This is one of the most unique Metroidvania (2D platformer) games this century. By Parisian indie team SciFunGames (“Science for all, fun above all”), the studio has an educational approach to titles.
The result with Exographer (2024) is a game about subatomic physics and Richard Feynman diagrams, all made very accessible for the player as you solve puzzles and become an in-game scientist. Yes, it’s fab!
Became a Digital Scientist in Exographer
This launched in May 2024 and is available on PC and all consoles. It’s incredible a title like this can launch and really kind of disappear amongst the white noise of so many other games coming out all the time.
As Exographer must be celebrated for its creative and educational efforts.
Physics is pretty daunting for most people, but to take a world of Feynman diagrams, immerse you into it all, and leave you beaming and happy is just brilliant.
Whilst there are platforming and Metroidvania elements, there’s no combat here. Instead, Exographer turns you into a mini-scientist on an alien planet. You visit an unknown planetoid and must uncover the secrets of a long lost civilization. The way the game does this is so unique, with a camera system used to unlock (and piece together) particles and puzzles.
Now, we’re not going to pretend we understand particle physics. Instead, we’ve got the below game review by a very real particle physicist (Vichayanun Wachirapusitanand) to explain what’s going on.
One of the employees at SciFunGames is Raphaël Granier De Cassagnac, a sci-fi author and physicist who helped make the science stuff semi-realistic.
The team kept an extensive devlog as the game was created, documenting the process of creating a fun video game alongside getting science stuff bang on. From an August 2024 post Discovering particles:
“To design these puzzles, our scientific director, Raphaël Granier de Cassagnac, took direct inspiration from the history of particle physics. In fact, muons were first observed in cosmic rays, and this came as quite a surprise. Other experiments, such as the discovery of the neutrino by Reines and Cowan, are hidden behind most of the levels.
To design the various analyses, game designer Pierre-Alban Ferrer drew on this history and came up with tools for selecting different properties of the particles and their interactions. Together with Raphaël, they exchanged diagrams such as the one below, before implementing these puzzles and testing them on novice players to check progress and learning.”
It’s the most thorough devlog we’ve seen since Lucas Pope’s extensive notes for his cult classic Mars After Midnight (2024), which launched a month before Exographer in spring 2024.
You can see more of Exographer in action below. It doesn’t play out like most other platformers we know, instead focussing on studying particles to unlock secrets. Your camera is essential and there are some very clever ways to solve puzzles by teleporting about the levels based on photos you’ve taken.
We loved all of this and think Exographer is a marvel of a game. However, we’re aware it won’t appeal to everyone. Its unique and methodical approach may be frustrating for some gamers, but the devs do provide options to make the puzzle-solving elements less confusing.
A big chunk of the game is its camera system, taking pictures and piecing together clues to understand progress. Some people may find that repetitive, we suppose, but as you progress the experience does open up further with consistently new ideas (no spoilers here).
And with around 15 hours of gameplay, you get a lot to experience across 20 levels, 139 hidden pictures, and 17 pixules (Exographer’s take on particles) to discover).
The only shame is it’s such an obscure title, with only 110 Steam reviews. For shame! Try to change that if you can, go forth and give this a whirl.
Getting All Scientific for Exographer’s Retro Soundtrack
The game has a beautiful pixel art style, plus an intriguing score by composer Yann Van Der Cruyssen (who has previously worked on the sci-fi classic cat-based romp Stray).
It sits in the background quietly humming away, never overwhelming the gameplay (important, given the thinking the experience requires), and was judged very well.
It has a retro quality to it, like a SNES era ’90s game, all mixed in with David Wise style ambience. Another post from the devs documented the score: Composing the music (from September 2024):
“Yann confesses that producing a soundtrack for a game with retro graphics is always a tricky business. The sound has to be neither too old school nor too modern. In fact, this isn’t the first time Yann has worked on this kind of game. Over the years, he has accumulated a number of tools to meet this goal. For Exographer, he used a mixture of FM synthesizers, emulations of old machines, wavetables from retro games and, sometimes, more HiFi samples passed through effects to degrade them.
Composing music for a game with a wide range of moods is never easy. The specificities of each level must leave their mark: flutes and percussion in the cosmic mount, glass sounds for the underwater levels, unstable harmonies in the absurd world, electrical artifacts for the most technological moments … A final subtlety: several tracks have been exported in separate layers to vary the intensity according to what’s going on in the game.”
The devs note it’s a game about reflection, highlighting the importance of the quiet universe you’re in, and the need for some introspection. The music delivers just that.
