Aphelion treads familiar waters for anyone who has played an action adventure game in a post-Uncharted world. But its emotional and grounded narrative about the search for hope is potent enough to look past many shortcomings.
Aphelion was so impactful because it felt honest and real.
That’s not always a sentiment we often get from our science fiction games which frequently focus on profound exploration of far-away worlds or rescuing sentient life from unfathomable threats. I think of Outer Wilds or The Invincible, where meaning is sought amongst the stars and purpose is not always guaranteed.
I suppose I shouldn’t expect any less from DON’T NOD who, for the last 13 years, has become relatively prolific in narratives whether they are tucked inside an action game or the sole focus. Before Life is Strange seared itself into my gaming consciousness, I played a good portion of Remember Me. DON’T NOD’s first effort was one of those PS3/360-era games that was steeped in style, despite not achieving mainstream success, like so many cult classics from those days.
A few months ago, I watched a presentation on Aphelion and was left curious but felt as if I knew what the game was about. Nathan, who previewed the first two chapters from the presentation, had similar hopes. My hesitation was that the game would be constructed of these bombastic action moments that would punctuate an otherwise slow-moving game, all while the story unfolded. With combat absent would the game’s stealth and climbing provide any kind of challenge? When observing a vertical slice of a game, it’s always hard to know how the pieces truly fit into the whole.
After a somber introduction, Aphelion springs to life with an overly dramatic setpiece.
The Hope-01 has crash-landed on the planet Persephone. Ariane Montclair awakens to chaos. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Ariane and her fellow astronaut Thomas Cross were meant to come to this newly discovered ninth planet (sorry, Pluto) and see if it could sustain life. Earth is nearly uninhabitable in the year 2060 with mass flooding putting our species on the brink. Despite being blanketed in ice, Persephone could hold our final hope.
In mere moments Ariane and the player watch that dream go up in flames. She attempts to escape the fractured ruins of the Hope-01 as DON’T NOD tutorializes players through the basics.
And it’s here I began to grow worried.
Aphelion‘s first chapter is instantly reminiscent of Uncharted. As Ariane, I flashed back to 2009 as Nathan Drake desperately climbed up the shattered cabins of a trainwreck dangling off a snowy cliff in Tibet. Ariane jumps across gaps, loses her footing, precariously dangles over death, and navigates through explosions and fires. In a sense, it has a thrill. But it also felt a bit dated.
Pumping the player with adrenaline after multiple near-death experiences is certainly a way to inject stakes right out of the gate. Yet that’s not the kind of game Aphelion really is.
Scattered throughout Aphelion are other instances of action, along with narrative and physical momentum. I was honestly surprised with how varied DON’T NOD attempted to make its concise mechanics over the course of the game’s 10-hour length. It helps to keep the player engaged outside of story reasons, while offering enough surprises that things don’t become overtly stale. But one should keep in mind that the primary thing players will be doing is walking and climbing through Persephone’s icy tundra in hopes to reunite its characters and hopefully understand if the planet is habitable.
Even by today’s standards, the Uncharted games and many of the titles in their orbit are considerably not that complex. Third-person cover-based shooting blended with traversal was never that revolutionary. Developers may introduce jetpacks or throw in elaborate puzzles to break up a kind of monotony. Naughty Dog always was always best in show because it knew when to pull the camera out and dazzle players. Not everything had to be a blockbuster moment, sometimes it was enough to zoom out and have Drake climbing an ancient statue to turn its hands in the proper configuration.
Ariane is not meant to be an action movie star and I appreciate how the game shows restraint to keep up the realism. At times she moves heroically and survives a desperate encounter that would probably kill almost anyone else but those moments bond us closer to her. The trials she encounters on this alien world test her and the player just enough to make survival both a necessity and a driving factor to reach the end.
There is a nagging feeling, however, that Aphelion has a bit more traversal and climbing than is necessary. Enough moments where I didn’t want to spend the 30 seconds or 2 minutes I knew it would take to navigate her around handholds just to reach the next story beat or section. Part of this is because DON’T NOD tries to make the act of climbing more interactive, requiring the player to press a button right before grabbing a handhold. If not, Ariane will sort of awkwardly grab at a rock or panel and the player must mash another button or she will lose grip. So I quickly got into the habit of pressing X then pressing square on my DualSense.
I mostly thought this crucial mechanic behind Aphelion‘s climbing was okay. It kept me engaged and gave jumping a tactile feel. The issue is that climbing up and down surfaces can sometimes feel sluggish and imprecise. There were times I wanted Ariane to just chain jumps back to back because the destination was just out of reach. Other times I wanted her to descend quickly and she simply wouldn’t. Aphelion is a bit clunky because the game doesn’t always properly register the player’s input. When attempting to scale down a surface, I would often have to walk to just the right part of the edge before I was allowed to press the circle button and initiate climbing down. Other times I would have to contort the directional stick in a strange way before Ariane would reach out her hand to indicate she would jump where I wanted her to go next.
