Osmos Review

BY Nicholas Rego | POSTED: 02 September 2009

Give some mote love.



I’m often told that I have a great job – all I have to do is play games on end, and then write about them. But a reviewer’s life isn’t that simple – more often than not, we’re forced to sit down and play games that contort our thumbs with their confusing controls, liquidize our brains with their crippling difficulty, or make us scream in terror at their agonizing soundtracks.  It is a sacrifice that I’m willing to make, because every once in a while there comes a real gem of a game that makes my job just that little bit more worth while.



We’ve been emailed in the past by smaller gamer studios to review their creations, and our latest subject up for review is Osmos from Hemisphere Studios. Available for purchase at the ridiculous price of $10, the game is oddly reminiscent of  my early Biology classes in high school, where we’d spend hours looking at lethargic cells under a microscope. It’s unclear whether Osmos is meant to be set in the voids of space or in a petri dish, but regardless it’s a fascinating journey.

You start off as a humble spherical ‘mote’, drifting around in a sea of bigger motes. Your objective is to absorb (in other words hug to death) other smaller motes in order to grow in size, and thus absorb even bigger motes. This may seem like a simple task, and truthfully for the first few seconds you can actually stay perfectly still and let other motes collide into you, however it doesn’t stay simple for long. In order to move around the level, you need to propel yourself forward, but each time you do this you have to sacrifice some of your mass. So that tasty mote that you were following around the level is actually now twice your size, and has a rather evil grin on its face.  This eternal game of cat and mouse is really what makes Osmos different – rather than pointlessly swimming around sucking up everything in your path, you have to play with a bit more reserve and tact, so that you avoid being absorbed by larger motes while still managing to grab some smaller ones.

Apart from the very smooth and dreamlike movements of the motes, the other thing that will get your attention is the game’s music. Featuring very funky electronica and ambient noises, you can’t help but relax a little bit as you speed around the level. Though the action in some levels don’t always match up with the background score, it is nevertheless a wonderful soundtrack to drift around the level to. To mix the gameplay up a bit, the levels introduce other special types of motes that you have to absorb, which in turn can propel away from you. If you can’t seem to get catch a mote in time, the game does allow you to slow down or speed up time, and the soundtrack follows suit. After a few hours of gameplay, your soothing gameplay experience will be scattered with bouts of frustration as you try to finish some of the more challenging levels available. And should you get really stuck, you can ‘randomize’ a level’s mote arrangement, so you can give things a go from a different angle.



Osmos really just has one purpose in its gameplay, and though it doesn’t change the gameplay too much in each level, it is still a great game to play when you just want a break from blowing up things and taking over the world. While it may seem an easy game at first, you’ll soon be surprised by some of the later levels, and truly appreciate the amount of time and effort that a small studio has put into this game.