Aphelion Review - Fifty Shades of Frostbite

Barely Magic Mike
11 minutes ago
7 min read

I consider myself a gamer of diverse tastes, but everybody has their biases. One of mine is that games with a captivating story can get away with simple gameplay. Some of my favorite indies come in the form of purely narrative-focused experiences like Firewatch, Coffee Talk, What Remains of Edith Finch, and for a totally different vibe, Thank Goodness You’re Here! These games don’t need complex gameplay systems because they find other ways to make interactivity feel rewarding and master that precarious balance of interactivity needed to deepen immersion. If I only cared about a good story, I could easily watch a movie or (God forbid) read a book, but games have a unique power to immerse us in a narrative by making us a part of it.

Dontnod is no stranger to such experiences, but Aphelion’s balance of story and gameplay occupies a space somewhere in between the purely narrative-driven stylings of Life is Strange and their more mechanically robust games like Banishers or Vampyr. So, does it work?

Aphelion takes us to a distant future where climate change has all but completely destroyed Earth, and dual protagonists Ariane and Thomas are headed to the distant frozen planet of Persephone. Persephone is home to a mysterious energy known only as The Source, which the duo have been sent to investigate to determine if Persephone could function as a new home for humanity. And while the stakes couldn’t be higher, they’re of course complicated by enough sexual tension to cut through the planet’s core! HR would have a field day with this. But when Ariane and Thomas are separated by the unexpected crash of their ship, will Ariane do anything possible to get Thomas back? Or will she focus on the mission first and foremost? This is how the journey begins.

Let’s start with the obvious – Aphelion is, for the most part, quite the looker. Despite a majority of the game taking place in one frozen wasteland or another, the diversity of geography feels surprisingly vibrant, full of strange but stunning landmarks and a handful of moments that had me reaching for the screenshot key. Equally great is the voice acting of the two leads, who both give compelling and grounded performances that made their characters feel like real people. And while the soundtrack rarely takes center stage, what’s there is often beautiful. It’s a shame there are some inconsistencies, like an odd visual bug that makes shadows created by your flashlight look pixelated enough to be several generations old. Overall, it's a nice-looking game that ran consistently well, despite some occasional weird bugs.

On the gameplay front, let's make clear that there’s nothing in the way of challenge in Aphelion, at least not intentionally, with the game keeping you on a very tight leash and virtually nothing to see being more than a few steps off the beaten path. I’m a believer in cinematic stories being generally linear ones, though, so I don’t see this as an inherent flaw and rather just a hallmark of the genre. What I do see as problematic is that the Steam page for Aphelion is extremely generous with terms like “high stakes parkour gameplay”, “resourceful investigation”, “tense stealth-based sequences” and “gripping traversal mechanics”. So, let’s break these down.

When it comes to parkour and traversal, this will mostly come into play when controlling Ariane, who leads a vast majority of the game’s chapters and engages in seemingly every hallmark of action-adventure auto-platforming. I say auto-platforming because nothing about Aphelion’s traversal aims to test your skill at anything. All of the greatest hits of AAA action-adventure tropes are here in full swing – you’ll slowly squeeze through tight cracks! You’ll hit the grapple button when it’s time to use your grapple hook! You’ll accidentally slip down steep slopes, crawl through small openings, balance yourself across a thin beam, jump from one ledge to another and (gasp!) even have to press A to regain your hold on a grip if your jump on it is too messy. Ariane climbs more clearly marked ledges than Nathan Drake practicing to scale Everest, and it’s hard for me not to raise the question of why.

I simply don’t understand the point of this volume of gameplay when the game very nearly plays itself. In Uncharted, this exact sort of platforming helps measure out the pace of core set pieces and often gives you an excuse to look at some incredible scenery or digest interesting bits of lore as characters chat while you climb. It’s a light distraction that keeps you engaged while the story plays out and is doled out at a pace that’s intentional enough to keep it from getting stale. But in Aphelion, this is most of the game. Sure, there are cutscenes, interesting set pieces and plenty of Ariane or Thomas talking to themselves in their respective chapters, but there is a lot of climbing around.

