Gatekeeper was inspired to follow this HD aesthetic from an experience at World Heritage Sites which made them feel "really spiritual and charged up" to create the first track on the album, "IMAX."

While on the last day of touring in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2011, Aaron David Ross and Matthew Arkell viewed World Heritage Sites which made them feel "really spiritual and charged up.

"[2] Gatekeeper and Thomas Robak said that works with an HDIY style look or sound professionally made despite being created in a quick amount of time with non-professional material.

[2] In fact, Exo, which is entirely made out of very high-quality sounds, examines the high amount of presence of high-definition video content in everyday life and how HD technology can lead to unthinkable possibilities.

[2] At the time, Robak still had a very limited skill in creating video game-esque virtual landscapes, his only experience being his and Jon Rafman's art piece BrandNewPaintJob.exe (BNPJ-EXE) which he described as "not much better than Doom.

[2] The process of making the project involved the duo and Robak constantly sending musical and visual plans and concepts to each other without taking a break to the point where they were "pretty much living Exo.”[2] The Exo video game has a similar gameplay style to Journey (2012) and Proteus (2013), where the player goes through environments to excite his or her imagination.

A majority of the editing included numerous hours of additional audio synchronization, given that the 707 could only sync up the rhythm of all instruments perfectly for only a limited amount of time.

[3] All of the instrument channels in the Logic sessions of each song were heavily filtered, having approximately ten effects units and audio plug-ins that, in Ross's words, worked against each other.

[4] The album follows a basic narrative about a world that is created from the beginning of the LP and destroyed at the end; it starts with spiritual space sounds in "Dromos" before the record gradually gets darker to the point where an apocalypse occurs by the closing track "Encarta.

"[13] The 405's Corao Malley spotlight's the record immersive feel, writing that it "is so much more than them sum of its parts, creating its own, high-energy, high-speed world and sounding better with each passing listen.

"[19] Another mixed opinion came from Spin magazine writer Christopher R. Weingarten, who said that the LP's "intentionally chintzy acid house" ruined any sort of tension it had from sounds such as "blood drips, smoking bullet casings drop" and "a robotic slasher flick.