- Exographer v58: Patch notes - 19 December 2025
Hi explorers. ScifunGames and Abylight Studios want to thank you for playing Exographer and your positive reviews. Have you discovered the Natitan legacy yet? An exciting journey awaits. We are back to announce our third Exographer patch, version number 58, with bug fixes: General Patched the CVE-2025-59489 Unity security vulnerability Fixed a bug where save files were corrupted by special characters in the Steam user name Character Fixed a bug where the character is unable to teleport to recover from an out-of-bound death World Greenhouse (level): fixed a bug where the puzzle is resolved but the main picture cannot be taken
- Devlog #12: First speedrunners! - 30 September 2025
Developing a metroidvania inevitably brings speedrunning into the picture. While we were building Exographer, we knew some players would be tempted to speedrun it. We even left a few “design flaws” here and there for them, especially regarding the gluonic boots. Our next game, still in the works, won’t be anything like a metroidvania, but it will be just as well-suited for speedrunning. When we created our Discord server, we immediately opened a channel dedicated to speedrunners. That’s how Zaldeeu, our very first PC challenger, found us. It was such a powerful feeling to watch someone persist over and over to achieve the best time and, finally, beat Exographer in under 45 minutes! We’re looking forward to seeing more challengers, like Johann, who is currently speedrunning the PS5 version. Both of them kindly agreed to take some time and answer a few questions about their speedrunning e…
- Devlog #11: Running on handheld devices - 25 July 2025
It’s summer — the perfect time to load up some games on our Steam Decks and Switches. Good news: Exographer is fully verified for both devices. But what does it really take for a game to run well on small screens and modest processors? Not much, at least for a 2D game, if you've kept those limitations in mind from the start. In the end, here are the main differences between the lighter (portable) version of Exographer and the standard one. The first two relate to graphical performance, while the last focuses on user experience and interface. The interactions between the character and its environment required sophisticated shaders involving reshaping our pixelated world via continuous graphics. In the example below, the photosphere repels the rock through a real-time animation. These shaders were simplified to run smoothly on Steam Deck and Switch. In the same spirit, two levels were ada…
- Exographer v57: Patch notes - 13 March 2025
Hi explorers. ScifunGames and Abylight Studios want to thank you for playing Exographer and your positive reviews. We are overwhelmed by the great reception of the game, and these help us to reach new players. Have you discovered the Natitan legacy yet? An exciting journey awaits. We are back to announce our second Exographer patch, with general improvements and bug fixes. Thanks for your feedback, it helps a lot with polishing, and making Exographer an even better game. We also updated our main art, to better communicate the style of gameplay: an exploration puzzle adventure, where players will be able to discover an exciting story, with characters, locations and powers based on particle physics. Please find down here every element we introduced with the latest patch: Character Fixed a bug where the character animation freezes upon falling death. World Initialization: Fixed a bug where…
- Devlog #10: Telling two stories - 19 December 2024
Exographer is primarily focused on its gameplay mechanics (see devlog #6), and its storyline emerged after all the design was essentially complete. Most of the text is used to solve puzzles, and it is revealed through the pages of a notebook to be decoded. To contextualize the information, each notebook entry is signed and dated by initially-mysterious characters... In Exographer, the main character walks in the footsteps of nine academicians, rediscovering their discoveries and understanding why they disappeared. There are thus two stories: the one the character is living, and the one the academicians lived in the past. We've already covered this second storyline, based on the real history of science, in our devlog #4. To visualize our character's typical journey through the academician world, as well as the flow of information the player receives, we used two interactive, non-linear s…
- Exographer v56: Patch notes - 17 October 2024
Hi explorers. ScifunGames and Abylight Studios want to thank you for playing Exographer and your positive reviews. Have you discovered the Natitan legacy yet? An exciting journey awaits. We are back to announce our latest Exographer patch, version number 56, with general improvements and bug fixes. Thanks for your feedback, it helps a lot with polishing, and making Exographer an even better game. Please find down here every element we introduced with the latest patch: Character Fixed a bug where the player’s animation is frozen after loading a picture upon a death event. World Initialization: Fixed a bug where the absurd matters are not the right ones, after finishing the game with the absurd matters inverted, and then start a new game right away. Source Antichamber (level): Added an absurd fog line to climb back if the player is aiming to complete its map. Yurt (level): Fixed a bug whe…
- Devlog #9: Designing characters - 26 September 2024
