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Over the past decade, Don’t Nod has explored the soul-sucking worlds of 17th-century America, post-WWI London, dystopian Paris, and a high school in the Pacific Northwest. But for its next trick, the prolific studio is going somewhere no human has gone before: the ninth planet of our solar system.
Aphelion is a third-person science-fiction game set in the 2060s. Earth, in this version of the future, has started to become uninhabitable. The European Space Agency sends astronauts to the edges of the solar system to explore its ninth planet — an ice-covered celestial body called Persephone, recently discovered by astronomers. What, you thought I was talking about Pluto? Go back to 2006!
The comparisons to Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar — itself an anxious examination of Earth’s decline — invite themselves. Ice planet. A setting in the 2060s (well, if you believe the film’s fans). Space agencies with hopes, dreams, and budgets. But after recently playing Aphelion for a few hours, I also picked up on some obvious parallels to another totemic piece of sci-fi canon: Alien.
Aphelion follows two people on the Persephone mission: Ariane and Thomas, both of whom are top astronauts with the ESA. (Don’t Nod collaborated with the agency on developing the game.) Aphelion will span 11 chapters, but the early build of the game I played covered just the first and fourth, each one lasting about an hour.
The first chapter cold-opens with Ariane, strapped to the pilot’s chair of whatever spaceship carried her across the solar system, with Thomas nowhere in sight. Their spaceship has crashed on Persephone. Ariane aims to escape the ship as everything around her violently explodes, spontaneously combusts, and otherwise falls to pieces. It’s a rudimentary, if cinematic, segment that nevertheless struck me with one minor innovation.
In most third-person action games, you press A to jump to the next handhold, and the character you’re controlling automatically grabs it. Aphelion introduces a twist to the rule: Yes, you press A to jump to the next handhold, but then you have to press A again to grab it. While the climbing routes aren’t nearly as complex as those in Don’t Nod’s meditative 2023 platformer Jusant (which was developed by a different team within the studio), that minor innovation makes even basic pathways feel exciting.
The fourth chapter picks up some time later. Ariane is still alone, suggesting she has not made contact with Thomas. She’s visibly rattled, too, suggesting even more death-defying events occurred in the chapters I was not privy to. Ariane follows a route that leads to a crevasse in the side of a frozen cliff. And that’s where Aphelion gets interesting.
You’ll never believe this, but inside that cave lives a monster: a serpentine mass of ink-black tentacles that moves through the air as easily as an eel swims through water. It chitters like a giant beetle and twitches with the devilishly inhuman spasms of those aliens from Edge of Tomorrow. After an initial encounter, it becomes clear that this creature can’t see; it tracks Ariane via sound, meaning whenever it’s nearby, Aphelion becomes a stealth game.
To navigate around the creature, you have to enter stealth mode; by pressing Y, Ariane crouches and moves at a noticeably slower pace. Sprinting, jumping, or, most dangerously for me personally, falling mid-climb are all actions that will alert the creature to your presence. Getting aurally spotted appears to result in instant, inescapable death, at least when you’re playing with my level of impatience. (Whenever you die, Aphelion bluntly describes how you fail: “An alien life form killed Ariane.” “A fatal plunge killed Ariane.”)
According to Don’t Nod, the creature, referred to in menus as the Nemesis, is the only enemy in Aphelion (besides yourself, if you count all the missed jumps and failed cliff climbs). It hunts you. And if it finds you, it kills you. In my session, I did not discern any way to harm it, let alone eliminate it. It’s reminiscent of Alien: Isolation, the 2014 survival horror game from Creative Assembly about an aggressive ink-black monster who cannot be killed and who hunts you throughout a space station in a futuristic setting while you contemplate the futility of existence.
There is a clear appetite for the mix of genres Aphelion appears to offer, as horror enjoys its surge in popularity and science-fiction approaches a wave of ascendancy. It’s why the vacuum left by Mass Effect can not only support another Mass Effect but also an entirely new franchise from its original creators. It’s why The Expanse fans rally so hard they get more than just a series renewal but also a splashy video game tie-in. It’s why Alien: Isolation itself is coming back. Whether Aphelion has the sauce or not will ultimately come down to whether its elementary gameplay can support its intriguing story. But on vibes alone, the potential is there.
Aphelion will be released in spring 2026 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, and will be part of the Xbox Game Pass library at launch.
