While sci-fi fans have been feasting on this year’s titles from Alpheion to Saros and Directive 8020, those games’ storytelling approaches vary in darkness, with a bleak tinge holding them firmly in place. But that’s just one way to do sci-fi. With Exodus, the debut title from Austin-based Archetype Entertainment, sci-fi goes back to the vast frontier of space, with exploration and hope driving it forward.
During a media event in Austin, Texas, we went hands-on with Exodus, an action-adventure RPG in a sci-fi setting from former Mass Effect developers and other devs from BioWare, 343, Electronic Arts, and Naughty Dog. A story-driven game, much of the game‘s systems feel familiar. Combat and dialogue tree choices feel like Mass Effect in a way that makes me wonder if Exodus was the next Mass Effect title we were promised long ago.
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But I don’t mean any of this to say that the game feels derivative. Instead, this familiarity helps ease the player into understanding how to play. Combat matches the very best of Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer combat (the only good multiplayer of that “we need multiplayer in everything” era), with quick ability wheel selection, a duck-and-cover system, and kinetic gunplay that leverages Jun’s special abilities. The similarities are there, without pomp and circumstance, and it works extremely well.
Exodus feels like another Mass Effect in many familiar ways.
Exodus, the first title in what Archetype Entertainment envisions as a universe to build more games in, is set in a far future in the Omega Centauri cluster, a region of space approximately 16,000 light-years away from Earth. Spanning thousands of years, the timeline begins with Earth’s environmental collapse, which prompts the launch of arkships to search for new worlds and save humanity through large-scale interstellar colonization.
During this time, a genetically modified human-descendant species known as the “Celestials” arises, and technology eventually leads to the construction of an interstellar transport system called the “Gates of Heaven,” leading a previously lost human fleet to establish a settlement on the moon Lidon, built upon the remains of an extinct alien civilization. Lidon is your home as you step into the life of Jun Aslan.
A Traveler, your role is to recover relics only when Lidon’s future is in question; you step up to save it. Throughout the game, players will encounter various factions and characters whose alliances and rivalries shape the story. Part Celestial, Jun has special powers that allow him to communicate with the Remnants that can shape the world and the ancient alien technologies around him.
The other major group that the game centers on is the Awakened. The name given to sentient animal species with entire societies, planets, and cultures across the galaxy, but are often subjected to servitude. This element may initially seem a little goofy, but as you interact with Awakened throughout Exodus, you realize that there is just as much depth in speaking to the Awakened as you’d get from any other species created for a sci-fi title.
EXxodus’ Awakened may not land initially, but narratively, they work.
Like the games we’re used to, Exodus also features dialogue choices that let players choose options that shape the paths they can take in the game: Immortal or Paladin—like the Renegade and Paragon system. This pathway to branching narrative will once again draw Mass Effect comparisons, and rightfully so. However, Archetype Entertainment’s embrace of time dilation is what makes these choices feel astronomically different.
When it comes to its world, in our interview with Studio Head Chad Robertson, the developer shared that it’s inspired by Star Wars’ approachability. Dune’s Paul Atreides, on the other hand, inspired the game’s protagonist Jun Aslan. But where those titles stand in the space fantasy and epic side of the genre, Christopher Nolan’s hard sci-fi film Interstellar inspires the game’s narrative structure.
It’s this last bit that makes Exodus unique in its genre, even while it carries the torch for the systems that Mass Effect defined for the sci-fi RPG genre of games. In the Nolan film, the Theory of Relativity is the guiding narrative principle, and from that, the scientific fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light forces a phenomenon known as time dilation. Simply put, one week for the character could be years back home.
In Exodus, Jun is a Traveler, a person tasked with pursuing the safety of humanity by traveling the stars across the galaxy. But in doing so, Travelers experience time in an incredibly different place. As they venture into the cosmos, a month may have passed for them, but back home, their child has become an adult, their parents have passed, and the world and people they love have aged by decades.
While the game’s ease of onboarding with regard to its weapons, progression, armor, crafting, and combat systems will be either a sticking point or just the right amount of familiar for different players, there is no denying that Archetype Entertainment’s approach to storytelling is its defining feature. Like Mass Effect before it, choice matters here, but with time dilation, it means something more.
