Breathedge

Alcohol, chickens, kebabs, space and coffin robots in bowler hats. 1950s Soviet visual stylings and hamster smoothies. Mayonnaise, kebabs, flying ZAZ cars and laser blasters. There’s so much to love about this game. Buy it.

Breathedge isn't a perfect space survival game and is sometimes aggravating, but there's plenty to enjoy, and few recent games can be so relaxing.

If you’re looking for a survival game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, developer RedRuins Softworks thinks they have just the thing with their game Breathedge. It may have released in 2018 on Steam, but the game has now been ported over the PlayStation 4. Drawing inspiration from games such as Subnautica, is this deadly trip to space worth your space bucks? Find out in our Breathedge PS4 review.

Breathedge has a lot going for it in its well-loved Early Access sandbox portion. But when it becomes more of a walking simulator, things take a turn. Regardless, it's a funny game that's still worth playing for anyone who enjoys the concept and the humor. But I can't help but think that many will be disappointed by the later parts of the game.

Breathedge offers some decent exploration and survival gameplay, tucked among very slow trips to gather materials that sometimes feel like they are wasting the player's time. A hit-and-miss sense of humor can sometimes amuse, while other times causing something close to fury. A mid-game pivot seems to drive the game off track-changing the mechanics in a way that feels jarring. Enjoyable for stretches, Breathedge can't help but shoot itself in the foot occasionally, in ways that are more frustrating than fun.

An explosion rocks your cabin, and all of a sudden you’re alone in the vastness of space. Well, apart from a mystifyingly immortal chicken and a helpful if patronising AI. Can you survive for long enough to unravel a conspiracy of galactic proportions? And do you even want to?

Breathedge may launch survival games into the final frontier, but it brings some of the worst tropes of the genre along with it… before abandoning that genre entirely in favor of a linear story propelled by hit-and-miss humor. It's all style over substance, looking great on the surface without much of interest underneath that polish. Without much sense of progression or accomplishment and exploration hampered by an obnoxious oxygen system, it relies too heavily on the initial novelty of floating around and the occasional decent joke. Breathedge just isn't fun to play.

Breathedge takes an interesting premise and shoves it out the airlock with an overreliance on tired jokes and half-baked survival sim mechanics. An admirable attempt to move the genre forward collapses under the weight of too much self-awareness and not enough polish.

The survival elements of Breathedge are pretty standard fare for the genre, but its hard to enjoy the experience due to dated humor and its insistence on abandoning its best elements halfway through.