There are many worlds in Jay Weston’s Exo One, but I’m not sure I want to leave the one you explore in the game’s Steam demo. I love hurtling towards its whirling horizon so much I would hate to actually cross it. If you’ve yet to have the pleasure, Exo One is a scifi-me-do of monolithic abstraction and giddy kinesis, like a pinball table built by the aliens from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It puts you in charge of a gleaming craft that can tumble over planets as a silver orb or squash itself into a flying disc, generating energy for movement from surface friction.
The demo gives you 10 minutes to revel in all this, and much as I’m tantalised by the planets that await, I do wonder whether its timed fade-to-black is a more appropriate ending than any the final game might provide. Exo One, you see, is a story of first contact. One of its planets is named for the astronomer Carl Sagan, who spent his career devising messages to the stars or hypothesising about conditions for life on other planets (the game’s rushing perspectives, always plunging toward and through some celestial object, also recall the voyages of Sagan’s celebrated Cosmos TV documentaries). Given the enormity and longevity of the universe, it’s extremely unlikely that our species will encounter another star-faring civilisation before we’re eaten alive by our sun or our own excesses. A fade-to-black is, sorry to say, the more likely outcome.
But perhaps I don’t need to be quite this high-faluting. Perhaps the source of the demo’s enchantment isn’t that accidentally poignant resolution but a quality all demos share – the unspoken invitation to get as much as you can out of something incomplete and disposable. There are many ways to replay Exo One’s demo. You can treat it as a time trial, of course, coaxing every last inch of airtime out of each rise, throwing yourself into driving rain. Or you can dial back your need for speed and turn it into an endlessly recurring final act of wandering and contemplation, comparable to Ko-Op Mode’s Orchids To Dusk. You might slow to watch sunlight bronze the dunes and listen to the crackle of dirt under chrome. You can trace patterns in the clouds, particularly the shapes revealed by lightning flashes, instead of powering through them. And then there are those huge, geometric structures that burst from the sand – the usual alien relics, or something even more obscure? These are things you can puzzle over in the full game, of course, but as always in demos, your awareness of being deliberately hemmed in is a powerful goad.
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