Aphelion: The Review of a Catastrophic, Terribly Contemporary Future

In recent years, the name Don't Nod has been synonymous with games characterized by a strong focus on narrative. An identity that began with Remember Me and was affirmed with Life Is Strange, a title that established the French software house's stylistic signature and influenced the studio's subsequent works.

Although distant in setting and themes, titles like Tell Me Why, Twin Mirror, and Gerda are united by a branching structure that impacts the course of the story: a distinctive trait that has affixed a label to Don't Nod's name, which over time has become a kind of creative cage.

which proposed different gameplay formulas and different approaches to narration. However, despite the good quality of these works, Don't Nod's name returned to the spotlight with Lost Records, a title that follows the path already set by Life Is Strange and positioned itself as a kind of spiritual successor.

This is why when Aphelion was announced during the Xbox Showcase last June, it attracted the attention of many, who wondered what path Don't Nod had taken and, above all, how it would break our hearts this time.

After exploring the planet Persephone far and wide in the company of Ariane and Thomas, we can say that Don't Nod not only decided once again to step out of its comfort zone, but was able to completely detach itself from it, offering an experience incomparable to any of its past works and capable of touching on themes that go far beyond the personal experiences of individual protagonists, expanding to social and political issues we face every day.

To enhance this narrative realism, there is the collaboration with the European Space Agency – ESA – which has allowed for unprecedented authority on urgent themes such as climate change, space colonization, and humanity's predatory impact on ecosystems. Thanks to this technical and conceptual support, the narrative avoids the simplifications and clichés into which many other video games have fallen when trying to address such themes. The presence of ESA transforms fiction into a plausible projection, treating human expansion among the stars not as a fantastic adventure, but as a matter of scientific and political responsibility that mirrors the crises of our present.

Climate Change and Space Colonization: A Timely Plot

The year is 2062, Earth is becoming an uninhabitable planet due to uncontrolled climate change.
Natural disasters, such as torrential rains, floods, and rising temperatures, have turned the global population into a massive horde of climate migrants forced to take refuge in bases located in the highlands of Greenland.

ESA and other space organizations have discovered the presence of a ninth planet at the edge of the solar system, Persephone, which represents humanity's best, if not only, chance of salvation.

Hope-01, the first crewed mission of the European Space Agency, with astronauts Ariane Monclair and Thomas Cross on board, is sent to assess the planet's habitability.
However, once they enter Persephone's atmosphere, their spacecraft malfunctions, forcing them to make an emergency landing that separates the two astronauts.
During their journey to reunite and complete their mission to the Source, an area that, according to calculations, is fundamental for the planet's habitability, the two protagonists find themselves grappling with the secrets and dangers that Persephone holds.

Two Characters, Two Types of Gameplay

Aphelion is not a typical Don't Nod game.
Beyond the absence of choices that impact the narrated events, the biggest novelty is the presence of two different gameplay approaches structured around the two characters.

Moments with Ariane are dedicated to exploring the planet's environments, with a series of climbing mechanics that will help us overcome Persephone's hills and mountains. Chapters with Thomas have a slower pace and are focused on investigating the events that occurred on the planet.

The two gameplay styles also differ in the various attentions required from the player. When controlling Thomas, it is essential to monitor the oxygen level of his suit, while in sessions with Ariane, it is important to master her movements and her balance level on the planet's various terrains.

Both astronauts will be able to rely on the same type of equipment, integrated into the spacesuit, but used in different ways. Both Thomas and Ariane are equipped with a grappling hook that helps them overcome a series of locations, a pathfinder useful for orienting themselves on the planet, and an EMP frequency reader that helps them interface with Persephone's electromagnetic field.

Aphelion also features a series of stealth moments during which we will have to overcome a series of areas without being discovered by the Nemesis, a blind enemy that, however, has extremely keen hearing; this creates quite a few problems given that Persephone is a planet covered in water, and therefore every step we take can reveal our position.

There is also a series of collectibles, cleverly inserted into the environments, which help to shed more light on the secrets the planet conceals.

As can be seen, Aphelion does not aim to renew or revolutionize the genre; it looks to Don't Nod's past experiences like Banishers and Jusant, proposing mechanics that perhaps would have benefited from greater diversification and depth, just as the presence of additional on-site equipment, which would have been justified by the game's plot, would not have been out of place.

