Exo One – PS5 Review

From Adelaide-based developer Exbleative aka Jay Weston and publisher Future Friends comes interplanetary exploration game Exo One. If we were lazy reviewers we’d say that it was Journey crossed with mid-80’s film Flight of the Navigator, only without the pseudo-mysticism of the former and Pee Wee Herman voicing the ship of the latter.

Produced in the Unity engine, Exo One is a procedurally generated planetary action game where you explore several planets in turn, interspersed with occasional story flashbacks showing up. The story is largely secondary here, with it being far more about the experience itself. You’re left guessing for most of your journey, and even upon the conclusion, you likely won’t be any the wiser.

You’re introduced to the controls gradually, instructing you to glide with and dive with . The main trick throughout is to maintain your progress through conservation of momentum. This is very much a game about the trip as opposed to the usual haul of trophies, with any outside completing the storyline likely to come by accident.

That is unless, you’re one of those types of gamers who nail a game’s mechanics from the off. If you do, we’re happy for you. Our rather more prosaic gaming skills made for an intriguing yet occasionally frustrating journey throughout the procedurally generated alien planets.

You see, the highs in Exo One are far harder to reach than the lows, quite literally in this case. In your base form you’re an orb that rolls across the landscape, after you’ve gained a bit of speed you can glide as previously mentioned. You can also gain altitude by tapping , but you can’t repeatedly spam it to gain altitude. That’s where the conservation of momentum and using occasional boost gates come into play.

Each planet has you heading for a monolith, many kilometres away, in effect a giant boost ramp that sends you to the next planet. We’d be lying if it didn’t feel like a mix of the titles to Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (one for the kids there) and Kubrick’s amazing 2001: A Space Odyssey once the film enters its third act.

The trophies we didn’t manage to get were for high speed on respective planets, and similarly for the highest point. A little disappointingly, a level select doesn’t become available upon completing the story, nor is there any tracking for the completionists out there who want to get all the available power ups. No doubt someone has already compiled a video guide, but you’ll still need to replay the game from start to finish to be able to replay for specific goals.

We managed to get through out first playthrough just shy of three hours, thought that was more through dogged perseverance and overcoming our PS5 crashing repeatedly. Let’s just say Exo One pushed our hardware to the limit, with it overheating on multiple occasions. This served to highlight that we needed to find a T8 torx screwdriver and clean out our fan, but also damn. Of all the games we’d have expected it to happen with, it wouldn’t have been an indie. Playing during the recent hot snap probably didn’t help matters either, but still.

There’s two speedrun trophies that we’ll leave on the shelf though. Finishing Exo One in less than an hour and a half, or even more unlikely for us, less than an hour, will be a tall order. One particular planet in particular had us struggling for the best part of a half hour, whipping through the rest of the game in the remaining thirty minutes is unlikely at best.

For the most part, we generally enjoyed our time with Exo One, as it’s often beautiful and often contemplative. We could’ve done without our PS5 crashing, we’d be interested if it was a problem for anyone else, or whether it was merely a symptom of our needing to clean out our fan. The trophies will remain tantalisingly out of reach, but we look forward to having another go. We just wish we had a level select and a collectible tracker, both of which would be useful given there’s planet specific trophies.