I’ve played just under an hour of Life is Strange developer Don’t Nod’s next game and, honestly, I’m going to need to see a bit more before getting excited.
Aphelion is a sci-fi adventure that sounds like it should combine the traversal of a game like Tomb Raider with tense character drama a la the studio’s excellent 2024 role-playing game (RPG) Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden.
It’s a compelling formula on paper, but the two chapters that I tried failed to play to the team’s established strengths in narrative design and world-building.
Ice climber
My play session began with European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Ariane waking up among the wreckage of a massive spaceship. Everything controls smoothly as you navigate your surroundings, looking for an escape, but I can’t say that climbing ladders, balancing on precarious beams, and jumping between brightly colored ledges feels particularly special.
There are some enjoyable set-piece moments at least, like a sudden high-speed plunge down a slippery slope that has you sliding left and right to avoid debris, though I didn’t experience anything that hasn’t been done countless times before. Thankfully, some interesting narrative threads are established with Ariane looking for evidence that her partner Thomas has survived.
Stranded on the surface of the distant planet Persephone in the near-future, it’s clear that they will need each other to survive. Marketing materials suggest the pair have a fractured relationship, and if the interactions between the two are anywhere near as fleshed out as that of protagonists Antea Duarte and Red mac Raith in Banishers, I can see them elevating the experience massively.
I just wish that there were more signs of what’s to come in the brief segments that I experienced.
After escaping the ruined craft, I was transported to a chapter much later in the game with Ariane climbing her way through an icy alien cave. Traversal here was similar, albeit with a heavier reliance on Ariane’s grappling hook – which can be used to rappel up steep surfaces or as a rope to swing between distant ledges. There were also hints of some early puzzles, with Ariane discovering that her high-tech scanner can be tuned to the planet’s magnetic field to uncover useful hidden features like grapple points.
The climax of the chapter, though, was the introduction of a creepy creature that stalks our hero through more open parts of the cave. Constructed from floating shards and strange, almost inky-looking black threads, this life form isn’t your traditional alien and, while obviously sentient, doesn’t even seem to be organic. It seems to be blind but reacts violently to loud noises like footsteps or jumps, forcing Ariane to stick to corners and slowly sneak by as it patrols.
Given the fact that the game is being made in collaboration with the real-life ESA, I can only assume that this is intended to be more of a ‘realistic’ depiction of extra-terrestrial life that’s going to be explained as the narrative progresses.
Still, I’m more interested in seeing how Ariane and Thomas get on when the pair are, presumably, reunited in the full release for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC come Spring 2026.
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