Playing Apotheon is like being an archaeologist exploring and unearthing the mysteries of an unknown world. You find your hands stretching thousands of years back in time to discover a story you didn’t know had unfolded. The art is immediately distinctive. While the same could be said for a fair number of independent games, this time it’s more than just a pretty background. Like the ochre-stained walls of an Athenian temple circa 500 BC, Apotheon’s characters are little more than black silhouettes. The environments are elaborate, sprawling, two-dimensional cutaways. They beg you to imagine this wondrous world in its full glory, but they resist conventional beauty.

These paintings are all we have left. Beneath that veneer is a run-of-the-mill action platformer. You make a few jumps here, and fight a few baddies there. Throughout, the minute-to-minute play stays simple. You grab weapons and shields lying around, using one button to attack, one to block, one to jump, and the two sticks to move about and aim your strikes with added precision. There's a basic crafting system as well, but it's a straightforward one. Instead, Apotheon expounds on these basic ideas with a string of apropos twists. When venturing into the underworld, for example, you often have to give up the use of a shield to navigate by torchlight, unless you've found a shield kept by the servants of the sun god, Apollo, that can light your path. Each area has something unique to uncover that make some parts of your journey harder, others easier. Such flourishes greatly add to Apotheon’s character, and support the game's mythological inspirations.

Our hero in this neo-Classical myth is Nikandreos. While not a member of the traditional Greek pantheon, his epic sticks to the conventions of Classical tragedy. In the prelude, his hometown, Dion, is out of favor with the gods. The forests have no game, the fields yield no crops, and the sky is stuck in perpetual twilight. Nikandreos, seeking to restore the mantle of humanity, journeys to Mt. Olympus, the realm of the deities. There he learns that Zeus, king of the gods, has grown to hate people and will not rest until they are destroyed.

If that sounds clichéd, that’s because, from a modern lens, it is. Apotheon eschews modern expectations, reflecting a far older brand of storytelling. Greek tragedy, and Greek heroes in particular, are far different from the super-powered defenders of good we see today. Greek heroes were flawed, difficult people who accomplished great things, though were often cruel and awful as well. Classical tragedy is even more unusual. These stories draw on themes such as the conflict between men and gods, and depict arrogant heroes that unravel themselves with acts of great hubris.

The ancients were a scared, superstitious people. We frequently forget their struggles, remembering them instead as creators of grand, monolithic civilizations. We forget these people believed not only in divine providence, but also in retribution. We forget the limits of their understanding, and that for these classic civilizations catastrophe was evidence of the wrath of the gods. From that perspective, Apotheon is hauntingly poignant.

In his quest for salvation, Nikandreos partners with Hera, queen of the gods. She’s been brewing over her husband’s many affairs and now lusts for justice. She guides Nikandreos, pointing out to him the weaknesses of the mighty Olympians. At every turn, figures from Greek myth appear--each with their own grudges, their own motives--to help Nikandreos. As he gathers power, he leaves nothing but death and destruction in his wake. Between each act, he sees that his people are suffering and dying--punished for his own arrogance. However, he, or rather we, never once waver. On we march to claim our prize, and to topple the gods.

This drama works because it’s relatable. At some point, every person who has ever lived has experienced pain. Suffering is a fundamental human experience. When we’re at our worst, we seek relief, no matter how destructive it may prove to be. The gods aren’t much different. Hera is driven by her lust for revenge, Zeus by his disappointment in his people. The other gods and goddesses you meet have their own motives, their own goals, and a slew of victims that want you to succeed. You become the vessel for hope, relief, and peace, your only failure being that you’re so damned foolhardy that you can’t see the consequences of your actions.

Apotheon shares many of its narrative threads with God of War, but the differences pile up quickly. Where God of War sticks to video game tropes, Apotheon is content to ground itself in myth. This is a fantastical world where gods and goddesses roam the earth, but beyond that, there’s no need for the suspension of disbelief. Where God of War is flashy and bombastic, Apotheon is soft and personal. Every battle is slow and careful. Each hit is quite damaging, so you hold your shield up and bide your time for a perfect strike.

Apotheon eschews modern expectations, reflecting a far older brand of storytelling.

Your weapons and shields also have limited durability. At best, a spear lasts you a few small battles. There are no flaming chain blades here. Instead, you have a small assortment of conventional blades, axes, and pikes. Shields can cover only a limited part of your body so you also have to predict the direction of incoming strikes. It’s similar to a two-dimensional Dark Souls in that respect. Unfortunately, that lack of depth is one of the few knocks against Apotheon. Repeating the block-wait-attack tactic for ten hours gets thin. The only respite is the bouts with the gods themselves.

Each deity has an individual domain with its own rules and challenges. Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, for example, transmutes you into a deer and try to lay traps to kill you. To best Athena, goddess of wisdom, you must navigate three concentric, rotating labyrinths. These contests serve two purposes. They reinforce your smallness and their godhood, and add variety to an otherwise monotonous trek.

