Exodus Preview: Time Dilation & Talking Bears — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] I'm generally someone who can look past talking animals in a fantasy setting, but I draw the line at sci-fi, so I've been worried about Exodus. That game's world supposedly follows the laws of physics and nature.

[00:14] Humanity cannot travel faster than the speed of light. They cannot traverse low-gravity environments without magboots, and yet, somehow, I'm supposed to believe that the game's protagonist, June Aslan, can communicate with certain animals.

[00:27] I'm also not supposed to find it painfully corny when he does so, or the animals talk back. Information? Sure. I know lots of things. Maybe even the most things.

[00:39] For me, that's a pretty tall order. So no one was more surprised than I was when, at the end of the preview's two-hour playtime, I found myself locked in a genuinely gripping boss fight with an enormous, talking grizzly bear.

[00:53] A task I only took on in the first place due to the fact that I had recently become very emotionally attached to a clan of talking frogs.

[01:07] And after this, players stepped into the shoes of June Aslan, a resident of the planet Lydon. Lydon was terraformed by a race called Celestrals, the serious ancient high tech beings who serve

[01:19] as the game's main antagonists. Unfortunately, a technological blight called the Rot, which also seems to be the work of Celestials, is putting life on Lydon and many other planets at risk.

[01:31] The good news is that June, who can be played as a male or female character, has been genetically engineered to interact with Celestial technology. The bad news? June's father has gone missing, and, in his absence, June's half-brother has overtaken

[01:45] Lydon, forcing June into hiding. I previewed a two-hour mission set somewhere near Exodus's midpoint, so by the time I met Jun, he'd already assembled a team, acquired a space-worthy ship, and was well into investigating

[02:00] the rust on Kansu an orbital space platform floating above Leiden Kansu is home to the K a race of talking frogs who provide mance to Kansu which in turn serves as a shield protecting Leiden from meteors and other space debris

[02:18] Everything was just pinky until some jerk, which seemed to be June's brother, arrived on Kansu, attacked the K, and imprisoned any survivors. Presuming that the game's intriguing atmosphere would soon be ruined by the presence of talking

[02:33] Frogs, I was determined to absorb as much of the pre-Frog game as possible. I explored every inch of every room on Kongsu and chose my dialogue with care. But before I'd even encountered the

[02:46] aforementioned race of ribbitless frogs, two things had caught my attention. The way Exodus looks, and the way its characters made me feel. Of course, I'm not surprised that a studio co-founded by the

[02:58] minds behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age Inquisition is capable of producing a compelling game with an interesting narrative and lovable characters whose approval players are eager to earn. What I am surprised by is the way consequences work in Exodus.

[03:13] While certain decisions may earn you a companion approval in the short term, their long-term effects are often dramatic and hard to predict, because unlike many other sci-fi RPGs out there, wormholes and warp drives don't exist in Exodus,

[03:28] so June and his crew cannot travel faster than the speed of light. This results in gravitational time dilation whenever you travel. What feels like a few days for June and his crew are months, if not years, for everyone else back home.

[03:44] Unlike RPGs in which the consequences of your actions are usually quite immediate, the effects of the choices you make as June play out across generations, sometimes impacting entire civilizations.

[03:56] This can make certain choices more complex. Things aren't as simple as just picking whatever dialogue option will make a particular companion like you more, because entire worlds are at risk with every decision you make.

[04:08] There's a lot more at stake here than romance or friendships. For some of June team members saving their civilization from the Wrath may mean they away so long that there no longer exists a home for them to return to If this tear setup sounds oddly familiar to the plot of Interstellar that no accident

[04:29] The team told me that they took a lot of inspiration from Christopher Nolan's 2014 sci-fi film.

[04:43] Exodus' combat, too, is engaging. June has several special weapons and skills, including the ability to control a rocky substance called Livestone, which can unlock hidden areas and speed up traversals.

[04:56] While there wasn't much opportunity for me to explore things like the game's skill tree, combat felt smooth and satisfying. Gunplay, too, feels great. There's a noticeable difference between firing an energy weapon as opposed to one that fires regular old bullets,

[05:10] and both are easy to get the hang of and control. In addition to weaponry, June also has other special abilities that seem to stem from his specially engineered DNA. In addition to gear like a grappling hook,

[05:23] June also has Batman Arkham Asylum-style bat vision, allowing him to see highlighted items that may be worth interacting with. These items can even be seen through walls, making it easier to discover hidden loot caches

[05:36] and solve environmental puzzles. June is agile and can easily dodge in combat, reposition behind cover, and return fire, though he will understandably be slowed down a bit when running around in low-G environments.

[05:49] His companions, too, have their own abilities that players control via a combat wheel, much like in Mass Effect. But I guess it's finally time we address the talking elephant in the room,

[06:04] The Awakened, aka the genetically altered talking animals that players encounter all over Exodus. The first Awakened animal I met in Exodus was a member of the Kain, the clan of talking frogs.

[06:17] You need to shut down the camera on this pipe, that's where the control panels will hide us then. I was fully prepared to find these guys annoying as hell but they took me by surprise The first one I encountered was clearly a child so I couldn be too annoyed with her

[06:33] I later bumped into a K named 4QC, who has a fondness for human music and was not at all amused when I changed the station on a nearby radio. 4QC was greatly amused, however, when a legion of fleshful enemies descended upon me shortly thereafter,

[06:49] leading to an intense, yet genuinely funny, combat encounter with a killer soundtrack.

[07:01] But what really caused me to change my tune when it comes to talking animals was the encounter with the bear. As I ventured deeper into Kansu, Soledad and I encountered an antagonistic human with a very large grizzly bear

[07:14] who observed the ensuing argument, but did not, or perhaps could not, verbally engage. For all his charisma, Solomon didn't manage to end the encounter with the human peacefully,

[07:26] and this understandably pissed off their furry companion. But instead of yelling at Solomon, like I would expect from a character as goofy as a talking bear, the creature rose up on his hind legs and let out a fearsome roar.

[07:41] This moment, and the ensuing boss fight, were an enlightening glimpse into the kind of game Archetype is cooking up. Something gripping, emotional, clever, and refreshing.

[07:53] Exodus' talking animals are deployed sparingly, and encounters with them feel special, even intimidating, rather than ridiculous or out of place. Like everything I saw during my two-hour preview of the game,

[08:05] Exodus' talkative furry friends and foes fits seamlessly into its world alongside humans and celestials. Although its inspirations are clear, Exodus never feels like a rip-off of other media.

[08:17] Instead, it feels like a breath of fresh air in a genre that has seen a lot of repetition. From what I saw in the two hours I spent in June at one's Magboot, Exodus stands easily on its own two feet

[08:29] and seems to have tapped into something many new IPs struggle with, a coherent sense of identity.