Kosong Sen - Dyson

Kosong Sen is a series that covers free games that are free to play. Since I'm on a roll with Indie games, this weeks game will be another indie game.

The game is called Dyson. Developed by Alex May and Rudolf Kremers, It is described as(from the official site):

Dyson is an ambient real-time strategy game with abstract visuals.

Remotely command semi-autonomous self-replicating mining machines to take over an entire asteroid belt.

Dyson has recently been nominated as a finalist for this year IGF awards in the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.




From the outset, the game has 5 levels and is about colonising all the asteroids(big circles) in a level. You do this by sending your dyson seeds(some sort of cross between plant seedling and animal) to take over other other asteroids.




You get dyson seedlings by creating a dyson plant. The more dyson plants you have on that asteroid, the more seedlings it will generate. Asteroids have three attributes, energy, strength, and speed. Energy determines the health points of your dyson seedlings, strength determines your seedlings attack power, and speed determines its movement speed as well as regeneration speed.




The dyson seedlings pop out of the trees you plant. The faster they grow, the faster you get the seedlings. Apart from planting trees, you can also plant a defense tree which sort of acts like an anti air units that fires at nearby enemy units. You have limited slots to build trees so you must decided how many dyson trees to plant and defense trees to balance things out.

The other asteroids hold other dyson species that won't stay dormant. They will attack you if you do nothing. The longer you wait, the stronger the enemy gets as their dyson plants would have grown bigger. The bigger asteroids will hold more enemy dyson seedlings while the smaller once have less resistance. You can use this to plan your attack.




It is very important to take the initiative and colonise the other asteroids as you will have the momentum if you have a lot of asteroid on your side. You could use the dyson seedlings from other asteroids you have to reinforce asteroids that have a lack of seedlings that need to be defended. You can also use your other seedlings from other asteroids to attack strongly held enemy asteroids(to break their defense).

A lot of content in the game are procedurally generated from the type of seedlings, to the growth of the dyson tree which is all technically impressive and cool if you are into that sort of geeky thing.




The art style is minimalist and employs soft colours. It sort of follows the theme of a Jenova Chen game that usually has a relaxing calming vibe. The music compliments this style and sounds soothing. The gameplay is not as relaxing as it looks and there is definitely the pressure to conquer all.

Behind the calming exterior, deep down Dyson makes you question your motivation to subjugate other Dyson species as you go on this aggressive campaign of assimilating all asteroids. Quite haunting in this day and age of war, intolerance and forcing your opinion on others.

Link : http://www.dyson-game.com/