Players are also given a winch in their suit that can attach to certain structures to allow Ariane to run along walls, swing across wide gaps, or ascend and descend. A number of breezy moments gave that rush of larger than life movement. Early on in one of the ways DON’T NOD injects variety, Ariane had to safely navigate geysers bursting from the surface both on foot and while platforming. But when using the winch, the game didn’t always properly respond to what I wanted. There were times I had to awkwardly fiddle with the controls to have Ariane face the side of a wall I was eventually going to have her swing and jump to. It took me several tries to properly understand how to have Ariane transition from dangling on the winch to hand-holding or vice versa, unsure of whether the game needed me to press the jump button or the descend button.
The other core pillar of Aphelion‘s gameplay is the stealth sections involving the Nemesis, an alien creature encountered on Persephone. Visualized as a smoke-like being that floats over the surface and stalks the player, it is actually incapable of seeing Ariane. Instead, it relies on sound to hunt. This means making too much noise when trying to escape will alert the Nemesis and have it hone in on your position.
Dealing with the Nemesis is broadly simple as a button press will allow Ariane to silently walk without alerting it. Players can literally be right next to the being and move like this and be fine. Noise only becomes problematic if the player forgets to time their jumping motions correctly, or potentially fall off balance when crossing a thin bridge. Later on, water is introduced that makes Ariane’s footsteps loud. Additionally, the suit’s visor comes equipped with an ability to see electromagnetic fields. Being a large part of the story, these EM fields can be manipulated on objects that will make noise and distract the Nemesis and sometimes the player will also have to solve puzzles by piecing together anomalies in the EM fields.
Unfortunately, the moments with the Nemesis early on are never that fraught with tension. It’s all too easy to slip past and never alert it. However, the back end of the game is packed with Nemesis encounters and while they are a little more difficult, it affects the pacing as the player is meant to slow down as the game works towards its conclusion.
Here’s the thing: I don’t think Aphelion is that exceptional when it comes to mechanics and gameplay. Any puzzle that is in the game could barely be considered one. And I have my issues with the game’s clunky traversal coinciding with some technical shortcomings. I absolutely appreciate how DON’T NOD attempted to sprinkle variety throughout the game so players weren’t doing the exact same thing every single time. There are even moments where I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go and died a few times jumping to what I thought was safety when it simply wasn’t.
Despite all this, I truly enjoyed Aphelion because there was something so strangely grounded about it all. It took me awhile to put my finger on it but it’s not a simple binary. Referring to Ariane and Thomas as “basic” people feels offensive but it’s not. The game is attempting to portray a science fiction story that is settled into our all but ordinary universe. DON’T NOD worked with the European Space Agency, even branding everything with their logo, attempting to make a game about what it would be like if this were to really happen. There’s a kind of stiffness to the way Ariane runs that feels heavy, not loose. The way players need to emphasize a button press to safely grab a ledge has this method to it that makes sense in the context of who we are embodying.
Visually, Ariane and Thomas are astronauts but they are still human beings with imperfections. I was fascinated by the choice to not have these characters with stark white teeth. Vanessa Dolmen, who voices Ariane, has this lovely accent that is hard to place and yet it feels so human in its unsteadiness. Eric Geynes as Thomas spends much of the game exasperated and in pain but still feels like a proper scientist.
Persephone as a setting is bleak but beautiful. So much of the game is this bright, snowy white contrasted with onyx-like rock. There are quasi-magical elements to it but it all feels contained in the logical boundaries of science. And that’s what is so fascinating about Aphelion. It introduces the fantastical to players but only embellishes it a few times.
So much of the game consists of Ariane and Thomas musing to themselves, recording voice logs in the hope Mission Control or the other will one day hear them. Players control Thomas for a handful of chapters where the pace mainly slows down to soak up narrative and achieve a greater understanding of what is going on with Persephone. And as the game continues to construct its narrative pieces, there’s a kind of restraint to never going too far, always taking the players along for a ride.
When searching my heart through my time with Aphelion, its narrative and characters compelled me to keep going. A planet mainly bereft of life can always be exciting when handled the right way. And while the game is absolutely a story of science fiction, it aims to be thoughtful in the vein of Interstellar or The Martian where science and discovery takes precedent over action. All the while, players grow to understand the relationship between Ariane and Thomas, to the point where I personally deeply felt for the two of them in a way I didn’t expect to happen. Certainly there are shortcomings to the execution of its gameplay that might turn other players away. Still, it’s hard to deny the broader impact it’s humble narrative can have.
Aphelion treads familiar waters for anyone who has played an action adventure game in a post-Uncharted world. But its emotional and grounded narrative about the search for hope is potent enough to look past many shortcomings.