One choice ripples out through years, decades, centuries. It’s not about immediate ramifications that impact the player directly. Instead, it’s about making a choice that has an impact beyond yourself, on people you may not meet again, and for a future that may not include you.
In our time with the game, we played just under two hours. In it, we faced the game’s environmental puzzles that embrace the reality of physics by not allowing players to jump in zero gravity, because magnetized boots are necessary to avoid floating into space. We also fought bosses and explored some hidden nooks and crannies. But what stood out amongst it all for me (out of just how fun the combat is) was the narrative choice we got to make in the game.
Archetype Entertainment wears their influences on their sleeves.
Exodus’s choice system impacts Jun’s immediate world. The choices you make, as expected, affect your relationships with the companions in your crew and how they react to you. But the two paths, Immortal and Renegade, don’t offer the binary reaction that you would expect. In the demo we played, we are trying to save a species of Awakened frogs from being subjugated by the force that wants to exploit their planet and their beacons to the Awakened’s detriment.
After you clear mobs and a boss, you have a choice to make. You can choose to help your planet and the Dynasty that you’re currently supporting by following the plans given by your companion. For the character at your side, maintaining control of the beacons but offering protection to the Awakened is enough to do “good.”
But that control comes at the cost of the planet and its people, stripping them of autonomy and self-governance. As subjects of a Dynasty, they’re only in a slightly better position than you just rescued them from.
Alternatively, you can put the Awakened first and promise them to leave and give them the power and control over their planet and everything on it. As the Paladin choice, this one is easy to make. But instead of this action, which goes against your companion and triggers something negative, it triggers dialogue and bonding with the character. He was acting on behalf of his empire, but you did what he could not.
Narrative choices are more nuanced when time is a factor.
The illusion of binary choice is what makes this small slice of narrative interesting. How the characters in your party react is fueled by nuanced personalities, and it seems that it may not be so easy to make choices that allow you to target increasing companionship easily. Instead, it’s more thoughtful.
Outside of companions, this choice also highlighted how time dilation can come into play in terms of the ramifications of your choice. In the conversation leading up to choosing to give the Awakened sovereignty and agency, the Awakened leader you’re speaking to has already shared how short their lifespans are. When you choose to give them complete freedom, he explains that the Dynasty he serves and its people will be allowed on the planet to use the beacons and have their support, as long as the current generation lives.
In any other game, this promise is enough to set up a path for the planet to now be considered friendly and not change again. But because travel from a spot in time makes Jun and his companions age more slowly than the world around them, a generation may be gone by the time you leave and come back. That kind of ripple effect is something that sci-fi titles haven’t truly grappled with previously.
Time dilation and a reliance on real-world physics to define it, space travel turns Exodus into a game about finding the personal in a scale of time that spans centuries. How do you track a choice’s impact across a history, not a moment? And as a player, how do you maintain an intimate and personal connection to a world that you’re roleplaying in when you exist outside of it?
Exodus uses time dilation to the fullest.
EXODUS has put its best foot forward in stirring these questions in me and stoking my curiosity. While the game captures a familiar sci-fi feeling I didn’t know I was nostalgic for until I started playing, its approach to narrative feels extremely fresh. In a way, Exodus’s approach to mechanics may capture the past, but its bold narrative strategy is doing something utterly compelling and unique.
Archetype Entertainment has built a game on the foundation of the past, and that should be enough to garner trust and get people in the door. In other words, Mass Effect fans will find everything to love here. Still, it’s a creative use of sci-fi concepts that refuses space magic (as noted in our developer interview) and instead uses the constraints of the real universe to drive its storytelling.
Films like Project Hail Mary have already proven that science is one of the most whimsical views of the world, yes, even when it’s not a space fantasy. Now, Exodus is setting up to do that in the games space. While the road to launch will put them in direct competition with a foundational sci-fi video game that holds a special place in players’ memories and hearts, its narrative offers a unique look at a world where hope is built on choices that ask you to pull your own interests out of it. Exodus has the potential, if the audience can meet it on its own terms.
