Don't Nod adds a dash of Alien: Isolation anxiety to its cinematic formula

Don't Nod announced its next third-person cinematic adventure, Aphelion, during last year's Summer Game Fest with an Uncharted-like reveal set in space. The studio's new journey follows a pair of European Space Agency astronauts bound for Persephone—a planet at the edge of our solar system—whose mission goes spectacularly wrong.

A preview build covering chapters one and four shows the game blending the studio's story-rich, exposition-heavy approach with climbing and parkour elements reminiscent of Jusant. The climbing tools feel more measured here, but the demo also produced frequent accidental deaths by falling; the repeated one-line game-over notices—"A fatal plunge killed Ariane."—underscored a need for clearer ledges and more obvious no-go zones.

The standout sequence occurs in a dark cave, where Ariane, armed only with a flashlight, encounters a snake-like extraterrestrial that can't see but can clearly hear her, a moment that leans into Alien: Isolation-style tension.

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