Exo One Demo
Look, this one is a little embarrassing truth be told. Exo One has been on my wishlist since it got a store page on Steam, almost. Like, right up there too. It has occupied a top 10 spot since I added it. I have really wanted this thing and still regret missing the Kickstarter for it. Looking into the details now my wishlist tells me I added Exo One 24/08/2020.
And there is a demo.
This is not a recent development as it turns out, though, no. It has been there just a click away since June 2020. I don’t know how I missed it. I really cannot explain it. But however it happened — I spotted it today. And have now taken it for a spin several times over.
You don’t get much. About 7-10 minutes of play of the first planet in an introductory area designed to get you familiar with the controls.
But it’s enough. It’s a good demo. It’s enough to whet the appetite and show the potential for the rest of the game as you learn to soar through the beautifully realised clouds, skimming over their surface for kilometres at a time before being forced groundward again.
And you can restart the demo to get in more practice and refine the art of your roll, jump, glide.
It’s a somewhat simple game mechanically speaking. It’s reminiscient of those side-scrolling games where you hold a button to heavily ride down one side of an arc and release at the right time to fling yourself in the air off the other, gaining greater and greater momentum as you manage to chain them together.
Except now add flight to that. A sci-fi story going on in the background. Space travel. And a beautiful, beautiful presentation.
While there is certainly an element of mastery to the game to pick-up on, it’s of a rather intuitive- almost zen type mastery. Where each run is a little better than your last. Where you can judge without thinking about it the right distance to plummet through the sky with 10x gravity activated before releasing back into a glide to best cover the distance in front of you, riding the clouds as far as you’re able.
I want to explore more. I want to see the other planetary environments teased at the end of the demo. And really- my only complaint so far is that I can’t.
So far as I’m concerned, the full release cannot come fast enough and the creator — Jay Weston — is really looking to have a winner on his hands.
