Eddy here, lead dev on Osmos. Thanks so much for your great writeup on the game. Really thoughtful stuff, and I enjoyed your musical/narrative perspective on things.

Anyways, I just wanted to respond to your question about time-warping. At its most basic level, it’s a way to allow the player to adjust the pacing (and thereby, sometimes, the diffculty) of the game. For instance, the Biophobe can be caught *much* more easily by slowing down time when moving in “for the kill.” And for the impasse (very dense) levels, speeding up time allows you to click less (without having to wait a long time), which becomes important as things get more difficult. Finally, my favorite analogy for it is deep-space travel. In some of the late, deep ambient levels, you’re so tiny and the scale of things is huge. Once you’ve planned a trajectory, you can go into a kind of “cryogenic sleep” by speeding up time. Once you’re close to your target, you can brings things back to normal, or even slow things down to a “bullet time” speed and really fine-tune the interception of your target. Then, choose your next target, and repeat…

I agree with you that it adds a complexity to the game-controls, but it also allowed us to play with spatial scales a lot more on the different levels — without boring players, or turning it into a twitchy game. Hope we succeeded!

Thanks,
Eddy