Games of the Year: Osmos

Move, devour smaller creatures, get bigger and devour more. Become the biggest little glob. The lifestyle is one of nature’s most basic, and found all across the globe in jungles, forests, fast food joints, and shopping supercenters across this scale-busting nation. In Hemisphere Games’ Osmos, it’s the fundamental game design.

We’ve seen this type of play many times before, most recently and similarly in Jenova Chen‘s excellent senior-thesis turned flash game turned PSN downloadable title, flOw.  But, as a testament to the beauty of creativity and know-how of each title’s creators, these two independently-developed titles share little in common beyond their foundational design.

Jonathan Blow, outspoken industry critic and developer of the intelligent and incomparable Braid, said this about Osmos in a September 7th, 2009 blog entry:

“Those who follow this blog know that I don’t recommend games very often. So you know that when I do, I really mean it.”

“Relatively speaking, a lot of independent game designers are trying to be experimental these days, and the problem I see with most of these games is that they don’t understand their own ideas — after playing, one feels that there was a lot of potential in the ideas that went unexplored, that the game never saw in the first place.”

“Osmos isn’t like that. It starts with an idea that several games have done before: you’re a cell and you eat guys that are smaller than you in order to get bigger. To this it adds the idea that makes the game stand out: This game is going to generally adhere to the nature and feel of physics in space; for example, momentum is conserved, so you need to eject your own mass in order to move. The game then explores the consequences of these ideas and ventures through a rich territory of additions that are all naturally suggested by the game’s premise.”

“It rings with that faint and distant sound of truth: because the game is based around laws of physics, it immerses you in these and you learn something about them. Perhaps not anything you didn’t already know in an abstract intellectual way, if you took physics classes in school; but here, you get a feel for them, so they become more real, more tangible. This game can change your perspective.”

Even before I saw Blow’s enthusiastic recommendation, which no doubt would’ve inspired me to buy and play the title, I noticed it buried in the “Indie” channel of premier gaming digital distro platform, Steam. I downloaded the demo, of course, along with demos for a dozen or so other titles, including the visually striking Vigil: Blood Bitterness and it’s mostly two-tone color scheme, the at-one-time controversial Eternity’s Child, and many others so terrible I wiped them from both my memory and my computer’s. Apologies to the unnamed, but please, seek feedback and be receptive towards it whenever possible.

Of the dozen or so titles I played, Osmos stuck out like a beautiful extended note in a sea of wrongly tuned instruments playing my favorite songs. Blow’s right in everything he said, developer Hemisphere games takes the “gimmick” of moving this circular mass incrementally with carefully planned clicks and fleshes the mechanics out considerably. In some levels, the player is free to roam a massive arena, exploring and feeding at will. Restraint is placed on movement in others, and the player is forced to eject their mass carefully, and as little as possible, into larger objects, enabling passage to smaller items more fit for consumption. The idea of “feeling” for the laws of physics, as Blow alluded, possibly comes into play most during scenarios where this thoughtless and emotionless player-controlled entity is placed in orbit around a much larger thoughtless and emotionless object. Here, the goal remains the same, as do the tools, but play centers more directly on the mechanics of movement during flow. Traveling backwards is still an option, but at a high cost of energy expulsion. For a real world comparison, try tubing down a river or creek.

Time itself may be sped up or slowed down in all of the aforementioned situations, but never paused. I don’t use the feature, but I can see why others might. Dragging movement down to a crawl allows more fine-tuning, and might help alleviate stress for those less capable of reacting to situations on-the-fly. Speeding up time may be most appropriately applied in situations where…well, any. An in-game tip recommends using the feature “while waiting for impasses to clear,” but the implementation’s up to players. Personally, I find the time mechanics unnecessary. The added complexity overshadows the beautiful simplicity of the one-click control method (if we’re controlling basic lifeforms, then isn’t a basic level of control fitting? ‘Sup Spore.). But the tradeoff may be necessary to allow a greater audience of less-skilled players access to and enjoy this phenomenal title. If Hemisphere responds to my email asking why the feature was included, I’ll update this post with the response.

For a title about consuming blue blobs with a bigger blue blog, Osmos feature an unexpectedly poignant narrative. There’s no plot or story, or even a goal beyond “Become the biggest.” The connection between visuals and soundtrack fuel the emotional weight. Not since I viewed Danny Boyle’s masterpiece of space exploration, Sunshine, has the calm and vastness of space been conveyed in a visual medium as effectively to me as Osmos. Cosmic and microscopic are one in the same with the right level of perception.

Sunshine’s visuals and the constant traveling of the protagonists aboard Icarus II set those feelings in motion, with the music providing capable emotional support. The situation here is reversed. The soundtrack from Loscil, Gas/High Skies, Julian Neto, Biosphere, and many more artists, frames the solace, security, fear, and futility of never comprehending the unknown science of a universe reluctant to unveil its secrets. The player’s goal is basic and understood, but the music implies it’s a small role in a much bigger, and more complex, whole. The setup’s similar to a Hitchcockian tease, but with the exploration of sound as the primary device. Students, take special notice.

Osmos is currently available for the low low price of $10 from Direct2drive, Steam, and developer’s official site. If you can, buy it skip the middlemen and buy it from Hemisphere. They deserve every last cent. For the soundtrack it looks like you’ll have to hit up the individual artists and their albums, Myspace pages, etc. to hear the compositions outside of the game. As far as I can tell, Hemisphere has yet to compile the songs into a complete purchasable soundtrack.

“…it’s surprisingly hard to make a game “relaxing,” while at the same time steering clear of “boring.” A lot of work went into tweaking the game, physics, sound/music ,and visuals such that these two seemingly conflicting goals are in balance.” ~ Andrew Nealen, Hemisphere Games team member speaking to Bitmob.