Breathedge is a space survival game with silly humour (fourth-wall, slapstick). The game begins with some robot coffins questioning you about some previous event. In a flashback you are looking at a photo of your father whilst on board a shuttle, but an explosion tears your ship apart, sucking the coffin into space.
After plugging a leak, the remaining part of the shuttle acts as your base, and you venture out to explore wreckages that act as points of interest where you can discover blueprints and crafting materials.
You are accompanied by a seemingly immortal chicken which you hold against electrical wires to discharge them. You also have narration by an AI who delivers a lot of jokes. Most text descriptions are in this humorous fashion, and the game never takes itself seriously.
You need to maintain food and water but there’s plenty of nutritious goo and ice to craft both. There’s better food recipes to discover like Honey and Salted. It’s only really a concern during the early stages, because later you will explore larger spaceship modules where there’s plenty of food and water to collect. The biggest danger is your air supply which is extremely limiting during the early game, and even the initial upgrades don’t boost it enough. Later on, the upgrades give massive increases, so as the game goes on, it becomes less of an issue.
The limited air makes the start of the game very tedious/stressful as you can barely venture out without planning on turning around and making the slow journey back to your shuttle to refill with air. So this scramble and rush approach is very repetitive. In some ways, I did like this approach as it was tense and a struggle to survive. I was glad that the gameplay changed in Chapter 2.
The game draws a lot of parallels with Subnautica, but in that game you could venture quite far, and come up for air at any point. You were limited by the depth more than anything, so I think Subnautica handled the mechanic better.
Another point of tedium is how quickly your tools break, so I found the best thing was to craft 2 of each tool, but then that limits your inventory space. After a few hours I found there were about 5 useful tools, but you only have 4 quickslots, and maybe you want to leave one space for one of the oxygen-replenishing items. If you need a tool that isn’t in your quickslot, you can quickly load the menu with the Tab key, but this doesn’t pause the game, so you have to scramble to select the correct item so you don’t waste too much oxygen.
Once you can craft the air balloon stations, you can deploy them in a place as far as you can travel, so then you can cover double the distance. These stations have limited supply of air (but they have a decent supply), and you can refill them with another craftable item.
Once you complete the objectives and reach Chapter 2, you will discover a new base of operations. Here you will discover some new materials, and begin finding more base-building blocks as well as a vehicle. The areas surrounding this area really open up and have massive distances between points of interest, so the vehicle is required. This is where the bulk of the game is, and there are 6 objectives to complete.
When I saw there were 6 chapters, I did wonder if this was going to be a 80 hour game. However, your AI companion makes a joke about forgetting to tell you that you completed Chapter 2 ages ago, so you then move to Chapter 4 once you find the Normandy which takes you to the next area. The next part will take a few hours but the last couple of chapters are short.
I felt that I got bored of the game by the time I repaired the Normandy and travelled to the next area. The gameplay became more tedious at this point because oxygen supply is not an issue anymore and you simply explore corridors of spaceships. The gameplay is often dull here like: explore, find a blueprint, run back to your ship, craft the item, then run back to where you were, use the item, then return back to your ship, repeat 4 times.
In this review, I feel like I have just trashed the game, but Subnautica is one of my favourite games in recent years, and this does feel a lot like it. The overall gameplay style was good, and the first two chapters are enjoyable despite some elements that drag the playtime. I felt they could have been a little more generous with the air supply and item degradation for a smoother experience. The game took around 26 hours which felt too drawn out in my opinion, especially the final chapters. Subnautica had a more immersive world due to the number of interesting creatures to discover; Breathedge has nothing but dead astronauts (well there are a few turrets and robots near the end, but it’s not exactly full of life).