual geometry of the terrain itself - don’t factor in. Indeed, the strengths lie in more than just the visual identity. Moments that while not the most active or stimulating so far as numerous actions happening on-screen at once, as simple the controls are, Exo One‘s beauty is in how elegant the very act of managing your little UFO-like device is. But for those keen to spend around two to three hours to reach end credits, Exo One does have surprisingly serene moments. Stray too far left or right of the desired area and the game will forcibly do a U-turn for you Starfox-style. The reality is that while the game isn’t strictly on-rails, player freedom is, for all intents and purposes, restricted to a channel per se of the environment.
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More so if you’re going into this game expecting a full 360 degrees of flying. It’s still a problem, don’t get me wrong and one that will drag the overall end product down a significant degree. Had it not been for its brief escapades between planets - when you’re left to make your way across these varying surroundings of ground, sky, sea and occasional space alike - Exo One‘s more frustratingly self-indulgent aspects may have posed an even bigger issue than they bring. Maybe there’s a connection and Exo One inserts it at such an extreme level of subtlety that it’s impossible not to come away and feel like the game could’ve easily ditched any semblance of story. Garbled dialogue interspersed throughout, of which you can’t help but deduce must be playing a critical part in the narrative here, only there you realize, to perpetuate the fallacy. Whereupon any and all assumption of some grand tie-in between one’s journey and this assumed failed mission to Jupiter the game conjures repeated flashes toward is left at an unsatisfying and frankly confusing cut-off. Aided in no way by one’s reaching the ending credits. And at the risk of starting out too harsh on the game, developer Exbleative’s starry-eyed gazing into the grand yonder can feel like it’s instead gazing closer towards its own figurative naval than it is anything that can be considered satisfying. This is not that type of game Exo One has an intended tone and you’re going to know about it sooner rather than alter. It won’t be remembered if you’re looking to engage with (by that I mean fight) alien life-forms of a sort. Exo One won’t last long in the mind if what you’re seeking are intricate mechanics or a story that in all honesty - much like the shape-shifting object you control throughout - is heading towards a cohesive end point. Devoid of anything that you would otherwise link to some form of threat to one’s…shall we say…continued existence. Even the game’s own premise describes this as a game without peril, without challenge. Landscapes too that, outside of occasional topography to interact with - and seemingly-artificial structures that at first hint towards deeper lore eventually subside as miscellaneous irrelevancies - prove little in the way of danger. You might mistake Exo One‘s brief journey as an altogether simple affair with an even-simpler pitch given the limited scope of gameplay with an objective that remains the same throughout: move forward…that’s it. And the game just so happily places itself slap-bang in the middle. And on the other: that harsh, abrasive acknowledgment that the cruel reality of physics are even more apparent when it comes to one’s survival.
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On one end of the spectrum: the romanticism of alien worlds and awe-inspiring stretches of baron emptiness that are admittedly, in their own right, a spectacle to behold.
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Specifically in the way it continuously strives to find the half-way point in the depiction of a planet-hopping voyage through space. Predominantly confined to a move-set governed by a mere three commands - analog stick to move, a trigger to glide, another to descend - there’s admiration to share with a game like Exo One in the way it gives way for the spectacle to speak for itself, regardless of how lengthy or inevitably dominant this design approach is.