Aphelion review – saving the world, one relationship at a time

The creators of Life Is Strange and Jusant return with a sci-fi adventure that’s part walking simulator, part romance, and part zero combat survival horror.

While a great many games are mostly concerned with nuts and bolts mechanics like driving, shooting, and puzzle solving, plenty come with an underlying message that’s clearly important to their developers. Despelote told a story of nostalgia for childhood sporting passion and Celeste dealt with mental health struggles via the metaphor of brutally challenging platforming, while Tides Of Tomorrow used the after effects of climate change as a backdrop for its story.

Aphelion is closer to Tides Of Tomorrow’s approach, although its execution is considerably more successful. Set in 2062, an era when Earth is starting to become uninhabitable thanks to global warming, humanity’s last ditch effort to save itself relies on a tenuous two person mission to a newly detected planet called Persephone, orbiting the sun right at the periphery of our solar system.

The multi-billion mile journey is framed as mankind’s final hope, and after six years in space, during which its two person crew get involved in a thoroughly ill-advised but probably inevitable romantic tryst, their ship crashes on final approach to Persephone. That leaves officer Thomas Cross missing, while fellow astronaut Dr Ariane Montclair wakes up suspended upside down by her seatbelt amongst the flaming wreckage.

Her first job is to find a way out, which also proves to be a fine excuse to show you the ropes of the traversal systems that comprise the majority of your interaction with its world. That involves a lot of walking, running, shimmying through tight gaps, and sliding down gullies, Lara Croft style, along with Uncharted’s climbing model, where you jump between clearly marked, geometrically identical ledges to scale sheer walls and cliffs.

You’ll also come across weakened ice sheets you need to creep across slowly to prevent them from cracking underneath you. It’s all fairly pedestrian but does its best to gamify getting from A to B, a process that’s unfortunately regularly bounded by invisible walls, a depressing last resort in game design terms.

Fortunately, the expressive facial animation and voice acting do a lot to distract from that, even if Thomas’ English accent is tinged with French, making the moments he calls himself ‘mate’ while trying to push himself onwards, sound charmingly improbable. It works though, and the two crew members’ lonely adventures are beautifully framed against the snowy wastes of Persephone.

Along with all that ice, there are contrasting craggy black onyx peaks and rock formations, along with a surprising amount of melt water. Scans from Earth showed an entirely icebound world, but the reality they find is one with multiple rivers, the permafrost creaking alarmingly as parts of it fall away into the caverns below.

Naturally, it’s not long before Ariane finds herself tumbling into those icy depths, in doing so discovering the Nemesis, an aggressive, twitching beast made of electromagnetic radiation, that stalks her through the darkness. In typical video game form, it’s completely blind, but attracted to the slightest noise, leaving our heroine tiptoeing through the subterranean caverns. In a nod to Silent Hill, you can tell the monster’s getting closer when the screen starts suffering lines of digital interference.

The EM radiation that made Nemesis also forms beautiful glyphs in the ice, and occasionally ghostly traces of your lost crew member. Wispy, translucent versions of Thomas appear to Ariane, reassuring her that he survived the crash, but leaving her frustratingly unable to communicate with him. It helps spur her on to try and find him, after having refused to engage more deeply in their relationship for fear of disrupting the mission, which makes her feel guilty now that he’s missing and injured.

Since their mission is supposedly the only one to reach Persephone, the mysteries multiply when they find human settlements, whose deserted interiors have an almost survival horror atmosphere as you explore them, trying to piece together what happened. There’s no combat though, just investigation and traversal, the latter also making room for your scanner, which lets you pick out objectives and search for pulsing strings of EM radiation.

Tuning the frequency of your scanner, you can use it to clear anchor points of snow, opening up grapple hook points that Ariane can swing from. Thomas is too badly injured to do any climbing. His challenge comes from a damaged oxygen tank, with his survival depending on finding air sources to hook his umbilical to, its limited range making your search for the next one a priority.

Aphelion (the technical term for when a planetary body is at its furthest point from the sun) is clearly most concerned with plot and characters, its story proving strictly linear, with no ability to alter its course – making it closer, in content terms, to Still Wakes The Deep than Don’t Nod’s original Life Is Strange.

The action, when it does arrive, isn’t always great. The QTE when Ariane grabs but slips off a handhold is bizarrely overused, in some sections as many as three out of four ledges getting you to execute the same straightforward ‘press X’ command, to the point where you just automatically mash it every time you hop to a new ledge. It robs the system of interest and its intended sense of jeopardy.

It’s also fair to say that Aphelion’s final chapters are its least impressive. They’re more rough and ready than earlier ones, as though they weren’t playtested as thoroughly, the minor graphical glitches and mechanical divots seeming to occur more regularly. Not to mention, encountering Nemesis in the late game doesn’t give rise to fear, so much as a weary sense of ‘not again’, its presence long ago having morphed from terrifying enigma to minor irritation.

Aphelion is at its best when its protagonists are exploring separately, its many mysteries still to be unpicked. Their jointly held sense of optimism, despite the huge challenges that lie ahead, along with the feeling of discovery as you visit new parts of Persephone, make for inspiring vistas and sentiments. Unfortunately, its gameplay and narrative can’t quite sustain the quality of those first impressions, even if its story does reach a satisfyingly adult conclusion.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £29.99
Publisher: Don’t Nod
Developer: Don’t Nod
Release Date: 28th April 2026
Age Rating: 16

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