EDIT:

Spoilers are now open!

Prior post:

Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club. Our Seventh game is Exo One. The target completion date is May 16, 2022.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after May 16, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Exo One?

Exo One is a traversal game where you play as a flying sphere traveling along the surface of a number of planets. It's a physics based traversal/exploration game with some light story element.

How long is Exo One?

How long to beat lists it as 2.5 hours long, though it encourages multiple playthroughs.

Thanks to Elden Ring, I’ve been delinquent on keeping up with these games. However, I did finish Exo One early this year, and I’m very interested to hear what other people think about it!

I hate to be a bummer but...I really did not like this game. I mean I really really really did not like this game.

I won't go so far as to say I hated it because I could kind of understand what the developers were doing, and I can understand why some people loved it, but to me it felt like a boring tech demo stretched out over 3 hours. Well I played for about 3 hours, but it felt more like 5 or 6. I was shocked when I got the achievement for completing in under 180 minutes.

The story is just so much vague nonsense and I was surprised that there was a separate story editor who came up with it. I suppose it is designed to be mysterious and intriguing but all it made me do was remember that I haven't finished Returnal and that game is leagues better than this one.

The game definitely looks nice (though there's some pretty bad pop in even on the Series X and the underwater and in cloud segments look flat out bad) but it's just so monotonous. There are minutes where all you do is travel in a straight line dropping and flattening to try to speed up if you want to, and it is the most boring thing I have ever done in a video game. I hated it. Meanwhile the 'platforming' segments were beyond frustrating with the limited control and I legitimately hated them. I would have turned it off if it hadn't been for the club (and I did turn it off and delete it the first time I tried it a few months ago.)

The Super Mario Galaxy style level could have been cool but the camera made it hard to see what you were doing in terms of trying to shift gravity and again it just took SO LONG to break out of orbit. My biggest complaint with the game is that often even if you know the right thing to do actually executing it is beyond boring. It makes Ubisoft open world bloat games where you have to collect everything seem downright focused in comparison.

So it's this weird combination of extreme boredom punctuated by frustration and boring frustration when I tied the same jump over and over and had to take another minute to set it back up. That power up on the water world can F all the way off with its placement.

Add in not caring at all about the story and, well, I had to listen to podcasts just to make it through and even then I was legitimately angry when each new level appeared and I had to play more.

There are a few moments when you're wave skipping or seeing a new world for the first time when it can be tolerable, and maybe if you took the time to master the controls it could be kind of fun to fly the gravity ship (it was kind of fun even as is, but the level design killed that by being so long and boring) but overall I did not have fun with this.

Maybe if I were in a more contemplative mood I could have gotten into the zen of just flying, and maybe it's a game best played one world at a time with breaks in between instead of finishing it all in one day (though I did go out for brunch with some friends in the middle so it was not just one long session) I could have gotten into it.

I do hope others enjoyed it more than I did. Looking forward to your impressions!

One last thing. We need voters for the next game so please vote!

I actually fell asleep while playing this game after work on Friday. I don't really have much to add. I really didn't care for it and can't think of a single person I can recommend it to. I suppose the sense of speed was well accomplished though even that started to lose its appeal thirty minutes in.

But it has excellent reviews across the web. Polygon in particular glowed about it. So, clearly it resonates with other people. I do wish it had hit for me to be a good cool down from Elden Ring, but it seems to just be a little too slow paced despite the immense speed you can gain and the short length.

I found it to be a great relaxing zen game with fairly satisfying traversal - breaking the sound barrier in such an extreme way to the point where you started hallucinating was a cool way to convey the intensity.

The narrative element was extremely vague and didn't convey much at all. An earlier build I tried (kickstarter backer demo) had a much more coherent story intro so I'm not sure why it was changed so much. The reverse-garbled voices also didn't seem very convincing as a form of recovered audio.

The different worlds often felt linear despite being physically open due to only having a single objective and there was nothing else to discover other than finding useful landforms to unlock achievements.

Ok. This game is great when it works. If you're just popping along on the ground for extended periods of time, it SUCKS. And it drags. And honestly, I don't think it teaches anyone well enough to ever get someone to be proficient at it. The asteroid mission is a nightmare that I only got through luck. The forest level is a bit too platformy.

But there are moments when you figure out the physics for that level and you're somewhere high up above everything for minutes at a time that is awesome. There's sometimes even separate mechanics at ground level vs in the air vs all the way up in the upper atmosphere.

However, I only got up there in maybe half the planets, and mostly in the later half of the game IIRC (played this a while ago). Didn't even realize that was a thing until I saw the achievements pop in multiple planets for getting up high (super rare achievements at that). It's clear that aspect of the game is seemingly fairly rarely experienced in many cases.

The story is.. fine? It doesn't really pull things together into something super satisfying. And yea, it's just WAY WAY too long. It felt like they could have cut a planet or two and that would be better. And yet.. it's clear how much work went into this. Some of those environments are stunning. As I said, there are slightly tweaked mechanics and tasks in most, if not all, the locations. Yea.

It felt like a slog through a lot of it, and yet I liked it, and yet I don't ever want to play it again, and yet..

It looks like i'm in minority, but i really liked Exo One. And i'm genuinely surprised that a lot of folks here didn't.

I expected this game to be popular because, well... It's clearly a "zen" game BUT unlike most of the games of this type it has an *actual gameplay*

Throughout the game i kept playing with its 'movement mechanic' and discovering nuances in seemingly simple gameplay. Keeping the momentum through the clouds was pretty satisfying and breaking the speed of sound, especially in the last level, never stopped being super fun.

I can understand the complains about the story but i actually greatly enjoyed that eerie vibe - it remained me 2001 Space Odyssey a lot.

Also after completion it's quite clear that narrative is kind of a homage to all astronauts and space traveling.

My top 3 of all "Club" games so far.

I have to agree with the majority here. I understand that when this game "works" it is pretty fantastic, but I never felt like I fully grasped the correct rhythm of the game. It is definitely beautiful, but the barely there story and sometimes frustrating insta-death mechanics gave me a real Super Hexagon vibe. And similar to Super Hexagon, I couldn't get into the game because I never got great at it.

Also, I'm not sure how this game graced as many 2021 GOTY lists as it did.

@zombiepie: Wait, you can die in the game? How? I don't think I ever managed that.

But death would have been preferable to spending a minute setting up a jump and then barely missing it only to have to climb all the way back up to try it again, or the time I missed one of the points to charge up the gate and spent what felt like a week just wandering aimlessly.

Oh, I more meant getting stuck into a corner or edge and dropping into a pit and feeling like the best way to correct your course was just hard resetting or starting the level over.