Exophobia bills itself as a first-person Metroidvania, but that’s not terribly accurate. It feels more like someone tried to port the original System Shock to the Game Boy.
Exophobia is the debut project from José Castanheira, a solo developer from Portugal. He describes the game as being “retro-inspired,” but it’s gone further than that. Exophobia is packed fat with chunky pixels, like it was designed to be played on a 12-inch CRT. If Castanheira had told me it was the HD remaster of a 1994 PC game, I’d have had to believe him.
In Exophobia, you’re an unnamed grunt aboard a human-crewed spaceship on an exploratory mission. Your ship found a new planet and immediately crash-landed there, but the locals took immediate offense to your presence. When you wake up at the start of the game, you’re the last human standing.
From there, your primary goal is to stay alive. Exophobia features no dialogue and tells its story through its environment, the names of its achievements, and a handful of hidden files. There’s more to its narrative than there initially appears to be, but most of it’s old news by the time you enter the story. All that’s left to do is shoot your way out.
You’re initially equipped with a suit of armor, a salvaged alien plasma gun, and a slide kick that you can use to either knock aliens flying or duck under obstacles. That’s about all you’ve got for help as you navigate what’s left of the spaceship, which is a sprawling four-level maze full of hostile aliens and malfunctioning equipment.
Exophobia’s map is the first thing that put me in mind of the ‘90s, as it’s got the same vaguely surreal feel as the Earth or Mars levels in Doom. A couple of areas are identifiable at a glance as ships or facilities, but it’s otherwise impossible to imagine Exophobia’s spaceship as anything other than the setting for a first-person shooter. The ship is a warren of narrow corridors, bottomless pits, conveyor belts that go nowhere, random lasers, ziplines, and inexplicable walls of fire. Nobody could’ve actually worked or lived here.
Don’t get me wrong: I actually think that’s a lot of fun. This used to be the status quo, but everyone lost track of it in the late ‘90s as video games started to figure out how their narrative worked. It’s always fun to see a big stupid death maze in a game that could never have been anything besides a big stupid death maze, even if my first reaction is to make jokes about OSHA.
Your first real challenge in Exophobia is simply figuring out what you’re supposed to do. It doesn’t have any of the training wheels you expect from a modern game, like waypoints or a quest log. There’s a decent in-game map, but its battery only lasts a couple of minutes. It’s not a bad idea to keep physical notes as you go.
The second real challenge is dealing with the aliens. Exophobia is tough, but in a particular way where you have little room to make mistakes. You start with shaprly limited health, and while you can heal for free at any save point, the game loves to make you run through long gauntlets of traps and aliens.
One on one, most of the aliens in Exophobia aren’t a real threat. They’re there to wear you down with ambushes or stray bullets or by sheer weight of numbers. You’re the fastest thing in the game, so you can run circles around almost anything you fight, but so many of the action sequences in Exophobia are set in close quarters that it neutralizes that advantage.
The bosses are probably the highlight of the overall experience. Each one immediately hits you with everything it has, within seconds of the fight starting. They do have patterns you can exploit, but it takes a few attempts to figure them out.
What I like is that the bosses aren’t simply giant sacks of health. If you figure them out, you can end each boss fight in well under a minute. It’s just a question of learning the encounter.
There’s a lot I like about Exophobia, but it’s one of those games where I couldn’t recommend it without a short conversation. It’s a ‘90s throwback that plays like a stripped-down immersive sim and a “boomer shooter,” so it’s an attempt to appeal to nostalgia from a few different, potentially exclusive directions. I’d want to know more about somebody before I put Exophobia in front of them.
I could also point to a couple of fiddly mechanical issues. I don’t like that your map reverts to its default state whenever you load a save, so you can’t tell where you’ve been, or that it frequently seems to reward you for clearing a boss fight with a file that hints at how to beat that fight.
There’s a slim line between unhelpful and obtuse, and Exophobia often hops back and forth across that line just to screw with you. This, too, is the ‘90s PC gaming experience, and even in the ‘90s, that wasn’t for everyone.