In Exographer, two types of character were to be distinguished: the Natitans, repositories of knowledge and inspired by real scientists who discovered elementary particles (see devlog #4), and Ini, the player character, an exographer sent to investigate a mysterious distress signal emitted by the Natitans. Ini's design had to be completely different from that of the Natitans. It was quickly decided that he would be smaller than them, and therefore evolve in a world too big for him. This is both a metaphor for our limit-conscious scientific knowledge, and a reference to the titanic machines built by scientists today, for example at CERN (see devlog #1). In our early versions, Ini would look like a robot, or even an exploration probe sent to analyze the distress signal and explore an abandoned world. In the end, we opted for a biological character, a sort of repairman or astronaut, to giv…
- Devlog #8: Composing the music - 16 September 2024
Exographer’s music was scored by Yann van der Cruyssen, author of the Stray and Seasons after Fall soundtracks, among others. Yann confesses that producing a soundtrack for a game with retro graphics is always a tricky business. The sound has to be neither too old school nor too modern. In fact, this isn't the first time Yann has worked on this kind of game. Over the years, he has accumulated a number of tools to meet this goal. For Exographer, he used a mixture of FM synthesizers, emulations of old machines, wavetables from retro games and, sometimes, more HiFi samples passed through effects to degrade them. Yann's sequencer, hard at work. Among the 22 tracks produced, there are several recurring themes or patterns: Yann first wrote the main theme, The Natitan Academy, with its chorus that worked very well on piano but took a long time to adapt in retro mode. This was the basis for the…
- Exographer is perfect for Steam Deck - 2 September 2024
We have good news for all those users of Valve's handheld consoles, Steam Deck or Steam Deck OLED, who want to play Exographer. This 2D exploration adventure game is fully compatible with the Steam device. Enjoy Ini's adventure on an alien planet and discover all the secrets that this science-inspired metroidvania holds on the go, with all the original game's features, controls, text and resolution adapted. Exographer has a 2D gameplay, full of puzzles and platforms, with pixel art graphics and an evocative soundtrack composed by Yann Van der Cruyssen (Stray). The powers we get, the characters we meet, the locations throughout 6 atmospheres and more than 20 levels and the particles we must discover are based on particle physics. Why is Exographer not yet listed as verified for Steam Deck? At the moment, the SciFunGames title only appears on Steam listed as compatible. However, the game…
- Devlog #7: Physics in the analyses - 26 August 2024
In Exographer, you'll spend a (small) part of your time searching for new elementary particles in images closely resembling those manipulated by physicists at CERN or elsewhere. And you don't even need any prior knowledge! The game is designed to help you gradually get to grips with these seemingly complex concepts. In the example above, a cosmic ray cascade, you'll need to find a muon and an antimuon, thanks to the chain of decay of the pion into a muon and then an electron. But you'll just have to let the visual aspect guide you, and to use your selection tools, in order to achieve this. To design these puzzles, our scientific director, Raphaël Granier de Cassagnac, took direct inspiration from the history of particle physics. In fact, muons were first observed in cosmic rays, and this came as quite a surprise. Other experiments, such as the discovery of the neutrino by Reines and Cow…
- Devlog #6: Varying puzzles - 12 August 2024
To repair the giant machines of the Exographer world, you'll have to solve puzzles. To design them, our game designer Pierre-Alban Ferrer had to meet various design objectives: simple or advanced learning of a power (see devlog #3), checking players' skills, using the camera, illustrating mechanics specific to science… Puzzles based on ray redirection, for example, meet the latter two objectives. The first (scientific) inspiration are the electromagnets of particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. These are used to bend particle tracks as they travel through the tunnels to serve various experiments. In play, this curvature is greatly exaggerated to allow right-angle redirections and beam separations. This brings us close to some of the puzzles in Half Life: Alyx. LHC superconducting magnets (Image: CERN) These puzzles also require the use of a camera: electric ray…
- Devlog #5 : Designing absurd materials - 8 July 2024
In Exographer, your enemies are four materials with strange properties. One of our challenges was to represent these so-called "absurd" materials. Inherent to the gameplay, they block progress, and some are even deadly! Progressive mastery of the powers (see Devlog #3) enables you to overcome them. To ensure that they conveyed the right visual message, our graphic designer Thomas Vaulbert had to go through several iterations, striking a balance between "beware, I'm potentially lethal" and "don't hesitate to use me if you want to continue exploring the level". Graphic research to represent absurd materials The first constraint was that they had to stand out against the backgrounds, whatever zone the player was in. To ensure a strong contrast with the backgrounds, Thomas opted for materials containing a lot of dark gray or black. The second constraint was to use a light, bright color to e…