My time with Apotheon reminded me of a conversation from the film Prometheus. David, an android, discusses with Charlie, a human, the relationship of creators and creation. David asks Charlie why people created robots. The response, “We made you because we could,” upsets David. “Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?”

Apotheon asks these same kinds of questions. Zeus, consumed with regret for how petty mankind has become, wants to unmake us. Nikandreos, having observed the same pettiness in other Olympian gods, conquers them and creates a new world where he is god. The names Apotheon and Nikandreos both allude to this chain of events, meaning “one who is elevated to godhood” and “victorious man,” respectively. Victory, and even deification then, are fated from the beginning. You will win. You are the hero, after all, but I can only wonder if in time his creation will bring him relief or despair.

I am skillfully piloting my Zorgon Peterson brand Hauler through the rotating port of one of the eighty bazillion space stations in Elite: Dangerous. I fiddle with system checks on the holographic dashboard, wearing an expression of self-satisfied disinterest. Almost casually, I flip on the landing gear, invert my ship, and reverse thrusters, deftly drifting into landing pad number 44. I'm master and commander at the far side of the galaxy. I'm an ace. I'm the Star Lord. I'm...not docking?

Well. In a Whedonesque bit of bathos, Elite: Dangerous has glitched, and instead of the chirps of the landing guidance system, I'm being rewarded with the angry, electric snapping sound of my shields grinding on raw space station. No problem--I'll just cancel my docking request and resend it. I make the requisite clicks. And that's when things go very, very bad. "TRESPASS WARNING" flashes in deadly red text, and a timer begins counting down from thirty. "Loitering is a crime punishable by death," a female voice helpfully intones over a loudspeaker, as I'm perforated by what is, frankly, an irresponsible amount of laser fire from station security. End scene.

Lasers, explosions, dystopian public service announcements...that was one of my more dramatic deaths in Elite: Dangerous, but it's actually in the routine of the parts preceding my demise that I experienced the quintessential sci-fi experience. It's the genre's unique thrill: seeing the incredible trappings of futuristic life fade into the background, turn second nature, become mundane. It's Chris Pratt punting alien lizards while dancing along to a cassette, or the way Cowboy Bebop segues from interstellar gateways to bell peppers and beef. The science is still there, of course, doing all the work to keep the cold void of space safely on the other side of the glass. But all the fussy details have been neatly elided, the edges gently worn and rounded from use. That's my kind of sci-fi, and Elite: Dangerous often delivers it, like a spacefaring Euro Truck Simulator.

But in Elite, that sort of familiarity is hard-won. Even if you do your due diligence in the game's tutorial--tampering with the controls, pitching and rolling until you can parallel park at half the speed of light--the game's vision of spaceflight simulation still proves aloof. It's quite a thing, to dump a player into a scale representation of the entire Milky Way galaxy with only the vaguest hint of direction. There's no expressed goal in Elite: Dangerous; if you're looking for signs of progress they might be found in your reputation, a one-word descriptor ranging from "Harmless" to "Elite." But you could just as easily mark your improvement by the accrual of bigger and better ships, or in cold hard credits. A few intersecting occupations are accounted for: trader or smuggler, pirate or bounty hunter… and miner for those who prefer the company of floating bits of rock.

You have the freedom to go where you will and do what you want, but friction and false starts ensure that you won't be going there very fast or doing it very efficiently for some time. There's the inscrutability of your cockpit dashboard to contend with, loaded for bear with functionality that never gets articulated. That, and the imposing galaxy map, with its disorienting scale and legion of similar-sounding star systems. There are the glitches, like the time I spawned into the game to find a shiny new "Wanted" label I'd earned for no reason, or the aforementioned docking snafu. And there's all the missing data that can only be found outside of the game, from critical trade information to a plain-words explanation of how your ship's fuel tank actually works.

It wasn't until I totalled the shiny new spacecraft I'd been loaned and tried to make a go of it with the chintzy, standard-issue Sidewinder that I came to better grasp Elite's systems. The Sidewinder's rinky-dink frame shift drive forced me to take a more considered look at the galaxy map or risk leaving myself stranded between long system jumps. The absence of a docking computer meant that I'd be guiding the little craft into station on manual instead having the autopilot unceremoniously dump me onto landing pads. Elite is at its best when it’s forcing this more deliberate level of engagement, and I wish it happened more often. Tellingly, there's a pre-flight systems checklist that you can run through every time you take off, but Elite pulls its punch and lets you opt out. Even as I write this, I'm hurtling through space on a trade run at 16.64c, window minimized. It's perfectly possible, as it turns out, to conduct an intragalactic smuggling operation en passant. All that's necessary is the occasional alt + tab to make sure I'm not about to plow headlong into a star.

