When I had a chance to preview Aphelion back in February, I was initially pretty optimistic about it. DON’T NOD is famous for their storytelling, and seeing them step outside their comfort zone of choice-based narrative experiences was genuinely interesting. Not only that, Creative Director Florent Guillaume described a game made that clearly had a lot of passion and thought put into it, so I was excited to see where it would go.
The preview I got with it was brief, and perhaps that led my imagination to build up the game higher than it should have. While Aphelion isn’t a particularly bad game, it’s not a particularly memorable one either, and I can’t help but wonder if the change in genre affected a change in the storytelling DON’T NOD is so well known for.
Like I mentioned in my preview of Aphelion, the story concerns two astroscientists—Dr. Arianne Moncler and Officer Thomas Cross—who crash-land on the mysterious planet “Persephone” during a research expedition to... Read more