Are you afraid of aliens? Do you have claustrophobia? Are you sick of waiting for Metroid Prime 4? Well, you’re in luck, because Exophobia might help with that last item.
Run amok in this Doom-like first-person shooter as you kill pixelated 2D enemies in a 3D world with your upgradeable pew pew laser gun. Delving into the claustrophobic corridors on a crash-landed spaceship on an alien world, your mission is to get the ship up and running again to rescue the surviving humans from the native aliens whom, you guessed it, hate you, your friends, and your grandma. The reason for such hatred toward the humans is part of some neat hidden lore which come as optional collectibles you can find throughout the game, and if you pick up the game, you totally should spend the time to look for them *wink *wink, *nudge *nudge.
Exophobia’s opening scene has your character waking up in a room filled with dead humans, presumably the ones sent out with you on this mission, being the sole survivor of an off-screen attack. In front of you is your dead commander who is wearing a powerful suit of armor that will give you the ability to safely traverse this inhospitable environment. You equip it and set off on the mission they died trying to accomplish.
The mood of the ship you’re exploring is wonderfully dark and dreadful. You are the last human within the four or five biomes found on the ship, each one being filled with creatures that would love nothing more than to see you join your dead comrades. Exophobia sets that scene well even with the simplistic graphics, many thanks for that goes to the synthwave style of music – not too overpowering, but just present and subtle enough to incubate that sense of being hunted.
Puzzles aplenty await the explorer in this twisting maze of a ship, and there are many hidden secrets to find for those who have an eye for suspicious wall patterns. I was so delighted when I discovered the first of many secret shrines dedicated to a variety of intellectual properties! I couldn’t help but shoot everything that looked even mildly suspicious in hopes that I would come across yet another easter egg.
Combat is just as much of a treat as exploring is thanks to the quick movement mechanics and straightforward usage of your weapon. Your character moves at a brisk walking pace, and combined with frequent dashing, I felt like I was the wind blowing around the hordes of enemies. The upgrades to your weapon render you more capable of eliminating them by the dozen and provide the means to expand the areas you can explore.
Additionally, you’ll pick up temporary upgrades, which can be lost if your hit points reach zero, such as a companion robot that shoots plasma rounds at nearby enemies while floating around you, a jet pack that turns your dash into a continuous high speed sprint, and extra armor to provide more cushion for those blitz maneuvers.
Some puzzles require you to be clever and quick by locating secret levers and buttons or dashing towards an open door on a timer. These sections provided a pleasing array of challenges which, combined with the waves of enemies that evolve throughout the game, gave me a very enjoyable gaming experience.
I did find myself getting turned around often since the next objective isn’t always clear, but that’s a good thing when the game rewards you for being thorough and curious.
That is, until it unjustly punishes you for making the wrong turn too many times and soft locking the game…
It was likely an oversight in development, but there is one section that has you swinging around on shipping cables to explore other parts of the map. Activating them will cause them to quickly carry you from one ledge to another like a claw machine, and you’ll be able to make it back to the other end by activating it again. The flaw is apparent when you use the hook then take a longer way back to the other end… the hook stays where you left it. This is how I accidentally created a massive soft lock.
I was literally wandering for HOURS trying to figure out where to go until I finally discovered that I accidentally went through a poorly placed one-way door, which prevented me from getting back to the hook and from returning to where I came from. My first play through was about 20 hours, and it felt like half was spent backtracking, un-backtracking, then re-un-backtracking. After resetting the game and starting over, I was able to finish the whole thing in less than half that time.
Exploring became a point of trauma for me from then on. I normally love the exploring aspects of video games, but this time I felt like if I did it wrong then I’d have to restart the game again. It’s not like any horror game where you might get jump scared while walking through a door, it was the stress of walking through those one-way doors hoping that I wouldn’t screw something up! The whole mess really sapped the fun out of it for me. I eventually got more confidence in exploring after I found the teleportation upgrade to my weapon, so even if I ended up on the wrong side of a chain-linked fence, I could blip my way out.
To make matters more of a drag, the ship ain’t the only thing crashing here… At certain parts of the game, the performance slowed down noticeably, and I’m not just talking about framerate, I’m talking about the actual speed of the game. My character would slow down, the audio would go out of sync, and objects I’d interact with didn’t respond as cleanly as they used to.
That’s when it happened.
After the slow down, when going through a loading screen either from a scene transition or entering an elevator, the whole game decides it can’t handle it and crashes. This crash occurred about five times throughout both playthroughs of the game. Every time I saw the slowdown I knew a crash was imminent, so I tried resetting my console hoping that would resolve the problem, but like a bad date, it kept coming back. Note that I was playing on the Nintendo Switch in docked mode.
Not to mention the wave of robots that stood me up while I was waiting to fight them! Several times in the game, you’ll encounter a room that’ll lock you in and have you fight a few waves of enemies and won’t let you out until they’re all defeated. This one particular room locked me in with robots, and after two waves, they all seemed to be playing hooky. The doors were still marked showing that the enemies haven’t been defeated yet, but there were none to be found. I had to reset the game, and I was eventually able to make it through that part.
With Exophobia being found on all platforms, I’m sure it has been optimized with more powerful systems in mind, but the soft locking and clarity of instructions (stay tuned) was more of a game development issue. It would have received higher marks if these little problems could be resolved.
My final gripe involves the in-game instructions. Again, part of what made this game cool was figuring out the correct actions to take and finding the next destinations on your own, and there were sections that gave hints on how to proceed, but perhaps they weren’t as clear as they should be. It was difficult to determine where you were supposed to go next, and maybe I’m just being a baby, but I think it would have been beneficial to give just a little bit more guidance. At least allow the player to look at all floors on the map instead of just the floor we’re on, then it would have been easier to see all the places we haven’t been yet.
If you’re planning on picking up the game, here are two pieces of advice that that will make the game much smoother and weren’t explicitly stated during gameplay. First, you can push the exploding barrels to blow up tougher barricades, which will greatly come in handy while exploring early on. Second, while looking at the ship map accessed through a terminal, you can speed up the cursor by pressing A, X, or Y (on Switch). I spent an embarrassingly long amount of time scanning the map the hard way.
It was such a shame to run into game affecting errors like these because the rest of Exophobia was genuinely a good game! Regardless of the issues, I enjoyed playing it to completion and even went the extra mile to find all the extra collectibles to get the good ending. So, don’t be too turned off by my complaints, I still recommend giving this game a try. I was charmed enough by the graphics, gameplay, and lore to wave aside the flaws.
After all, are there not flaws in even the best of us? And yet, despite them, there will always be someone out there who needs you in their life, who misses you when you’re not present, or who remembers you fondly when people ask about you. Don’t let superficial flaws rob you of quality experiences in your life.
Leave a Reply