Review code provided by the publisher
I’ve always feared what being stranded in the middle of space would be like. I compare it to being lost at sea only, there’s an even slimmer chance that you’d actually be rescued at all. Breathedge fills that hole in my mind and makes it even scarier than I originally thought. It’s not the horror that you’d traditionally think to find in space and even gets accompanied by some hilarious jokes throughout its length. It’s a unique take on the survival genre that blends a bunch of great aspects together.
Story
The story starts with you awakening at the hands of a couple of mafioso-type robots. They’re interrogating you in order to find out how you ended up where you are now. You’re a nameless astronaut whose grandfather has recently passed away. While in the middle of transporting his body on a starcruiser, it’s suddenly and mysteriously torn apart. From there, you try to survive as long as you can and make it your grandfather while piecing it all together.
Gameplay
The gameplay itself is where Breathedge really makes players work for their survival. While you’re able to save the game at your own leisure, there is a lot of technical difficulties to be had. You’re stranded in space with only the materials and supplies left to you from the destroyed ship you were on. You’ll have to use your brains and instincts in conjunction with the materials you’ll find to make it further into your journey to get back home.
There are several different difficulty options that you can play the game on but I bounced between normal and story. The normal difficulty though is the way that the game is meant to be played. The main difference that I found between the two difficulty choices is the fact that on normal, you have to manage your oxygen whereas, on story, that’s not a worry. I liked not having to worry about oxygen when on story but having to manage my astronaut more really did feel like the genuine and intense way to play.
Managing said oxygen is crucial in getting things done, so making sure you’re not at zero is always the main point of interest. The oxygen tank gives you 75 seconds of air and once depleted starts chiseling away at your astronaut’s health bar. You can fill it back up in multiple ways with the best choice being to return to your pod. Leaving the pod is a mission every single time because you have to hope that there’s enough oxygen to carry out your task at hand. There are so many times that I’d just make it to the pod in time to keep my health bar looking relatively intact.
Venturing out into the cold void of space is needed to be done to grab the available materials in order to craft food items, tools, and machines. Many can be found in bundles floating around space as well as broken apart pieces of the starcruiser. Each contains some pretty unique different rooms and locations that can be pretty fun to scavenge. The ideas used throughout Breathedge made it feel more than just another survival or crafting game. Every new thing I came across offered something intriguing to interact with.
The craftable items within the title come off very unique compared to other games in the genre. They’ll have funny names, crazy looks, or may not even have a specific use at all. For one, there’s an objective where you have to build a bundle of useless crap. Literally. It’s inventive enough and it’s times like these when I’d chuckle to myself because of how little this game tries to take itself seriously. You can even change cigarettes into carrots if that’s more your thing.
If surviving oxygen loss isn’t hard enough, the astronaut will also have to navigate through other elements such as radiation poisoning and freezing. Radiation will kill you over time of course, but freezing doesn’t. Instead, freezing will slowly cause ice crystals to form over your helmet’s visor, leaving you with little to no visibility at all. It’s just another really unique thing that Breathedge does that sets itself apart. Imagine being stuck in space with a visor you can’t see out of while you try to get somewhere warm enough to thaw it. It illustrates my point that even if it’s silly most of the time, horror or emptiness can be found. It drives the survival aspect home for sure.
Visuals
Breathedge has that retro 50s space-race style that we all know and love. I’m always a sucker for retro depictions of space and sci-fi so this is right up my alley. Even though the art style may be retro, the look of space itself maintains a fully current view of what we know about space. It’s a beautiful-looking game that manages to mash-up the old and the new perfectly.
Audio
The in-game audio does its job and creates an immersive Outerspace that you’d come to expect in something like this. There’s also dialogue at certain points of the game as well as through the AI that helps guide you.
Replayability
For being a survival game, there’s definitely enough here to warrant repeated playthroughs or an extended single playthrough. It’s more of an adventure than anything, so those more invested in it will find themselves sucked right in.
What It Could Have Done Better
There’s not much to complain about when describing Breathedge. The only thing I can pick at is the fact that even when playing on the story difficulty, the goals or objectives really aren’t too clear. I think that playing on story should be a bit easier in terms of direction and clarity of its instructions.
Verdict
Breathedge is a survival game for people that have started to grow tired of the genre. It does its own thing and tries to invoke a sense of comedy into its backdrop of loneliness. The hazards that surround our astronaut are daunting even within their simplicity, that makes even the most mundane tasks feel like an uphill battle. While I’ve mostly grown tired of the genre, Breathedge does enough to make it feel fresh.
