What defines a game by Don’t Nod, the French studio behind acclaimed narrative dramas Life Is Strange, Tell Me Why and Lost Records: Bloom and Rage? Dmitri Weideli, an executive producer at the company, has a hard time replying to this question at first, and then settles on an answer that seems rather broad. “We want to make games that matter and that give players a great story that allows them to go through different kinds of emotions,” he says. “We try to diversify the kind of games we create, but at the same time, keep the same spirit.”
There’s certainly something to this idea of diversification. Since its founding in 2008, the French outfit has made action-adventure games about memory, narrative games involving magical college students, and a role-playing game about a Georgian vampire. Recently, it released Jusant, an ecological sci-fi fable that was also a refreshingly realistic take on rock climbing.
Aphelion, the team’s latest, does have a little in common with Jusant, at least. It is another science-fiction game, but one with a glitteringly hard edge. It’s based around a mission to the edge of the solar system where an icy world called Persephone has been discovered. Somewhat inevitably, the crew crashlands on the planet, and what follows is a journey of exploration, survival and stealth in a harsh alien climate.
It’s not hard to look at the trailer with its grappling hook and walls of climbable ice and view this as a spiritual successor to Jusant. This is not the case, according to Weideli. The team working on the new game actually came directly from another project, the episodic supernatural game, Tell Me Why.
The emphasis is different, too. Aphelion’s climbing is simpler than Jusant’s, which could get very technical in places, and it’s not the central preoccupation this time around. Several developers who worked on Jusant have joined the Aphelion team in the last few months, however, and have shared their experiences dealing with rope physics and vertical level design.
The real inspiration for Aphelion largely came from movies such as Interstellar, The Martian, Ad Astra and Arrival. “We wanted to create a great story-driven game,” says Weideli. “But we wanted to go within another genre, that led us to a more action-adventure oriented game.”
Intriguingly, everywhere you look in Aphelion there’s the presence of real science. Persephone itself is based on Planet Nine, a hypothetical large planet that many astronomers believe orbits the sun far beyond Neptune where it is patiently awaiting discovery.
But Planet Nine is only the starting point for the fiction here. “Planet Nine was an important source of inspiration,” Weideli says, “and an interesting scientific grounding for an adventure featuring astronauts who explore a new planet. [But] we then added our own lore, imagination, and most importantly, human drama.”
Aphelion is also pitched as a collaboration with the European Space Agency. “The ESA team gave us access to space experts and scientists, with whom we could discuss and challenge our ideas about the story of the game,” Weideli says. “For example, our narrative team could discuss the scientific aspects of a space or extraterrestrial mission, review the vocabulary of a space mission, how astronauts talk to each other during a mission. They also offered to review and give advice regarding the technology.”
The design team won’t be playing things entirely straight, however. Alongside exploration and survival, there’s that final element: Aphelion is also a stealth game. Weideli isn’t ready to talk about it yet, but something has survived out in the ice of Persephone, and it doesn’t seem entirely friendly.
Whatever lurking horrors await, it’s nice to see Don’t Nod back making complex, hard-to-classify video games, after a recent round of redundancies. With so many people working in games at the moment engaged in an awful real-world spin on the survival genre, it’s thrilling to see a team still turning to the stars.