And call me jaded, but after playing a game like Cairn that makes the moment-to-moment act of climbing so meaningful and engaging, it’s hard not to see the dichotomy between that and a gameplay system content to be little more than “don’t worry, we have Tomb Raider at home”. I say climbing is most of the gameplay here, and unfortunately that’s generous to the rest of it. By which I mean – the stealth sequences. At their best, Aphelion’s stealth sequences are brief but contrived, easy enough to pace your way through but too predictable to build any of the tension the developers seem to want. Most of the game’s stealth sequences can be completed by simply walking very slowly for a very long time. And as the game goes on, they add difficulty by requiring you to set off distractions and placing more obstacles in your way, which often feels like an annoying gateway to instant fails rather than anything providing a compelling challenge.

It’s in these later game sequences where the stealth is at its worst, making me audibly groan every time a new sequence required me to walk really slowly or use my electromagnetic field detection tool to activate distractions. This tool is used for other purposes throughout the game, but calling it a gameplay mechanic is fairly generous, as it usually consists of tuning to the right EM frequency and holding A. Similarly, the aforementioned “resourceful investigation” is a hilarious way to describe the act of walking around collecting audio logs that directly tell you what is happening. Describing it as “resourceful investigation” is, like my attempts to use an intro to yoga video as a proper workout, a bit of a stretch at best.

In direct contrast to Cairn redefining what a climbing game could be not even three months ago, Aphelion’s gameplay borrows so much from AAA action-adventure tropes that it can sometimes feel like those tropes are standing on top of each other dressed in a trench coat in an attempt to be more than they are. Major Vincent Adultman vibes. As a result, Aphelion is only technically not a walking sim in the same way that “frozen dairy dessert” is technically not ice cream. And even at only 7 hours long, the game feels overstretched by mechanics that feel there for the sake of being there rather than to enhance the experience. It’s almost worse that it kept teasing like it was going to occasionally be more, like the one time I had to find a passcode to open a door in a way that felt like an actual puzzle, and another time I was tasked with repairing something only to have the game do it for me after a couple of button presses. I understand the game is focused on its story, but parts of it just felt like giving the player a fake steering wheel and telling them they’re driving the car. It was degrading when I was four years old and damn it, it’s even more degrading now.

This might have been fine if the story was up for the task of carrying the experience, but it only does so for the first half of the game. As it progresses to the inevitably emotional story beats, I never found myself feeling the way the writers wanted me to, and sadly I attribute that to half-baked character development. Despite the amount of time that we spend with Thomas and especially Ariane, we never learn much of anything about their history or even their relationship. What did they leave behind to go on this important mission? How do the people left on Earth survive? How did the decisions of their past inform what they’re doing now? What we learn of this is barely breadcrumbs and I'm here for the full baguette – the story is intently focused on the here and now, and its potential for emotional payoffs is limited accordingly. The game tries to create a compelling dichotomy between Ariane’s love and her purpose but struggles to reconcile these themes in a way that lands an impact. Instead, it often feels contrived and lacking in internal motivation for the choices made.

Thankfully, if the planet Persephone could be considered its own character, its story is far more compelling. The truth around what The Source is and how it factors into the planet’s ecosystem is consistently interesting, even if I got a bit lost in the details around the ending – not sure if that was just a “me” thing.

In the end, my feelings on Aphelion are mixed. In the first couple of hours, it was a deeply compelling and immersive journey that had massive potential to tell a story that hooked me to the end. But as that journey went on, I increasingly struggled in my motivation to finish it, turned off by sluggish pacing, annoying stealth sequences, and a feeling that even the “pretty good” parts of it could have been much more with a stronger focus on character development and less on jumping around climbable ledges.

MEDIOCRE/TABLE LAMP