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...

Read the rest at IPR's Multimedia Blog.