I’m taking the Ages in the order their principles appeared in Atris’ journal, so Edanna, the nature age, is next. It’s the one that interests me most conceptually, but aggravates me most in execution. The idea here is to show the player the interdependence within nature both within the environment and through the interaction of the player with the bird (the player first saves the bird and at the end of the Age the bird flies the player to end of the puzzle.) Color is an important indicator within Exile. As in nature, something brightly or vibrantly colored indicates you should pay attention to it.

My first problem is personal, though I wonder to what extent the developers intended this: I have trouble navigating the Age. Many times, I ‘step’ forward down path and am confronted with a wall of green or brown instead of a visible route. I then swing my view around and begin to generally click in the direction I believe the path continues, sometimes this works and sometimes I have to take a ‘step’ back to reorient myself and then try again. This is immensely frustrating, and after awhile I became slightly nauseated.

It’s fine for the game to have difficult-to-find spots and routes, but this felt as though what would be a relatively simple task in the real world became hard because of poor visual design. Then again, maybe the sense of disorientation was deliberate, but if so, how does that encourage the ‘nature rewards interdependence’ theme? If this were a horror game, I could understand – being chased by something nasty while you struggle to make your way through a thick, damp jungle and swamp sounds interesting.

(I assume here that my experience is average. It’s quite possible that I just have poor spatial analysis when it comes to busy 2d environments.)



For a nature age that stresses interdependence, Edanna has a very mechanical feel and there’s little evidence of interdependence. A glowing manta ray moves along a series of sacs on a vine pipeline but… why? How does this benefit the animal? How does it benefit the plant? The player appears to be the only creature who would press the ends of the sac and cause the manta ray to move from one place to another. It would die in the first sac without the player. In the end it, the animal ends up in a small pool of water with no steady food source or mate – I can’t see this as something nature would allow to go on for very long.

The environment exists only so the player can interact with it. The story exists to provide a reason for the player to interact with the environment and to explain how these elaborate environments were created. The problem is that plants and animals, unlike machines, have their own reason for existing as they do. A machine can exist only to provide a charge that causes another machine to react. A glowing manta ray cannot exist only to provide a charge that causes a giant venus fly trap to open.

Anyways, it took me 2 hours and 15 minutes to complete this Age. I began tinkering with the dynamic forces age and so far it's interesting.