It’s 2062 and Earth is dying from a climate disaster. That’s not a typo; yes, it’s currently 2026, and Earth is dying from a climate disaster, but in Don’t Nod’s new game Aphelion we apparently stick it out for a few more decades before hitting make-or-break time. 36 years from now the European Space Agency’s Hope-01 mission—humanity’s first voyage to the furthest reaches of our Solar System—approaches Persephone, a post-Pluto ninth planet discovered all the way back in 2028 that might have the right conditions to potentially support human life. Things go wrong, though, and the craft crashes into a vast frozen expanse of the unexplored planet. Astronauts Ariane Montclair and Thomas Cross, separated with no way of contacting each other, have to salvage what they can of the mission while exploring Persephone and hopefully finding one another. There’s no fighting, no lasers or ray guns, just scientists trying to stay alive on a hostile planet—and lots and lots of climbing.
Aphelion is very appealing from the outside, with a sleek, realistic space travel sheen and a relevant story from a studio that deserves respect. Don’t Nod makes good games. It’s never made a great one, but it’s also never failed to make an interesting one; games like Vampyr and Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden can’t hide that their ambitions outstrip their budgets, but they’re smart, earnest stories that don’t insult or talk down to the player. That is still, somehow, a rarity in action games. Aphelion keeps the studio’s streak of making games with a brain alive, but it’s Don’t Nod’s clunkiest release yet, with a narrative payoff too meager to compensate for its mechanical failings.
You play as both Montclair and Cross—not simultaneously, as in another, far less grounded (and weirdly controversial) sci-fi game released this month, but in alternating chapters. Montclair is athletic and seemingly inexhaustible, able to climb mountains or dangle off of precarious perches as long as necessary. Cross is injured, with a broken oxygen tank, and has to hurry from one oxygen station to the next before he asphyxiates. It makes for two very different styles of play, one full of Uncharted-style platforming across Persephone’s rugged terrain, the other based around exploring scientific outposts while moving quickly from one oxygen source to the next.
That’s right: Even though Hope-01 was supposed to be humanity’s first trip to Persephone, it turns out an earlier expedition had already landed there—one financed by a private company, instead of a governmental body like the ESA. Finding out what these scientists were up to, and what went wrong, eventually becomes a major focus of Aphelion‘s story, and the most intriguing part of the game. It’s a familiar tale—a corporation valuing a project over the lives of its employees—but always a timely one, and although the “email and audiolog” presentation is beyond hoary at this point, the writing is sharp enough to carry it through. The personal relationship between Cross and Montclair, a throughline that’s most prominent in the game’s first and final sections, isn’t as compelling, and that’s part of why Aphelion ultimately falls flat: It doesn’t give you much of a reason to care about the characters it most wants you to care about.
In Aphelion, the biggest enemy is self-doubt. (That, and a giant flying trail of smoke with a metal beak.) Montclair, who has a longer and more perilous journey than Cross, is especially prone to feeling inadequate and too weak to carry on, even though she’s clearly the stronger of the two, both physically and in terms of willpower. She’s definitely the only one of the two capable of dealing with the black gas cloud of an alien that’s protecting the thermal source both Hope-01 and the earlier expedition are there to investigate; the sightless alien reacts quickly to sounds, so Montclair has to walk slowly and carefully, something Cross can’t really do with his dripping gut wound and leaking oxygen tank. Between tall cliffs, winding caverns, thin strips of land that basically become balance beams, and the precise stealth needed to slink past the game’s only enemy, Aphelion puts that left analog joystick through its paces.
Aphelion gets along on good will and solid writing at first, and just when it starts to grow old it reaches the meat of the story about the earlier expedition, which carries it up to the conclusion. It’s the kind of serious-minded science fiction that will resonate hard with some but might put those looking for the latest space war to sleep. Although Persephone and the Hope-01 mission clearly aren’t real, the European Space Agency is. It collaborated with Don’t Nod to make a fictional game informed by real missions and warning of real dangers, with a central threat rooted in basic biological functions (as helpfully explained in an in-game dry erase board Cross stumbles upon). Entering the final chapters it seems like another Don’t Nod special: a smart, dignified game butting up against its technical limitations. And then those technical and mechanical issues become too much to ignore.
The smoke creature’s hearing suddenly becomes much better, with almost every step Montclair takes alerting it. Earlier it’s not hard to tell exactly when Montclair can move again without fully arousing the alien; near the end it becomes almost impossible, with the monster coming down on her again and again in ways that seem disconnected from Montclair’s movements. The camera might become locked in the far-away position assumed whenever Montclair uses her towline to swing over a chasm, even after she lands and resumes walking through the cavern; jumps she should easily make become repeated deaths as she doesn’t grab onto ledges she previously would or reach as far as she normally does. At the end Aphelion devolves into trial-and-error frustration, with the game too often not working the way it taught you it would. There’s some thematic resonance in that—it falls apart just as Montclair and Cross’s mission did, just as the earlier expedition did—but it’s unintentional. Don’t Nod discovers that the edge of the solar system isn’t just farther than its ambitions can go; it’s so far it effectively breaks a game. Yes: Aphelion flies too close to the sun.
Aphelion was developed and published by Don’t Nod. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It’s also available for PC and Xbox Series X|S.