Aphelion Review: DON’T NOD’s Sci-Fi Adventure Fights Its Own Gameplay

A beautiful sci-fi journey held back by the act of playing it

Aphelion is the kind of game I wanted to like more than I did. Here’s my brutally honest Aphelion review. On paper, it has the pieces: a lonely frozen planet, two astronauts separated after a crash, a collapsing Earth in the background, and a story about survival, connection, and trying to find your way back to someone who matters.

The setup is strong enough. Ariane and Thomas are sent to Persephone, a frozen planet that may hold hope for humanity, but the mission quickly turns into a fight to survive. The game mixes exploration, traversal, stealth, puzzle solving, and cinematic storytelling. It wants to be emotional, mysterious, and tense at the same time.

The problem is that the experience in your hands does not always match the ambition on screen. I had an 8–10 hour go at Aphelion, and by the end, my main feeling was frustration. Not because of who wrote it. Not because of whatever online argument people want to attach to it. Because as a game, it kept fighting me.

Reviewed on PC.Score: 5/10

Aphelion – 32:9 Super Ultrawide Gameplay Video

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Aphelion

Release: April 28, 2026

Genre: Sci-fi Action-Adventure

Developer / Publisher: DON’T NOD

Platforms: PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S

A game surrounded by noise before you even press play

There is no avoiding the online reaction around Aphelion. Steam discussions have not only focused on the game itself. Some players have dragged lead writer Leigh Alexander into the conversation, connecting the game to older arguments around her 2014 Game Developer article, “Gamers don’t have to be your audience. Gamers are over.”

That history clearly matters to some people, and the Steam discussion board shows how quickly the conversation around Aphelion has become bigger than the game. There are threads about the writer, funding, politics, race, audience, and the general direction of modern games. Some of it is criticism. Some of it is noise. Some of it is people using the game as a symbol for something they already wanted to argue about.

For me, that is not where this review starts. I do not read reviews before I review a game, because that can bias the brain before the controller is even in your hand. I played Aphelion first, then checked what other players were saying afterwards. And honestly, my issues are simple: the game did not land with me because of how it plays.

The atmosphere is there, but I cannot praise what did not land

There are things Aphelion clearly does with care. The visual direction can be striking. The frozen landscapes have scale. The sci-fi mood is there. The camera wants to frame everything like a lonely space drama, and at times, the game does look like something made for big screens and wide displays.

But I cannot sit here and force praise for the sound, music, or atmosphere when it did not work that way for me. After the first couple of hours, the music and audio started to feel repetitive. Instead of pulling me deeper into the world, it began to feel like a loop machine. That might land differently for other players, but for me, it became another part of the fatigue.

And that is where Aphelion becomes difficult to recommend. The game has presentation, but presentation can only carry so much when the movement, traversal, stealth, and direction keep breaking the flow.

Traversal, stealth, and getting stuck became the real story

The strongest frustration in Aphelion is the way it handles movement and progression. The game often feels like it wants you to follow one exact route, one exact jump, one exact ledge, one exact solution. When it works, fine. When it does not, you are left running around, climbing up and down, testing everything, and wondering whether you missed something obvious or the game simply failed to communicate it.

Near the end, I hit a sequence that became a running and jumping nightmare. I think I tried it around 50 times. If someone counts more from the video, let me know. Was it hard? Maybe. Was I tired? Absolutely. My eyes were starting to close, reactions were not where they should be, and after 7–8 hours of raw gameplay, that becomes a factor. Not an excuse, but a factor.

Video evidence: running and jumping challenge

Still, that section felt less like a fair challenge and more like a loop where the first attempt is almost designed to kill you by default. You fail, restart, fail again, try to understand what the game wants, then repeat until the right movement finally clicks. Was it fun? Only when I finally made it.

Later, closer to the end, I had to coffee up and keep going. It did not help much. I ended up back and forth, climbing up and down, trying everything, only to finally realize I had to use the winch to destroy the pulse machines. I think there were three of them. That took me about an hour to figure out. Maybe that is on me. Maybe the game did not explain it well enough. The result is the same: I was not enjoying discovery. I was wrestling with direction.

Ultrawide support should not be an afterthought in a game like this

I prefer playing games like this in ultrawide. In 21:9, but 32:9 super ultrawide. A lonely sci-fi world, big landscapes, wide cinematic framing, and slow exploration should be perfect for it. For me, Aphelion looks like a game made for ultrawide in spirit, even if it did not launch that way in practice.

Did it launch with proper 32:9 support? No. I first refunded it because of that. Later, I gave it another try after finding the Aphelion ultrawide and wider fix by RoseTheFlower. The fix worked, and it made the game feel much better to play on my setup, but it was not native support and it was not perfect.

You can support RoseTheFlower here: Linktree or GitHub donation overview.

That matters. A community fix can improve the experience, but it should not give the game extra credit from me. If anything, it highlights what was missing at launch. The fix made Aphelion more playable in 32:9, but there were still sloppy moments because the game was clearly not built around that format properly.

Classic launch-day glitches, the wrong kind

I also ran into some of those traditional AA/AAA launch-day moments where the world stops behaving. At one point, I ended up under the world. Another time, I was inside a mountain, under a river, running around with no idea what the game expected from me. It was classic sloppy glitch territory.

Video evidence: under the world/collision glitch

That kind of thing always bothers me, especially when many indie games I play are cleaner when it comes to basic bugs, collision, and launch stability. Bigger production does not always mean a cleaner game. Sometimes it means bigger scenery with the same old problems underneath.

What other players are saying lines up with some of this

After playing, I checked Steam discussions and player reviews. The game is currently sitting at a mixed user reception on Steam, and the actual gameplay complaints are not hard to find. Players mention clunky parkour, awkward stealth sections, confusing puzzles, rough checkpoint placement, getting stuck, and controls that do not always feel reliable.

That does not mean every complaint is fair, and it does not mean every loud Steam thread is worth treating as serious criticism. But when the same types of issues show up in my own playthrough and in player reactions, it becomes hard to ignore. The controversy around the writer may be louder, but the game’s mechanical problems are real enough on their own.

Final verdict

Aphelion has the bones of a good sci-fi adventure. The premise works. The world has scale. The idea of two astronauts trying to survive and reunite on a hostile planet should be enough to carry a strong narrative experience.

But for me, the game keeps losing itself in stiff traversal, unclear direction, awkward stealth, repetitive audio, missing ultrawide support, and glitches that pulled me out of the experience. The story never grabbed me enough to forgive the frustration, and the gameplay never became smooth enough to make the struggle feel worth it.

I give Aphelion a 5/10, or a very low 50/100. Fix the issues, improve support, clean up the direction and technical problems, and it might be worth revisiting. Until then, have a nice day as always.

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