Backlog Bingo 2025: Exo One

It's time to make the same joke twice in two posts: "If I had a nickel for every time I've had a partner recommend me a game about rolling an orb through a surreal alien landscape, I'd have two nickels..."

Exo One is the first of the two games that i was ~~politely requested~~ to have on my bingo card by my Domme; i would later re-realize that they actually had a lot of history with this game after finding them at 22nd on the speedrun leaderboards. (They apparently used to be 3rd, but the game's been optimized a lot since then.)

I knew nothing about this going in, as I typically try to avoid knowing tons about games before I play them in general. This was particularly true here: past "my partner said i should play it and my other partner already owned it because it Looked Like Vibes™", i was blind. So, I played the first level, and thought, huh, this is a lot like Venineth (immediately making the above "two nickels" joke on Discord), wonder where it'll go. And it turns out that...that's the entire game, much like it was with Venineth. You have a spaceship that's an orb with a "gravity drive": one button drops you out of the air and sharply accelerates you if you're going downhill (and sharply decelerates you if you're going uphill, which you almost never want to do). The other button lets you turn your orb into a disc that can glide for a while, or skip across water. You can also dive with the gliding disc to go very fast. Move with the analog stick.

That is...the entire game, and it's lovely. Start a level, see a giant blue goal, zoom yourself over there with some surprisingly complex momentum and physics for a game with three meaningful inputs, take in cool alien landscapes while listening to post-rock, get occasional bits of story.

I enjoyed this a lot for what it is: it at time feels like playing a really awesome screen-saver, but it's Pure Vibes in a way I find really compelling and relaxing. If you like things like Journey, Sable, etc, you'll probably also enjoy this, as it's meditative in a lot of the same ways. I have little to say about it because it's a very simple game, but don't let that be taken as me not liking it: it's very good at what it's trying to do, and that doesn't need to be much.

Oh, and this is also the game that got me my actual Backlog Bingo bingo, across the second row with B2 I2 N2 G2 O2. (left to right, Ultros, Terranigma, this, Death of a Wish, 1000xResist, for those playing along at home.) So, that's neat, first bingo of the year on the server. :3