have you ever wanted to be an orb?

How about a disc, skimming gently across the surface of the sea, while endless meteors rain from the sky, creating spouts and geysers in their wake?

Part Contact, part Transmission for Jehn, part No Man’s Sky, in Exo One you play as the last surviving member of a failed mission to Jupiter. Earth has since received a transmission from space that contains the blueprints for an experimental spacecraft that only you can operate. You go out into the dark unknown to find out what waits for you.

The gameplay is fairly simple: your ship can increase its gravity and utilize its momentum in order to traverse landscapes, and an upgrade allows you charge up a glide can be renewed by rapid descension. Each level starts with you arriving on a planet and your goal is to travel thousands of kilometers to reach the monolithic warp pillar that will transport you to the next planet.

The simplicity of Exo One is one of its greatest strengths, as the absence of external feedback helps further instill a feeling of isolation that the game’s atmosphere inherently cultivates. There are no enemies, no skill counters, no challenges, just physics-based movement and surreal, sometimes hostile worlds. Each planet you visit seems abandoned– there are scant traces of life in the forms of unknowable architectures, floating islands, transport pillars that take you between worlds, and sprawling jet black megaliths of incomprehensible purpose and origin.

Despite this feeling of isolation, I couldn’t help but feel that I was being watched. It’s an experience I’ve had before, playing World of Warcraft and intentionally breaking out of bounds to see the seams that held together reality, the pervading sense of “you should not be here”. The entirety of Exo One manages to evoke this same type of apprehension, a constant feeling of something approaching: maybe it will find you zipping through storm clouds, possibly within a magma floe, or from deep within the abyss of an ocean that you can just barely stay on the surface of.

If any of this sounds at all enjoyable to you, I implore you to pick it up! The game is $17 and I completed it in about 4 hours (though, I spent a lot of time flying around going “wooooow”). The soundtrack is also available on Bandcamp, and is an extremely good ambient album on its own! The dev has said that there’s a (slim) possibility for a sequel, which I’d love to see. I wish there were a few more planets to explore, but in the meantime I’ll likely go back and try to break the sound barrier a few more times.