![]() Geometry can be seen through textures in a way that make the game look buggy. Lava pits kilometres away will be rendered in detail, while pieces of rock within touching distance will be featureless blobs for extended periods of time. It got to the point where every time the game twisted away from its strong environmental storytelling and leaned on its narrator, I suffered from second-hand embarrassment at how cringey the lines were.Įqually awkward is the lack of optimisation – when Breathedge is running well the vistas are breath taking, however what it decides to prioritise is occasionally distracting. It all feels like someone who was an edgy teenager in the early 2000’s, grew up to be a 4Chan and Twitter user, and decided to douse the script with things that were ‘hot takes’ years ago. There are swipes made at Marvel, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, as well as references to Chuck Norris, Mass Effect and Alien. Although this does help to alleviate what would be a sombre game, the humour missed more than it hit for me. ![]() For example, a smuggler crushed with one eye popping out will prompt the AI narrator to deliver a cheery jibe for the situation. ![]() This would be macabre, but the game opts to deliver a lightness to the whole proceeding. The problems arise in some of the performance issues, some design choices, and the narrative: combing through the refuse is often akin to being a detective as the player comes across vignettes where they discover how other members of the crew met their grisly deaths. With the amount of traversal it is really smart how the game guides the eye through lights and colours (as well as manageable waypoints) each piece of the destroyed ship stands out against the greys and blues of the detritus, meaning that the player is naturally drawn to them. Similarly, the way the player goes from barely being able to survive, to building their own space station, to flying space vehicles helps make the game feel big in a meaningful way. There is a real feeling of accomplishment when returning to an initial area takes seconds after it initially took hours to get out of them. Trying to explore these fully seems impossible, but as the player accrues refills and upgrades these seemingly massive structures will be dwarfed by later areas. In the beginning there are several floating hulks that the player, low on oxygen supplies, will struggle to get to. The player has to monitor their hunger, thirst and oxygen meters, being mindful of extreme temperatures and radiation, while gathering space debris to build tools and gear.īreathedge is really slick when it comes to its sense of scale. The game is played in First Person perspective, and is an open world survival game set in the vast, loneliness of space. ![]() This made me mutter, ‘okay, but can we just get on with the game?’.īreathedge’s gameplay is set up in a flash back the main character was aboard a giant space liner that crashed, and now they are having to venture out into space and attempt to build enough resources to find a way out of the predicament. There are some goofy credits that made me chuckle and then the game pauses as one of the robots lights a cigarette, and tells the player that the cigarettes cause ‘loud headlines in newspapers and other diseases’, prompting the user with ‘Yay, censorship!’, or ‘No, let him smoke’. The setup for the game is that the main character is captured by robots and recounting their tale of how they ended up in this encounter. Breathedge has the dubious accolade of being game that, within 5 minutes of starting, had me both excited to play more and wanting to turn it off. ![]()
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