Osmos

My expectations for Osmos were relatively low. After all, I picked it up for $2.00 during the steam thanksgiving sale in 2009. However, after 5 minutes of playing it, I had bought it as a gift for everyone else that I knew who had a steam account. Maybe it's the nerd in me. Maybe it's the fact that trance/electronica has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. It could also be how beautiful this game looks in motion. Whatever it is, this game clicked with me in a way that few other games have in my roughly 20 years of playing video games.

In concept, the gameplay of Osmos is similar to that of Katamari Damacy . The player is a Galaxy, a small sphere flying through the nethers of space. Galaxies that are smaller than you are shown as blue and can be absorbed- adding their mass to yours, but if you make contact with a galaxy larger than your own, you are absorbed and the level must be restarted. The controls are physics based, but very simple to understand. To propel your galaxy in a certain direction an amount of the players mass must be expelled in the opposite direction. This adds a price for movement as the player will shrink with every subtle nudge making it harder to absorb more galaxies. Therefore a level of finesse is encouraged as sending your galaxy careening through space will rarely (if ever) end happily. While the concept may seem simple, the game does a very good job of providing a large variety of ways in which your galaxy interacts with those around it. Some missions will have you orbiting attractors (black holes) while others see you racing another "living galaxy" to see who can absorb the other first. Luckily, they introduce the concepts of inertia, orbiting, time control and other sentient galaxies with an appropriately paced learning curve. However, some of the later levels can be devilishly tricky to complete and you will most likely be retrying some of them more than a few times. The game offers a branching mission structure, so if the player is more fond of a certain type of gameplay, Osmos doesn't force the player to complete missions he/she doesn't particularly care for.

The game's presentation does a great job of captureing all of the wonder, beauty and mystery of outer space. Light flickers from within colliding galaxies, black holes shimmer with dark shades of gravitational force and a wake of stardust emanates from your galaxy as you drift along. The soundtrack is comprised of a very satisfying list of techno and house tracks that greatly accentuates the feeling of floating through the cosmos. The game is one that is experienced through sight and sound as much as it is through actually playing it. I myself am guilty of loading up a favorite level just to sit back and watch the galaxies spin.

Osmos is one of those games that is greater than the sum of it's parts. It does what it does so perfectly and with such a deep understanding of what it is that I can't recommend it enough. Everyone I've shown it to has appreciated it in one way or another. I feel that this is a game that everyone should play or see at least once.