Exo One (Xbox Series X)
It’s difficult to depict just how vast a planet’s surface is, especially if you’re choosing one that doesn’t appear to have diverse biomes or many structures. It’s even more difficult to depict that vastness in a video game where you put some boundaries in place so the player never strays too far away from the areas of interest. Exo One’s planetary exploration manages to achieve a good sense of scope with the planets you find yourself on, but while there is definitely a great deal of artistry put into eliciting such a feeling, the vastness also starts to undermine the game’s efficacy as a relaxing tour of alien worlds.
In Exo One you control an unusual spacecraft that normally looks like a simple sphere. However, while it looks like a marble, it also has the unique function of being able to manipulate its gravitational impact. You can use this to make the ball jump up into the air twice before it will need to make contact with the ground again, but more interestingly you can enhance the ball’s weight. After gaining some elevation, you can then plummet downwards, building up momentum to speed your spacecraft up so long as you use the rather accommodating topography of the planets you visit to your advantage. With the first world being a desert with plenty of sloped dunes, you’re given a chance to acclimate to when you should increase your gravity so you can slide down a ramp, build up speed, and launch off another one, able to cross the vast surface of the planet much more quickly by doing so. To maintain speed you can even activate a glide, your ball taking on a disc shape so it can fly over the environment until you either feel it is time to drop down and build up more speed or the gliding energy wears out.
After you have come to understand the momentum mechanics well enough for them to become second nature, there will likely be a grace period where your now fluid movement will be quite satisfying. Simply gliding over swathes of the planet’s surface thanks to your own ability to identify opportunities to boost your speed does make for some enjoyable traversal even if your only company during it is some atmospheric music and a landscape with a handful of features. There is certainly a moody feeling to crossing a world where the only sign of life at best will be alien vegetation while artificial structures of unclear purpose dot the surface, and those early moments spent finding the rhythm and flow of movement can be a relaxing period where you’re on board for this low pressure exploration. Your only real objectives are the implications of something important given to you by distant lights, one being the way you move on to the next planet and the other being a power boost you can collect that will let you do things like glide for a bit longer but not so much so they feel necessary to grab.
Once the initial novelty begins to wear off though, the sparseness of the planets starts to become a bit too apparent. There will usually be some striking use of light and some planet-specific features like a water world or one with floating cubes of land, but your traversal will still primarily exist of the same gravitational mechanics you got a hang of back in the desert and the few new aspects added to your exploration are boosters that will carry you places faster and the ways your ship interacts with clouds and water. These don’t necessarily increase your range of activities either, you simply aim for the water or clouds a bit differently since one lets you sink down while the other pulls you up or you let boosters do some work for you. The vastness of the planets that so well establishes the atmosphere of the game starts to become a bit of a detriment as you are left with nothing to find off the beaten path and your journey forward leads to little interesting stimuli to encourage your interest. Large stretches of the world, even when approached at high speeds, are dull continuations of the same landscape you’ve been on for minutes now, and while the game will likely only take around 3 hours or so to complete, most planets do feel like they start to drag because your only real activity while in transit besides taking in the scenery is trying to speed up your traversal to get it over with.
Exo One does toy with a few different objectives at parts though, and oddly enough focusing in on clear activities does not always do it many favors. One planet has you needing to reach three points of interest before you can leave and this feels more like where Exo One could have spiced up its worlds, the need to sometimes find ways to reach the desired elevation or location making you think a bit more about your movement options than other worlds where the topography exists purely to help you build up speed. The segment where you need to launch yourself between asteroids though really rubs up poorly against the movement mechanics though, the limited space you have to build up speed and the wide range the asteroids have for their gravitational pulls meaning you will have to be much more precise in how you use your abilities and even if you slip out of the range of a pesky asteroid, you can still find yourself drifting for minutes at a time before you feel you can safely land at a destination. Some cloud levels near the end really test your patience as well, since with the ability to build up momentum now placed solely on the boost clouds give you, your input feels less valuable.
Most of the planets you visit do have Xbox achievements tied to trying to reach an incredible height or reaching incredible speeds that are somewhat weak ways to add objectives if you’re craving them, but where one might hope some meaning could be added to the adventure instead leaves little room for meditative reflection. Only in between jumps between planets do you really get information on the grander story and it’s often in small fragments that aren’t really enough to chew on. Before your adventure starts you learn of a disaster that underwent a human mission to Jupiter, and while the occasional detail gained during these planet jumps will tell you a bit about your spacecraft or give a small hint on that mission’s issues, they are crumbs that don’t really come together much and you are left with little room to invest yourself emotionally in this part of the game’s past. Without a doubt, incredible work was put into manifesting the diverse worlds you find yourself on, each one feeling distinct and not always reaching into the common wells for what one might expect from how you might design an uninhabited planet’s surface, but while the distance traveled does seem to have some bearing on the narrative, the actual planets are seemingly just stops on the way like you’re merely using them to grab the next connecting flight towards your true destination.
THE VERDICT: The utterly beautiful worlds you explore in Exo One communicate their uncaring vastness expertly, but small details like water speckling your vision when you pass through a cloud aren’t what make an adventure meaningful. The lacking story communicated in meager portions makes the long hauls across the surface of worlds that offer little besides eye candy feel hollow, and while the movement systems at the game’s heart could be satisfying in the right contexts, they can’t make up for how plain the trek across each world ends up feeling. Exo One does experiment a little with directly challenging your movement to varying ranges of success, but mostly it seems far too concerned with forward movement when the mechanics for doing so lose their luster too quickly and there’s not enough present to breathe life back into them.
And so, I give Exo One for Xbox Series X…
A BAD rating. Exo One feels much longer than its short playtime, and while that does do its tone some favors as it can make the journey feel long without actually taking up too much of your time, that sensation doesn’t just come from effective environmental design. Exo One’s momentum mechanics could be great for a game where you need to reach areas quickly and a few moments do require some smart use of the environment, but usually when Exo One gets experimental it’s breaking away from why the movement normally works with tests like a planet where you are completely unable to guide your movement with the control stick and thus are at the mercy of strong winds. Exo One almost demands too much of your attention to be a relaxing guided tour through some beautifully rendered worlds, and while even the ones without some gimmick can start to drag, they’re much easier to move along through than ones like the asteroid area that will slow things down more with a less than thrilling challenge. Some worlds would occasionally have a light ball moving around the environment just like your spacecraft and the brief thought that catching them might change something invigorated the planet exploration for me a bit, it feeling like there was weight and purpose behind the moments I chose to dive to build speed or which pieces of the environment I utilized. This was apparently for naught, but having moments like this to break up the empty forward movement could have added some life to the long stretches without necessarily invalidating the sensation you’re on enormous planets trying to reach a distant destination. Just a dash of meaningful stimuli could do wonders, like greater nuggets of story detail to ruminate on as you start exploring a planet or even having some info come to light in the midst of a level so you’re not left just staring at more landscapes that often feel like eye candy without deeper meaning.
Exo One wants to be meditative but doesn’t give you much to meditate on. It wants to be relaxing, but even a casual game should still ask for more meaningful interactions than just occasionally giving yourself a momentum boost to continue forward. Some stunning vistas and a fitting soundtrack for this lonely galactic adventure could have provided a wonderful canvas for something deep and meaningful, but Exo One doesn’t follow through on the strong mechanics it sets up or the marvelously rendered settings you unfortunately have little reason to dwell on.