At first, I thought I was just rolling. An obsidian ball bouncing on the surface of a strange planet, the gravity is very light, and the speed of the dust rising is like a slow dream. There is no goal, no path, and not even a guide. Who am I? This smooth geometric body that can contract and expand at will is the whole answer. Then, I jumped off the first cliff.

The process of falling was pulled for a long time. The sound of the wind is the deep breath of the planet, rubbing against my smooth surface. I contracted inward to make myself denser and heavier, like a bullet enthusiastically summoned by gravity, accelerating to the embrace of the earth. Just before the impact, I suddenly stretched out — my body turned into a light thin blanket, and the falling violence was instantly tampered into a long glide. The air current supported me and brushed the fangs of the Scarlet Canyon. Falling and flying turned out to be just two degrees of the same posture. The whole meaning of my existence seems to be to accurately grasp the moment of transformation.

This journey has crossed several planets, each of which is a solidified physical poem. On the planet where the storm is permanent, I surf in the sea of liquid ammonia clouds with the rising airflow of thunderstorms; on the deep-sea planet, I sink into the silent darkness until the pressure compresses me into a dense core, and then uses the great force of geothermal eruption, like a shell spit out by the deep sea, shooting back under the starlight. The most unforgettable thing is a broken satellite, whose fragments are suspended in orbit, forming a boulder road. I have to jump between these slowly rotating islands and calculate the angle and strength of each ejection. If there is a slight deviation, I will float into the cold deep space forever. That’s not solving puzzles, but learning humility in the silence of the stars.

The game strips away all languages and symbols. There is no blood strip, no map, and no task list. The state of life is told by the pure luster of my body. It will be gloomy after a violent impact, and it will gradually return to crystal clear when it is suspended quietly in the sun. The only “interface” is my resonance with the environment — the slight humming when approaching a specific mineral, and the colorful ripples flowing on the surface of the body when crossing the aurora. Information is no longer “informed”, but perceived. I learned to “listen” to the wind pressure with my skin, “taste” gravity with the center of gravity, and “read” the terrain with the flight arc. I, this nameless geometry, have become the only sense of the universe to tell me its laws.

When the journey reached the end, I crossed a star gate, and my body began to stretch infinitely, turning into a light, and integrating into a vast sea of stars. There is no ending animation and no production list. The screen returned to darkness, leaving only my own breathing.

I sat in front of the computer and didn’t move for a long time. The noise of the city outside the window slowly seeped back to consciousness. _Exo One_ didn’t give me a story. It gave me a pure “present” experience that belonged to physics and stars. It simulates not an adventure, but an oldest existentialist question: when all social definitions and language are deprived, when “you” is just an object moving in the laws of the universe, is the most direct and silent resonance with all things the most original and shocking form of consciousness?

The black geometry that learned to fly and fall in the virtual star space may be closer to the essence of “I” than any character with a name and story — a silent witness who will eventually find balance and trajectory alone in the vast existence.