Thank you Moebius Games for sending us this game to review! Exotic Matter is a Minecraft-like sci-fi survival game that transports you to the fictional planet of Xcylin in the year 12039 in order for you to find a substance known as Violex. Once you do find it, you will be able to power your ship’s engine and allow it to go at light speed. However, the game doesn’t try to adhere you strictly to the mission; in fact, it is quite the open world, allowing you to play and explore. You may want to watch your step, though, because fall damage can be taken. When you respawn in the ship in what the game calls a nanochamber, you don’t respawn with full health. The only way to get it all back is to exit the mission and go back into it again, it seems.

The controls are a little unique, and they certainly take some getting used to for you Minecraft fans out there, myself included. However, Exotic Matter starts you off at the beginning of the mission with a tutorial so you can get used to them. There is a reminder of the basic controls that you will be using the most on the left-hand side of the screen. The UI (user interface) also includes a compass, in-game time of day, a map at the top left hand corner, your health at the bottom left hand corner, your inventory bar, and your equipped items bar. In the inventory menu, I happened to notice that the developers spelled ‘equipped’ wrong and spelled it ‘equiped’ instead. There were also a few occasions where the game crashed on me while it was trying to launch. However, the game is in very early access, so the developers will immediately fix this mistake upon the publishing of this review, I’m sure.

In the daytime, Exotic Matter’s world is open and inviting, but upon entering the night, depending on how your world generated, the night can become very dark and foreboding. (My first world ended up generating at night, in that dark and foreboding state. If you’re anything like me, that is not a good impression to have!) The music is quite ambient, but can get very, and I mean very, ominous at night. The night’s musical style reminds me of Portal-style music a little. Sometimes you may find robot-like NPCs that wander around placing blocks. (Every time I saw one, I would get jumpscared!) Once the sun rises again, the world returns to its open state. The sky is turquoise and there is a bit of (I’m assuming intentional) fog. There is also a huge moon that looms over the planet during the day. The voxel-like graphics of the game look like a texture pack you would find from Minecraft, with the level of detail on the blocks’ textures. It doesn’t look bad, it’s just that the way the graphics were constructed, that looks a lot like a Minecraftian texture pack.

Exotic Matter also has something called a construct mode, where you can build structures that can appear in your missions. The construct is flat, and all of the pregenerated blocks have a gray checkered pattern on them. You spawn with all of the ingame blocks and items, with 64 of each, as well as some special tools that will help you build and destroy in the construct space. The special construction tools perform a few different actions, including duplicate, create, and destroying blocks. It’s pretty clear in the clumsy layout of the construct mode that the game is trying to focus on the mission mode, which is the main part of it. The dark and foreboding night may be a bit much for some of the younger audiences. However, there are no moral issues in the game itself, it is merely how the games chooses to present itself visually that makes me concerned. Otherwise, if you are the type of person who loves Minecraft and a good sci-fi adventure, then this is the game for you! -Kittycathead