- DevLog #4: A not-so-unknown civilization? - 11 June 2024
In Exographer, you follow in the footsteps of nine enigmatic academics from a forgotten civilisation. These ‘Natitans’ once built colossal machines to discover the inner structure of matter... But they all seem to have disappeared, leaving a kind of testament behind. Like absolutely everything else in the game, these characters are directly inspired by science. In this case by real scientists, whose names have been changed. Our Dirca above is a reference to Paul Dirac, feminized for the occasion. Among the hundred or so physicists who helped establish particle physics, we had to make a difficult choice. Our scientific director, Raphael Granier de Cassagnac, has chosen the nine shown below, but 81 names are mentioned somewhere in the game, as a discreet tribute to all the others. Above: Concept art of Liaup, Waber, Shgig, Dirca, Gelma, Fenma, Rucie, Rofur and Tosom. Can you find out who…
- Exographer Next Fest Demo Stream! - 5 June 2024
Watch developers play Exographer, an exploration adventure based on science with beautiful pixel art. Steam Next Fest demo includes the first levels of the game; arriving to an alien planet, discovering new particle physics based powers and solving puzzles to access new areas. Wishlist Exographer now on Steam. Coming 2024. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2834320/Exographer/
- Exographer Next Fest Demo Stream! - 5 June 2024
Watch developers play Exographer, an exploration adventure based on science with beautiful pixel art. Steam Next Fest demo includes the first levels of the game; arriving to an alien planet, discovering new particle physics based powers and solving puzzles to access new areas. Wishlist Exographer now on Steam. Coming 2024. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2834320/Exographer/
- DevLog #3: The logic behind the power-ups - 3 June 2024
In Exographer, the character acquires powers that are directly inspired by the interactions between elementary particles. This key element of the game is also a major design challenge, which can be summed up as follows: How do you create a fun experience while staying true to the science? The first step was to gather as much information and content as possible, in this case relating to particle physics. Then the team came up with ideas, tons of ideas, trying to imagine different powers and their interactions. For example: what if we made the character stick to quark ceilings using gluonic boots? Then came the inevitable step at this stage of the design process: prototyping... on paper! Through prototypes like these, game designer Pierre-Alban Ferrer has been able to test numerous concepts with the whole team. Is it fun? Does it correspond to the type of challenge we're looking for? Is i…
- In this new Steam Metroidvania, science is both your friend and foe - 25 May 2024
While plenty of the best Metroidvania games such as Hollow Knight and Ori feature memorable combat, the defining feature of the genre remains that careful interweaving of exploration and upgrades. Following recent successes such as Animal Well comes Exographer , a new puzzler and platformer based heavily on real-world science. We at PCGamesN spoke to physicist and writer Raphaël Granier de Cassagnac and his studio SciFunGames about the inspirations for its upcoming game. Read the rest of the story...
- DevLog #2: Taking and keeping pictures - 30 April 2024
In Exographer, taking pictures reveals many clues and you can do it in any situation. That includes in the middle of an animation or while using a power, or when you’re on a moving in mid-air or in an elevator. You can take as many pictures as you like, and the last picture you took is your save point. That led to two technical challenges. The first one is about recording and restoring fidelity. Our developer, Tony Cottrel, had to make sure that everything you see on the image you capture is actually what you are going to get the moment you load back the picture. That implies recording the states of not just the player’s progression, motion, and activated powers; but also the states of puzzles, props animations, moving objects, and even some audio configurations! Of course, he also had to keep track of world elements that are located outside of the frame canvas, such as other puzzles yo…
- DevLog #1: Graphic inspiration - 15 April 2024
In Exographer, the player's progress is punctuated by the discovery of elementary particles. Most of Exographer's levels are graphically inspired by the actual scientific locations where these particles were discovered. We thought this was all the more appropriate given that these places are often gigantic, marvelous and photogenic. These include, among others: Particle colliders that are several kilometers long; Cosmic ray observatories that lies in deserts; Underground caverns that only neutrinos can reach... In the very first level, the character even walks around in an old-fashioned television, because it was in this kind of cathode ray tube that the electron was discovered. The overall game's artistic direction was set on this first level. Several archaeo-scientific options were explored, and the most realistic was chosen (bottom right below). Before tackling a new level, our graph…
