I’ve always been fascinated with space and what planets on the surface look like. Weather patterns, mountain formations, various chemicals, and minerals do certain things with the weather and whatnot. This is what Exo One explores. While there’s a paper-thin story here about a spacecraft being discovered on Earth and NASA trying to use it to launch a crew to Jupiter. The vessel gets lost, I think, and you wind up bouncing around a dozen different planets trying to find your way back to Jupiter. It’s barely there, but it gives you a reason to keep going and provides an overall goal.

The controls take getting used to and by the end of the game I never quite cared for them. They seem over-complicated, but you essentially control the ship’s gravity and flight direction. You can roll on the ground to build up power (the orange glow in the center of the ball) and can lift off or smash down to the ground by increasing gravity. You do also have a double jump button which comes in handy for fine-tuning your flight path. You want to stay in the air as much as possible as this is your best form of movement. In the air, you can travel farther as you will be traveling dozens of kilometers on each planet to get to the goal.


Each planet is completely different in the sense that some are covered in oceans, some have no ground, and some have more complicated terrain to get around. Some have little gravity and some give your ship a bigger boost due to the increase in lightning in the area. You can boost your ship with various things like flying into clouds, wind paths, particles, and various other boosters. These boosters are usually visible a few kilometers away and you want to get to those. There are some instances in which navigating became irritating and frustrating. A couple of planets have strong winds or will cut your controls completely. One planet had me just rolling along the ground for over 10 minutes using the wind to guide me. The terrain itself seems almost randomly generated and hills are your enemy. You want to boost downhills and release gravity going up like a giant ramp. This is impossible with areas with strong wind as they slow you down.


There are upgrades for your ship kind of spread around on some planets. These increase your glide and overall power, and they are helpful, but getting to them can mostly be a chore. Fine-tuning and aiming for a small spot is really frustrating. You can constantly turn around and try again trying to gain just the right height to reach an upgrade. The enjoyment is the constant momentum you can create via rolling on the ground, boosters, and using clouds to gain altitude. Once you reach the goal, which will be a giant blue light in the sky, you warp to the next planet and I love the variety. Not a single planet is the same and soaring over large oceans or weird formations is just awesome. The visuals are fantastic with great water effects, rain effects, and an overall amazing sense of speed.


There’s not much else to the game except to enjoy the scenery. There are no high scores, no hidden secrets, or anything of that nature. Think of this as a “walking simulator” but up in the sky. The only gameplay is maintaining your flight and fighting elements on some planets. It’s over in about two hours, but it’s a beautiful two hours. If you love exploring planets on say games like Mass Effect you’re going to enjoy this quite a bit.

Limpador de paladar, indutor de introspecção, botão de maravilha, post-rock - esse tipo de arte tem vários nomes e propósitos para pessoas diferentes; a delícia cinestésica de rolar por aí e ir muito rápido em vistas lindas sendo o fator em comum que une todos aqui. Tudo que queria era algo que acabasse rápido, me transportasse para um estado de consciência elevada, e invocasse do fundo de mim sensações de frisson e pura alegria, trancafiadas a sete chaves - é pedir muito? Embora Exo One tenha sim atingido esses picos, me fez passar por vales demais , tanto literais quanto figurativos, adicionando gordura e tempo de jogo que me provocaram tédio ao invés do efeito desejado, quebrando a fantasia de higiene mental que o jogo me proporcionava.

Desde luego, un juego único. Por compararlo con algo, que no se me ocurren muchas cosas a las cuales hacerlo, es el primo marciano y ominoso de Flower. Abraza su expresión a través de movimiento y dinamismo, muy vibrante y expresivo.

Se puede hacer un poco largo, no justifica su duración mecánicamente. La jugabilidad de todos los niveles es similar y, si bien es precioso y enigmático, eso no lo sostiene todo lo que dura. Sigue siendo no obstante una idea bonita ejecutada a la perfección, simplemente la idea no da para tanto.

A very interesting game that nearly overstays its welcome. The core gameplay loop isn't much more than "go up, then go down, then go up" again and again, but the alien landscapes coupled with a few interesting mechanical shifts (wind, water, etc.) switch things up enough to not feel stale.

The story is there, but it's told in a way that seems a bit more obtuse than it needed to be. There's a satisfying ending here, but it'll land flat if you haven't pieced together the narrative bits along the way.

Completing Exo One is like completing a chore, except it's one of those chores that doesn't feel cathartic to have finished, and you don't feel like you've vindicated anything by seeing it to completion. It's like shoveling in a deep snow because you have to go to work or get groceries. The snow is heavy, your back hurts, your driveway is massive because you live in nowheresville somewhere in the midwest and your neighbor is three miles away between two cow pastures, but you gotta get out and get those dang groceries. The snow is coming down hard, and it will have filled your driveway by the time you get back, but welp you gotta go.

Exo One starts off with a nice premise, some cool lore shows its glimpses as you navigate a sphere across a planet using your momentum to carry you. As you play the game though, the illusion fades and the traversal mechanic of gliding and rubber-banding feels downright horrible and unrewarding. Levels are massively sized, intent on having you mastered this technique just after starting, without really giving a proper tutorial or any way to gauge success on understanding. You go from world to world and the backdrops/environments are admittably fairly astonishing, however the gameplay grinded my gears enough that I was constantly looking for each one to be the last. There were numerous times where I was completely lost on direction because the objective markers (which are loosely marked with a extended blue light) were obscured, or the momentum required to slingshot to the next part of the map wasn't taking hold. A few hours after starting and slamming my head against the desk, I was able to complete Exo One, a game that honestly didn't feel like it wanted to be completed. It also definitely overstays its welcome, as numerous other reviewers have mentioned.