An Alien World as Real as it is Terrifying

On a technical level, Aphelion confirms Don't Nod's desire to raise the bar for its products, as already seen with Lost Records.

Visually, we are, perhaps, facing the software house's best product. The models of Ariane and Thomas border on photorealism and show enormous attention to the facial expressions of the two characters.

But it is in Persephone's environments, the true protagonist of the game, that Aphelion amazes.
The planet's icy expanses and mountains have been modeled with monumental care that personally reminded me several times of the Norwegian fjords in winter; a location ideally not far from the Svalbard Islands, the Icelandic lands, or the Arctic expanses that the team studied and used for the construction of the various game environments.

It should also be noted that Aphelion pays strong attention to the management of sunlight, and how it reacts with a planet at the edge of its system, and to the geological composition of the planet: two elements that were built based on real data related to trans-Neptunian objects and the icy moons Europa and Enceladus.

Aphelion is a game that is best played with a good pair of headphones, preferably with 3D audio.
Persephone is a living planet and communicates this through its continuous creaks and rumblings of glaciers or the howling of the wind among the rock formations.
Everything manages to convey not only a sense of profound solitude but also the intrinsic hostility of the planet.

The union of the soundscape and the attention to environmental reconstruction immediately makes it clear that Ariane and Thomas are not explorers of a world at their disposal, but tiny and fragile specks lost in a titanic environment that is indifferent to their passage.

It is necessary to dwell on Aphelion's soundtrack, written by Amine Bouhafa, already the composer of the soundtrack for the film The Summit of the Gods.

The game's soundtrack obviously looks to Bouhafa's past experiences, but also has many references to – needless to say – Interstellar and Alien, and aims to convey the sense of magnificence of both the danger and the mission of the two astronauts.

To do this, Bouhafa relied on two totally unusual instruments.
The Cristal Baschet, which according to the composer is an alien instrument because to be played it requires immersing one's hands in water, producing sounds difficult to recreate with other instruments.
The second instrument was the organ of the church of Saint Eustache; an enormous instrument but capable of light sonorities, able to convey the ambivalence of Persephone, sometimes welcoming, other times dangerous.

Aphelion is Don't Nod's Full Maturity

Aphelion is Don't Nod's most mature work and confirms that the software house is no longer anchored to narrative experiences based on the feelings of its protagonists, but is capable of addressing broader and more current social and political themes, accompanied by different gameplay systems.

Supporting this full maturity is the collaboration with ESA, the true highlight of the production, which acts not only as an exceptional consultant but also as a bridge between reality and fantasy.
Persephone and its icy lands do not exist, yet the care with which the planet was created is based on what has already been observed on Earth and in the universe.

Walking among Persephone's glaciers, one cannot help but think that this is exactly how astronauts will feel in the future when they set foot on Europa, Jupiter's icy moon, Saturn's Enceladus, or the less famous but more similar to Persephone, Ganymede: Jupiter's icy moon that possesses its own magnetic field and is formed by layers of water and ice that make the formation of life highly possible. Elements that make it the special object of observation for the European Space Agency's Juice mission.

Beyond the need for some gameplay improvements, it is difficult to find critical issues in Aphelion, especially if one considers it as a moment of stepping out of the comfort zone for Don't Nod, which points the way for future experiences.

Don't Nod's maturity is also evident in the cultural references Aphelion draws upon. There are obvious allusions to cinematic experiences like The Thing, Interstellar, and Alien, but also the desire to engage with less popular and more political themes.
Ariane and Thomas force us to reflect on the effects of the New Space Economy, with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin expanding the impact of the Anthropocene far beyond Earth's borders.
But there is also the very current theme of climate change, which already today creates tens of millions of climate migrants, who are not recognized and protected by the Geneva Convention.

The impact of climate change is not visible in Aphelion, but it is omnipresent in the emails, conversations, messages, and memories of the two characters.
We don't know if in 36 years we will be forced to take refuge in bases in Greenland, but we do know that today in Bangladesh coastal areas are no longer arable due to rising seas, that Lake Chad and the Aral Sea are now puddles, or that Kiribati is already organizing the relocation of its entire population elsewhere, becoming the first country to plan its geographical demise.

What is shown in Aphelion is not an “if”, but a “when”.
A tomorrow that we have not yet fully touched, but which we are slowly building, and this cannot help but make us feel powerless and terrified.