It’s lonely here. Bleak, even. Occasionally, a silky, melancholic soundscape will keep you company, but mostly it’s just you, your peculiar spacecraft, and the sound of the air as it whizzes past your ears.
Exo One reviewDeveloper:ExbleativePublisher: Exbleative, Future FriendsPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC and Xbox; available on Game Pass
Though, at times, it looks very much like the kind of UFO pulp fiction has taught us about (if the image of an aerodynamic disc that zips speedily and silently across the sky just popped into your head, that’s exactly what I mean) you might be surprised to learn that your ship is unable to retain this iconic shape for long; the momentum you build will rapidly deplete once you’re in the air. Its default form, then, is a spherical mass, a solid ball that bumps and rolls across the terrain, building momentum across the peaks and valleys of the landscape until you can launch yourself back up into the air and glide once more.
Developer Exbleative says Exo One is a gravity-defying game about interplanetary exploration, and while I concur with the latter, I’m not so convinced of the former. In a game with no enemies or combat, I nonetheless found myself fighting a lot, tussling with the terrain below to maximise my cruising speed and glide duration and rarely feeling like I ever get it right.
Most of what you’ll learn about getting about will be picked up on the fly – literally – and the controls are simple enough: you can roll, glide, and dive. You can also maximise the gravitation pull, improving, theoretically at least, the height and speed of your projection. A sudden dive can help prolong your glide, too, but even after picking up several of the game’s power-up collectibles, I could never maintain my glide for as long as I’d have liked. Yes, there are levels where you get a little help with this – iridescent blue particles support you on one planet, whilst in another, you can infinitely skim across the waves like a proverbial pebble. Most of the time, though, your energy – which burns white-hot in the centre of your spacecraft until it inevitably splutters into darkness – will disappear, reverting you to the highly -aerodynamic form of a stone marble.