Osmos doesn’t grab your attention much in a glance. Play it and you’ll find it an exquisite little game. If you’re a science nerd like myself, I bet Osmos will make you smile when you see the levels it has to offer. Slow, yet beautiful and alluring, it revolves around the simple premise of growing your cell and defeating other cells that compete in this ‘primordial soup’.
If you’ve played Spore, you’ll remember the first cell stage, which was arguably one of the best stages in Spore. Osmos is a lot like that with some differences. These other cells(called motes) do not have any intelligence in them. Their movement depends entirely on physics. Bump into them and they start moving. The faster you go the more momentum you have.
The catch here is that to accelerate and steer yourself, you’ll have to propel your mote with its own matter which means the more you accelerate/steer the smaller your mote gets. This leads to some interesting resource management like situations where you need to just give your mote the gentlest of nudges to move where the smaller motes are.
There are three types of levels, one in where your objective is to grow huge. The first few stages are pretty straight forward and do not offer much of a challenge. The later levels of this sort become more like a puzzle game as you are blocked by motes bigger than you(if you touch them they absorb you). You need to nudge them a side by propelling streams of yourself against them and inch your way in.
The next type of levels have AI motes that have certain attributes. Some of them run away from you, some chase after you when they are big, some are aggressive and absorb smaller motes, some a more passive. The later levels have multiple of these AI motes and it becomes a rush to get the early smaller motes.
The final type of levels are the most magnificent ones. Called the ‘force’ levels, they involve a heavy gravity matter in the center(often acting like a sun in a solar system) that cause all the motes around them to swirl around this matter. I can’t tell you how cool this looks and it reminds me so much of Keppler’s law of planetary motion and Einstein's general theory of relativity. If you fling your motes just at the right angle and momentum, it will start to orbit around this matter. move to fast and you’ll spiral out of orbit.
Osmos is a slow paced game. You’ll be waiting for your mote to travel across the level most of the time and thankfully you can speed up time(and even slow down time to make minute adjustments). The music is relaxing and adds to the ambience of the game. It’s also not a very long game but for the price of USD$9.99, it’s a great appetiser of a game. Relax, sit back, and let Osmos charm you with its simple, elegant, physics based gameplay.
Price : USD$9.99
Rating : 8/10
Buy it here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/29180/
Demo:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/29200/
