Aphelion. I’ve heard it’s good for SEO to start a text with the term you’ll mention a lot throughout the article, so I figured I’d kick off these impressions that way. Aphelion is the new game from Don’t Nod studio, the ones behind some really beautiful, wonderful titles that are now cult classics in the industry. Just to name a few: Remember Me, a seventh-gen classic; Life is Strange; the incredible Vampyr; Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden; Jusant; and so on. Not long ago, we had the privilege of attending a showcase for their new game, one that hooked me right from the first announcement: Aphelion. And it wasn’t just listening to the devs from this awesome company talk about it, we also got to play it ourselves at home, feel the game out, and of course, write these impressions.
So over the past few weeks, we’ve been spending time on Persephone, an icy planet that’s supposed to be in our solar system, somewhere beyond Pluto. To see if that undiscovered ninth planet could be a new home for humanity.
That’s roughly the main plot of the game. Two astronauts, Ariane Montclair and Thomas Cross, are sent by the European Space Agency to Persephone to check if we humans can survive there. On a distant planet covered in ice, because Earth is in its final stages due to global warming. The story in Aphelion takes place something like 30-something years in the future. Just two astronauts on a lonely mission to a totally unknown planet, aboard their spaceship Hope-01, which suffers a catastrophic crash during landing. Thomas and Ariane barely survive.
We got to play two chapters, which I gotta note aren’t connected, they’re not back-to-back in the story. One’s right at the beginning, Chapter 1, and the other later on, Chapter 4. In the game, you’ll control both astronauts as they try to find each other and continue exploring, but above all, survive. Though in the demo we played, we only controlled Ariane, right after waking up in the wreckage of their Hope-01 spaceship, noticing Thomas isn’t with her.
Before I dive into gameplay and what sets this game apart from others, I gotta mention a few things about its development. The European Space Agency (ESA) collaborated on the game, providing advice to help the dev team create the world based on hard-science-fiction. This isn’t science fiction with impossible stuff, it’s events and scenarios that could totally happen in about 40 years. Take Interstellar: that’s a sci-fi movie grounded in real physics and plausible future events. Aphelion is similar, and interestingly, Interstellar was one of the inspirations for this title. So more Interstellar, less Event Horizon. Hope you know what Event Horizon is. Persephone is currently sci-fi territory, but there’s been talk for a long time about a ninth planet in the solar system, in the asteroid belt beyond Pluto, but because of that dense belt of everything and anything, we can’t spot it yet. It should be an icy planet made of, hopefully, water. Though in the game, there’s this creature, a being that hunts you. Interestingly, even that’s designed based on possible scenarios. Nemesis, as the dev team calls it, is made of water and other states of water: liquid, gas, plasma, ice. But Nemesis in this game will follow you from the moment you encounter it all the way to the end. When I say “follow,” I don’t mean like a good buddy, more like an alien stalker, like the Alien from the movies. That was the second big inspiration for the devs, ’cause Nemesis chases you like the Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation.
Now let’s talk gameplay mechanics. This is a game about exploration and survival. Ariane shows you right away what she can do and what’ll be the core of gameplay: lots of climbing and navigating an unknown planet. Plus, it’ll have parkour elements. In this demo, we had just one instance where she was actually running and escaping the crashing ship, jumping and sliding under obstacles like in Mirror’s Edge. The rest was general navigation and climbing, similar to Jusant or Uncharted titles, but with one cool trick. Since climbing is a foundation, it won’t be just holding the analogue to climb and switch holds. Every time she reaches for something, you manually grab that ledge, rock, or whatever she’ll hold onto. At the start, in the wrecked ship, all the parts Ariane had to climb were highlighted yellow, but that’s just for learning the game. Later, those objects will blend organically into the environment. No yellow-painted ledges on an unknown planet, ’cause duh, that wouldn’t make sense.
Controlling Ariane feels really good and responsive. Combined with climbing and running, exploring the Hope-01 wreckage at the start is pure joy. I gotta emphasise this is a pretty linear adventure, no room for free exploration. Aphelion is a story that wants to be told from start to finish, without narrative branches or wandering where you shouldn’t. Though that wasn’t an issue for me at all.
While the first level focused on the Hope-01 wreckage, the fourth one we played introduced Nemesis and navigation/exploration on the planet. That’s when I realised narrative adventures don’t need tight corridors to create claustrophobia. Don’t Nod perfectly captured the empty planet’s isolation, a place you can’t escape from, where you arrived intending to stay, and that uneasy feeling is always lurking under your skin. That quiet, peaceful atmosphere, combined with what I heard during play, excellent ambient sounds and music, creates those chill moments as you gaze at the planet you’re on, which is hands-down beautifully designed, along with every environment I saw. Yeah, it’s all ice and snow, but somehow those settings have the beauty of an unconquered world, even though it’s basically barren.
As Ariane pushes through icy crevices, we meet Nemesis, the being that’ll follow you everywhere and hunt you. The only entity creating danger in this title, as far as we know. That unlocks another gameplay element: stealth. Nemesis, made of water, gas, and whatever, doesn’t have eyes; it reacts to vibrations and sounds. When it appears, your screen gets distorted, you know it’s there even if you can’t see it. And when it is on screen, you gotta be quiet and careful to sneak past and keep exploring. Like most stealth games, where enemies follow patterns, Nemesis does too. It’ll have its patrol path searching for you while you get through the section. A path that changes if you’re noisy, then it’ll adjust based on where it last heard you. Though from what I saw, we won’t have deep interactions with it, at least not early on. It’s there to add tension and stress, and I gotta say, in the part I played, it’s pulled off really well.
DON’T NOD decided that you don’t have any elements on your screen during gameplay, so absolutely zero HUD elements telling you where you are or where to go. You do everything via the Navigator you can activate. You scan the environment to figure out the path, spot the level’s end goal, and get hints on what you can use. Without the Navigator, you’re on your own. But that’s a good thing here, because as I said, it amps up that feel of isolation and loneliness on the planet. The non-existent HUD is a huge plus.
Besides parkour, Ariane has other tools: we saw a grappling hook early on, and of course, a flashlight for dark areas. We’re told Thomas has different tools, but we didn’t get to play with him. Ariane and Thomas, lost on the planet, are actually much closer than they think, but in a totally unknown environment, even if it’s just a few minutes’ walk away, if you don’t know exactly where the other is, the search could last forever. I think that’s one of the main ideas here: everything’s so close, yet feels so far, distant.
One more fun fact about Ariane: her name in the game comes from ESA’s space program. Ariane is the name of rockets created through multinational collaboration, a real milestone in space exploration, and the first launched from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana. So everything in this game has roots in our reality, which is a really nice touch.
Aphelion is shaping up to be one of my favourite games. Not just ’cause it’s grounded sci-fi, but how the world is built and presented to players, the emotions it stirs while playing, the feelings creeping through your head that this is a totally plausible scenario for the not-so-distant future. Okay, one of the scenarios. Aphelion is in development for PC, Xbox Series consoles and PlayStation 5. We played this preview build on Xbox. It looked fantastic in every way, as you can see from the text, but I believe it’ll look just as good on other platforms, with extra shine on PC. Aphelion comes out sometime in 2026, and we can’t wait to continue Ariane and Thomas’s adventure on Persephone.
We would like to thank DON’T NOD for this wonderful opportunity and hands-on demo
