Electricity buzzing between two purple pillars. A ground pebbled in blue and green and red and purple. Weird structures after weird monuments. Brightly coloured moons looming in the emptiness above. Exolon is filled with striking images which give a palpable sense of being on an alien world. The limitations of 8-bit computer graphics, and those of the Spectrum even more so, meant black backgrounds were often a sensible approach; using that to represent space is obvious but no less effective when done right. Raffaele Cecco very much does it right. There are not that many different visual elements in Exolon, but they’re spread in a way that keeps wonder and anticipation going.
This artful scenery is not what Cecco and Hewson decided to sell Exolon on. “You blast, battle, bound and blunder your way over more than hundred screens of blood curdling action” says the manual. If you reach the end of the game, it tells you that “you have proven your combat abilities to the full”. Those came as a bit of a surprise to me when I saw them after my first couple of plays, in which I had experienced no curdling of blood whatsoever.
It is true that Exolon gets you to get your hulking space-person to fire missiles right from the start, fizzing over their shoulder in a flare of rainbow sparks. It’s to remove immobile blockages, though. The missiles are introduced as a series of spectacular keys for what are functionally locked doors. Yes, Exolon is named after the exoskeleton you can adopt at special pods in the middle of each level which gives double firing power. Yes, you have to shoot at some deadly sine-waving bubbles and fixed guns along the way as well, but combat never feels an appropriate description of that. Nothing is alive or reactive enough.
The eerie deadness of the world is part of what makes its alienness so strange and effective. If there were living beings that created all of this, they appear to be long gone. What else might they have left behind and what might it say? To me, that remains much more interesting than the disappointing reality of the mechanical destruction and travel which Exolon offers as your means of interacting with most of its world. All of that goes slowly enough that contemplating the surroundings is practically an inevitable occupation, so perhaps it is intended to give players a chance for contemplation. Perhaps not. Cecco’s later shoot-em-up Cybernoid is more obviously combat-focused. Maybe my idealised version of Exolon was never there to be. The pebbles, monuments and looming moons yet survive.