Once you've gotten your space legs under you and upgraded to something resembling a viable ship, it's easy to settle into semi-comfortable routine. Check the station bulletin board for courier missions or a tantalizing bounty payout, or the commodities market for a decent-looking buy-low option. Set a course, leapfrogging from star to nearby star. Arrive at your destination system, drop out of hyperspace and into a slightly slower supercruise, and throttle down so that you don't overshoot the beacon for your target station or combat zone. Deliver your supplies, ply your wares, blow up your mark, and repeat. Profits can be reinvested in your ship once you're safely docked, towards upgraded cargo holds or, say, advanced lasers. The nuances of kitting out a good ship are as obscure as any of the rest of Elite's systems, but generously, anything bought can be sold back for the same price if it turns out you've made a colossal error. Elite is less charitable when it comes to trading outside the garage. The game plays it coy when you look for trade data in other star systems--the best you can hope for is a suggestion that "maybe" a given product is "sometimes" exported from some station therein. Often times it isn't there, however, and let me tell you: there's a real novel frustration in traveling eighty light years away to find out they're all out of tea this week.

You have the freedom to go where you will and do what you want, but friction and false starts ensure that you won't be going there very fast or doing it very efficiently for some time.

It’s enough to drive a fellow to tea piracy, which happens to be well accommodated for in Elite's laissez-faire frontier. One can buy interdiction systems that forcibly drag an NPC or a player character's ship out of supercruise, opening them up to predation should they fail a minigame of “keep the crosshairs aligned.” Thus engaged, combat unfolds with straightforward but precise dogfights, where momentum and trajectory are the secret killers, not the missiles or lasers. I confess that I’m not particularly good at this sector of Elite, whether it comes to gauging an enemy’s skill from afar, or sticking to his six in the heat of battle. I even have trouble remembering to keep my speed at the sweet spot that lets you turn quickest. But a more practiced hand can make use of the more advanced tactical offerings, redistributing power to the parts of one's ship in the most need, or pulling the slick-looking maneuvers conferred by a stick and throttle system or Oculus VR headset (the peripherals pair so naturally with Elite that the game almost seems built just to leverage them). That's a wrinkle I've yet to master, but the promise of dramatic, large-scale battles between federal armadas tucked away in distant systems is more than enough incentive to learn the ropes. Would that you could effectively team up with other players to run them--Elite’s tools for inter-player cooperation are almost nonexistent.

The little joys of Elite: Dangerous' solo play suffice, though. Peals of thunder rumble past your ship in supercruise, and I don’t care if they're as fake as the pumped-in crowd noise at the Georgia Dome, because they sound great. Ditto for the sudden, 18-wheeler horn that accompanies a drop out of hyperspace into close proximity with a giant, iridescent star. The hottest of these visibly cook your ship if you get too close, which happens to be a requirement if you want to use a fuel scoop to replenish your stores on the fly. They're also functional light emitters in the game's engine, and you can see the shadow of your craft ripple down the side of a station if you get between the two bodies. There are a few curiosities out in the ether, too, though they’re harder to appreciate if you’re not an astrophysics hobbyist. For example, the chance discovery of a station orbiting, well, nothing, struck me as odd. There’s a term for this, apparently: a “LaGrange Point,” but instead of making me contemplate the wonder of the universe, it mostly brought ZZ Top to mind. Still, this a game where light years can be hopped in a moment, and yet the prospect of traveling from one end of Elite's map to the other remains inconceivable. It's hard to overstate how remarkable that is, how the simple act of playing a game can engender such an acute awareness of size and scale.

It's an accomplishment in its own right, but that breadth doesn't come into play elsewhere in the experience. Like most space sims, Elite: Dangerous partitions the universe into discreet "rooms," in this case representing individual star systems. At a glance, it appears that almost a third of these systems purport to be in open rebellion, though you'd never know it from the pervasive quiet. Slaves are purchasable and tradable commodities, an inclusion that's sometimes played for ironic humor in the missions but usually rings as off-putting. The only way to interact with that underbelly of rebellion and slavery is from the comfort of my captain's chair, through a market speculation interface or a salvo of missiles. I pick up contracts for the assassination of high-ranking government officials on the same screen that I get my tea delivery requests.

The old problem remains: when time and distance are bumped out to these impossible ranges, the only systems capable of following them out there are the most discreet and elastic ones. Trade just happens to scale well, a daisy chain of supply to demand, demand to supply, all the way to the white nothing at the edge of the universe. Perhaps the next true frontier is the search for a procedural generation system that can create something more ostentatious, something that can surprise…something not so visibly derived from an underlying system of ones and zeroes. But then, maybe it's there in Elite: Dangerous, in its way, and the problem is that I need to learn to start being more impressed by LaGrange points.