I can't recommend anyone to buy this game, let alone download it off of Game Pass as I had.

Going fast = 5 stars
Going slow = 0 STARS

They need to scrap any part of any level that prevents me from going fast
-Flat ass plain GET OUTTA HERE
-dumpy little dune that isn't tall enough for adequate speed GET OUTTA HERE
A level toward the end where I rip the sky open like a decadent horny God LETS GGOOOO

I do love a journey through space though, qnd the score and sound are great! this is a nice game, I just wish the execution was better and that the levels were more complex / less repetitive !

Exo One is a short, pensive and unique little game where you play as a UFO hurtling across alien landscapes very, very quickly. Pulling on the right trigger makes you heavier, allowing you to build up velocity when going downhill, while squeezing the left trigger transforms you from your default spherical shape into a discus-like oblong, able to glide majestically through the often turbulent atmospheres of the various planets you're taken to. The idea of the game is to rhythmically switch between the two different forms of your spaceship in such a way that you build up as much momentum as possible. This, in turn, lets you go faster, glide for longer and jump higher. It's difficult to put into words, but play the game for any amount of time and you'll intuitively figure out what you need to do.

When it works, it's excellent: shooting off the top of a steep hill at hundreds of miles per hour to send yourself flying through the air and then seamlessly turning into an aerodynamic metal frisbee to soar even further - it just feels wonderful. Even better is the sensation of diving from three thousand feet up, breaking through the sound barrier as you charge towards the ground, pulling up at the last moment and then zooming low over the barren wastes or endless sand dunes beneath you. While the imagery and atmosphere are borrowed wholesale from films like 2001 and Interstellar, I've never really played another game like it before. It's sort of like Flower with the physics of Monkey Target, although much, much faster.

Beyond trying to build up enough height and speed to get to the one or two far-flung collectibles there are to find on each world, you don't do anything in each level except make your way to the star elevator: a constant blue light on the horizon that catapults you to the next planet. The simple joy of moving through space at speed, however, is enough to compel you to keep playing; I completed the game in one two-hour long sitting and never found myself getting bored. The fluidity of the movement combined with the dreamlike, even surrealist environments and evocative ambient soundtrack were enough to put me into a trance-like mood. I imagine it's a good game to play if you're stoned (I wasn't, but the game's Achievements seem to encourage this: you get one if you're able to 'Get high' enough on each level).

There are a couple of missteps. On a few occasions where I'd whiffed a jump and had to spend time lining it up again, I felt like a rewind button would have been handy. And a claustrophobic jungle planet about two thirds of the way through is frustrating to navigate; in a game all about speed, a level where you're forced to slow down seems out of place. There's also a back story that is told quite effectively through garbled audio messages and sudden images that momentarily flicker on the screen, but I didn't pay attention enough to figure out exactly what was going on. The fact that the game is only two hours long, however, makes any of its shortcomings easy to overlook. I thought this was a memorable, meditative experience that serves as a nice palette cleanser between more mechanically-involved games. If you're looking for something short before a certain game releases later this week, and you have Game Pass, definitely check it out.

8/10

The idea of exploring other worlds, more specifically other planets, has always been my biggest dream. Science fiction has been a constant companion since my childhood and especially in video gaming that dream came true on multiple occasions. Star Wars, Mass Effect, Freelancer etc. - just to name a few, fed right into that urge to explore other places. But not just other places, more so other places that have not been ‘claimed’ by anyone.
With having migrated to Germany, I’ve had parents who were not able financially to travel a lot with us kids, so I’ve barely seen anything that didn’t resemble the same’ish landscape of Germany, other than on screen and in virtual worlds. We’ve also never owned any piece of land or a house, so I never understood the concept of that really neither. While people I grew up with told stories of places they had visited and were really familiar with the feeling of being entitled to places, for me it was always rather borrowed and temporary. My interest in the universe and space also made me see things a lot more abstractly and with larger context. It’s extremely superficial that we believe we own anything, on this earth or anywhere else. We have no control over it, it’s borrowed. Just like the places I’ve called home. And I think that’s why I love the idea of exploring exoplanets that are uncharted so much. Not only I know that these places belong to no one, but everyone else does too. It’s a baseline that gives me comfort and blurs the lines of the classism I’ve grown into. No wonder I loved spending time in No Mans Sky so much, a game that gives you the chance to literally visit places no one else has ever seen before, for as long as you’ll play it, you won’t run out of places where everyone would be the same. Start out the same. Exo One feeds into that as well, but on a different level. The places you explore here are absolutely awe-inspiring, they are from a technical standpoint as well as an artistic one. I couldn’t believe my eyes most of the time. But what made it so special to me, was, that those places really felt alien but at the same time kinda weirdly welcoming (as exoplanets per definition should be, duh!). Completely different from one another, but mostly based on very possible variations of planets.
Of course I had to love this game, so I was able to overlook some of its shortcomings: the gameplay could be described as a marble-version of a journey-esque exploration game with tiny wings mechanics. That’s a lot, I know, but these things came to my mind while playing it. The mechanics are juuuuuuuuust good enough to get you over the runtime of roughly 2 hours, the monotony of it (even though very fitting, because the sheer size of these places makes sense) might prove to be too boring for many. The mystery that’s thrown in in very tiny bits serves the game and atmosphere well, but doesn’t do anything drastic to elevate it further.
I’m pretty sure reception for this will be rather mediocre, people will like the visuals and then drop off after a while. I get that too, but I won’t ever skip a chance to explore other planets, no matter how limited my interactions are. It will always give me goosebumps and leave me in awe. And specifically now, in this period, also offers a great escapism, away from one of the most special places in an unthinkably big universe, that we collectively shit on every day.