I’m a big fan of survival-crafting games but since it has been a really popular genre lately they can be hit or miss. Breathedge gives a breath of fresh air,  no more survival on earth or an earth-like planet like in Ark Survival, Conan Exiles etc. Say hello to space.

Space Subnautica

Breathedge is a survival adventure game, like Subnautica but instead taking place in outer space. Your mission? Bringing your deceased grandpa to a galactic funeral. The space hearse you traveled in got wrecked, leaving you, the debris, coffins, and dead passengers floating through space. It’s your job to get to reach the extraction point to get to safety and discover why the space hearse, from the company Breathedge, crashed. Surviving in space is no joke, I mean look at us we haven’t even been able to get to Mars.

Not dying is a real challenge. From oxygen depletion, radiation poisoning, freezing colds, space junk floating around, and managing not to dry out or starve.  Maintain all these elements to survive. At the start, you can select from 4 different difficulties to fit with your playstyle. Are you up for a serious challenge with permanent death, do you want to mainly focus on the story with survival elements or go into sandbox mode with everything available with no ways to die? It’s all up to you.

To infinity and beyond

You start off in the funeral spacesuit that the company supplied to you but this isn’t really soothed for spacewalks. Gather supplies from the wreck to upgrade your gear to make it to the extraction point to be saved.  When discovering new items/supplies in space you unlock blueprints to be able to make them yourself. These upgrade your character. For instance, you discover the blueprint for an oxygen balloon made out of condoms which grant extra oxygen capacity. This lets you explore deeper in space.  Upgrade your suit to be able to fly faster or be more resilient to radiation. Points of interest are marked on the map. These are hints of where to go to progress in the story and/or obtaining new materials and blueprints to upgrade.

The gameplay in Breathedge is really addictive but gets frustrating the more you play. Every time you want to get a bit further into space to see what new stuff is out there edging closer and closer to the extraction point. The second have is where it falls apart a little bit. Here is where you need to do tedious crafting to progress instead of exploring space which was the most fun part of the game.

Lack of polish

I have a couple of problems with the game. Every time you examine something time stops which is a good thing because you don’t want to die to a lack of oxygen when you are reading. But the music and sounds stop playing as well which totally takes you out of the atmosphere in the game.

The crafting system is rather slow. You have to wait for the recipe to finish and you can only craft one item at a time and can’t tap out. This makes it so you’re waiting a lot when you need to craft a lot of stuff at once. Flying through space is relaxing but also takes a really long time to get where you need to go, which slows the overall progression of the game. The progression of being able to fly further and further as you progress feels addictive but can turn around to get really annoying and repetitive.

I also ran out of alkaline and batteries with no batteries near me to get and no way to gather new alkaline since my grabber broke which needs a battery to create. I was still learning the game so I probably wasted a lot of materials but there shouldn’t be a way to soft-lock a game like this.

This is how to port

Breathedge has crazy silly adult humor sprinkled all throughout the game. From the commentary to the corpses you find along the way. This gives the game charm but can also be annoying for those not into the kind of humor.

I have played a couple of other Switch ports of PC games. Most of them were really held back by the downgraded graphics and slow controls because of the switch from a mouse to a controller. Breathedge does have some rough graphics but it plays really well with a controller without slowing the game down too much.

Conclusion

Breathedge is like Subnautica in space but has some minor flaws to it. The game suffers from a stretched-out playtime, especially at the end, a slow crafting system, etc. Outside of the flaws, the game controls wonderfully on the switch. The game lacks some polish that bigger published games have but it’s addictively good fun.

7.5/10

-Tested on Nintendo Switch