While space-bound science-fiction tales grapple with ideas you’d need a PhD in astrophysics to understand, others excel at tackling stories with personal stakes. Project Hail Mary is about a lone astronaut being sent into the unknown to save a doomed Earth, but it’s also about his budding friendship with a fellow space adventurer.
Aphelion, a new sci-fi game, does something similar: it deftly balances a grand story about trying to find a new hope for humanity with a much more personal story about two astronauts (and former lovers) grappling with where they stand with each other. The storytelling is as top-notch as you’d expect from a Don’t Nod game, even though the moment-to-moment gameplay doesn’t land as well.
Image: Don’t Nod via Polygon
Aphelion is the latest game from developer Don’t Nod, the AA studio that’s always trying something new. It created the Life Is Strange series, published rock-climbing game Jusant in 2023, and followed it up with action RPG Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden a few months later. Though the gameplay systems and genres change, each of Don’t Nod’s games is centered around relationships between characters, and that focus is ever-present in Aphelion.
It opens with protagonists Ariane and Thomas reevaluating where their relationship stands. They clearly just hooked up on their spacecraft, and you later learn they broke up some years ago. Awkward. (Why the European Space Agency sent an ex-couple on a mission for the last hope of humanity is something I can’t wrap my head around.) By opening with this scene, Aphelion establishes its stakes; it’s a game as much about two people trying to figure out a messy relationship as it is about them trying to save humanity. Aphelion is stronger for that.
Image: Don’t Nod via Polygon
They’re traveling together on mission Hope-01 to Persephone, a newly discovered planet that contains plenty of frozen water. They’ve been sent to evaluate whether Persephone can be habitable for human life because the Earth is dying due to climate change, something that feels less far-fetched by the day. How soon until we send astronauts to space not just for a moon flyby, but for a mission scouting out a new place to live?
Hope-01 goes horribly wrong almost immediately. Ariane and Thomas’s ship begins falling apart as they descend to Persephone, and they crash land on the surface. They’re separated by quite some distance, and neither knows the fate of the other. Though, like the mission name, Ariane and Thomas never give up hope that the other is still alive.
The bulk of the game is spent with Ariane. She is constantly at a crossroads, torn between trying to advance the mission, no matter how unlikely that seems — she’s out a spaceship and all the equipment it held — and trying to find Thomas. She knows he’s wounded from the crash and unlikely to survive on his own, and the personal connection between the two former lovers throws a complicated wrench into her decision-making. Seeds of doubt are sown, and like Orpheus going after his lost love, Ariane must constantly persevere through her own underworld on Persephone in search of her lost lover.
Their separation forces Ariane to confront feelings she had tried to bury for years in favor of prioritizing the mission. (Distance makes the heart grow fonder, after all.) With Thomas’s fate unknown, she can no longer afford to ignore those feelings. In some ways, the Hope-01 mission isn’t just seeking out salvation for humanity; it’s seeking out salvation for Ariane and Thomas’s relationship. Though the pair is rarely on-screen together, the care they have for one another shines through the performances of Vanessa Dolmen (Ariane) and Eric Geynes (Thomas). Every heartbreak and triumph reverberates through their voice acting.
Image: Don’t Nod via Polygon
Thomas gets narrative moments to shine, too. Like Ariane, he constantly narrates audio logs addressed to his former lover. He recounts the discoveries he makes — turns out, Hope-01 wasn’t the first manned mission to Persephone, raising questions that don’t get fully answered by the time Aphelion’s credits roll. Thomas learns so much about how life works on Persephone, and those discoveries feel both grounded in real science and imaginative; not all alien life in sci-fi needs to be bipedal.
Where Aphelion fails to engage is with its moment-to-moment gameplay. Most of Ariane’s segments consist of long stretches of parkour climbing that don’t do anything better than what Assassin’s Creed accomplished 20 years ago. Climbing can sometimes feel imprecise, with multiple button presses needed for Ariane to respond to an input. On more than a few occasions, Ariane would jump at another platform, hit it, and flail her arms before falling to her death instead of latching on and pulling herself up. A bit more complexity could have helped. It wouldn’t have needed to go full Cairn, in which you manually control each limb, but something similar to how Jusant (another Don’t Nod game!) made climbing a puzzle to solve may have helped to elevate Aphelion’s run-of-the-mill parkour.
Aphelion’s stealth sections oscillate between tense and mundane. While exploring, you will occasionally navigate Ariane around a deadly alien creature who can only detect her via sound. Instead of offering a sandbox to strategize your way through, these stealth sections are disappointingly straightforward. Utilizing her scanner, Ariane can activate distractions to draw the creature’s attention, and they’re necessary to succeed. Sometimes Ariane will even comment on needing to set off a distraction, in case it isn’t clear.
While tense at the outset — especially when the black snake-like cloud of an alien slithered by me — Aphelion’s spooky stealth levels became rote by the end. I only started getting caught and dying because I was rushing to complete the levels. However, trudging through those mundane parkour and trivialized stealth sections always pays off because getting to the next plot beat is a worthwhile reward.
Aphelion is Don’t Nod doing what it does best. Ariane and Thomas’s journeys across Persephone are both high stakes and highly personal. Because, in some ways, every relationship is a world unto itself, and those worlds and the hope they contain are worth venturing through Hell for.
Aphelion is out now on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a prerelease download code provided by Don’t Nod. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.