Has anyone played Breathedge yet?

Breathedge, a game I first heard about just a week ago, has received its 1.0 update. I never played Subnautica but always thought it seemed really cool, so hearing this game described as Subnautica in space had me curious to see what it's all about. I haven't given it a go myself, but wanted to see if anyone has checked it out! What do you think so far?

@nateandrews: I just started playing this when it showed up on Game Pass a few weeks ago! It's pretty fun, and there's more of a story to it than I was expecting. I will say, it can be hard to find some very essential resources sometimes, as there's no "scanning" ability.

Breathedge is a good game that has an obnoxious sense of humor. I quit after about two hours because despite enjoying the actually gameplay, I just got weary of the jokes.

Oh the original thread is from 9 months ago. Well @nateandrews I had started playing Breathedge roughly about half a year ago when it arrived on Game Pass on my Series X. I don't think it is a game that particularly works well on a console, it's fine, but watching some footage on PC the interface is clearly a lot better and a lot more usable there where you have more realestate and mouse control.

That said I found a lot about it surprisingly really good. As @tartyron mentions, the absolutely awful humor drags the experience down every step of the way. We are talking just bottom of the barrel, Twitter level, anti "SJW" humor at every step. Even jokes that aren't making fun of racial inclusivity or vegetarians just batter you over the head like the gimmick of your onboard computer reading out messages at a hundred miles per hour in a flat text-to-speech fashion.

If you can tune that out then the world of Breathedge is a really neat space diorama. Along your main path you encounter these unique little scenes frozen in time. This is also the part of the game where some genuine humor can be found in the form of fellow astronauts and the multiple ways they met their demise. Breathedge is a real turn your brain off, checklist sort of experience. At it's heart this is a crafting, survival game so you are constantly monitoring your health, your hunger, water, fuel etc. The tools you craft break constantly so you are always stuck in an infinite loop of mining to craft and crafting to mine. Every objective you encounter requires the use of a certain tool that can typically be constructed from resources found floating in the objectives vicinity. Since this is all happening in space you are flying out from the warm safety of a service craft out into cold space where the second you leave the door an oxygen timer starts ticking down. Fly out - collect as much as you can - fly back - craft - fly out again. As you progress through the game you will find upgrades that allow you to fly faster, carry more oxygen, use your tools more often. You probably already know if you have the lizard brain for this sort of experience where essentially busy-work can seem relaxing and ultimately rewarding.

I got pretty far in the game before something more interesting came along and surprisingly the gameplay kept evolving in surprising ways the further I got in. At it's core you are always whittling down some checklist, but I was always motivated to see whats right around the corner.

It's good to hear that its mechanics are solid, at the very least. What I saw of the game's attempts at humor was so immediately off-putting that the game instantly disappeared off my radar, to be honest.

@humanity: Wow, thanks for this write up. I've been craving a fun scifi survival and crafting game like Subnautica again and was waffling on this one after seeing this thread - I will probably not get this now. The humor sounds truly off-putting. Subnautica and it sequel were much more understated and benign in its humor

@dodecalypse: It's also important to note that the crafting here is somewhat barebones. You are mainly just crafting tools or whatever macguffin the game has decided to come up with as the next campaign milestone. In one attempt at humor the game has you create a literal macguffin, a piece of junk that in its description says in some highly annoying way that the item in question was invented by the developers as another roadblock and is actually completely useless. Another time you craft a helmet with radiation resistant paint but then find out the red paint completely obscures your view once you finally craft it rendering it useless. In the second section they introduce the element of base building, but I have no clue why you would engage with it apart from just wanting to build some bases. I was able to move past to the third area without building anything, apart from the stuff required by the tutorial.

This all sounds really negative and off putting and I guess thats because it is. A lot of the stuff in the game is extremely frustrating when it isn't just downright insulting. The best you an hope for is rolling your eyes. The whole thing starts off with your character being interrogated by a robot smoking a cigarette and a prompt comes up that says something like "let the robot smoke / OR / I believe in censorship" you know, like those sort of rebellious 14 year old internet digs. Why did I keep playing this? I honestly really dug the aesthetics and there was nothing else out that I cared about at the time so I would loaded up to see whats around the corner. The worst part is that I kept thinking "the people who made this are obviously talented, it's such a shame they also appear to be also the fucking worst."