tl;dr: Superbly immersive in its minimalism, and definitely not recommended for people who are afraid of facing a basic existential horror: running out of breath and dying alone inside a tiny escape pod in the middle of nowhere.

After you turn off the lights and put on your headphones, you are immediately immersed in what appears to be an otherworldly underwater (or space) environment that you can only experience through the minimal UI of a radar screen. The sparse, grirtty interface elements and visuals (and the even sparser controls) force you to surrender to the brilliant and shockingly uncomfortable sounds of your breathing, the whining of the engine and the blips of the radar's pulse. And it is this sound design that makes Capsule what it is: an experience much more so than a game. Mainly because your desire to survive has less to do with winning and more to do with avoiding the desperate gasps of running low on oxygen.

The gameplay is simple and repetitive, but it does manage to keep you tense throughout. Alone in your claustrophobic capsule you traverse this unidentified alien space, using the radar to help you locate pockets of air and power while avoiding dangers, and using the compass/distance readout to navigate to your next destination. Balancing these simple decisions of speed and direction feels like a constant gamble stacked against you, so expect to die alot. Still, despite the very basic controls there are a couple of secrets and subtleties to be dicovered in the gameplay - a look at the achievements may give you a couple of hints.

The game has no pause button but saves at (and restarts from) the last base you have managed to reach. Those are also the locations where you can refuel and uncover your next destination, while skimming through the few lines of communication leftovers you can access - the only way the game delivers explicit story. There is of course a bit of mystery there, an anomaly, elements of the strange. But the snippets that mostly hit home tend to be the mundane communications of daily life: a greeting to a daughter, a joke, complaining about those working in the other department, life as it is lived day-to-day. And they hit home because underlying them is the same existential horror that underlies every design aspect of this game: the mundane sound of a breath turning into a hopelessly lonely death rattle amidst the uncaring void.

So is this a good game? Not... really. The narrative has those fascinating little moments, but never develops, and the ending is at the same time experientially satisfying and way too abrupt. The gameplay, while tense, is repetitive and doesn't evolve, the difficulty is only scaled up by increasing the distance between bases. In fact, the minimalist retro-futuristic aesthetic and the sound design are all that holds this game together, but they constitute such a superb achievement of immersion that they are enough for me to absolutely recommend this game. This odd collection of 4 buttons, colourless dots on a screen and a couple of sound bites took me on a journey that I will have a really hard time forgetting any time soon.

tl;dr: Superbly immersive in its minimalism, and definitely not recommended for people who are afraid of facing a basic existential horror: running out of breath and dying alone inside a tiny escape pod in the middle of nowhere. After you turn off the lights and put on your headphones, you are immediately immersed in what appears to be an otherworldly underwater (or space) environment that you can only experience through the minimal UI of a radar screen. The sparse, grirtty interface elements and visuals (and the even sparser controls) force you to surrender to the brilliant and shockingly uncomfortable sounds of your breathing, the whining of the engine and the blips of the radar's pulse. And it is this sound design that makes Capsule what it is: an experience much more so than a game. Mainly because your desire to survive has less to do with winning and more to do with avoiding the desperate gasps of running low on oxygen. The gameplay is simple and repetitive, but it does manage to keep you tense throughout. Alone in your claustrophobic capsule you traverse this unidentified alien space, using the radar to help you locate pockets of air and power while avoiding dangers, and using the compass/distance readout to navigate to your next destination. Balancing these simple decisions of speed and direction feels like a constant gamble stacked against you, so expect to die alot. Still, despite the very basic controls there are a couple of secrets and subtleties to be dicovered in the gameplay - a look at the achievements may give you a couple of hints. The game has no pause button but saves at (and restarts from) the last base you have managed to reach. Those are also the locations where you can refuel and uncover your next destination, while skimming through the few lines of communication leftovers you can access - the only way the game delivers explicit story. There is of course a bit of mystery there, an anomaly, elements of the strange. But the snippets that mostly hit home tend to be the mundane communications of daily life: a greeting to a daughter, a joke, complaining about those working in the other department, life as it is lived day-to-day. And they hit home because underlying them is the same existential horror that underlies every design aspect of this game: the mundane sound of a breath turning into a hopelessly lonely death rattle amidst the uncaring void. So is this a good game? Not... really. The narrative has those fascinating little moments, but never develops, and the ending is at the same time experientially satisfying and way too abrupt. The gameplay, while tense, is repetitive and doesn't evolve, the difficulty is only scaled up by increasing the distance between bases. In fact, the minimalist retro-futuristic aesthetic and the sound design are all that holds this game together, but they constitute such a superb achievement of immersion that they are enough for me to absolutely recommend this game. This odd collection of 4 buttons, colourless dots on a screen and a couple of sound bites took me on a journey that I will have a really hard time forgetting any time soon.