While you're busy floating around, other motes are constantly banging into one another, and since only one survives the collision, it means that other motes are continually growing in size. It's all about conserving your momentum and efficiently intercepting other floating motes so you can gracefully grow, which in turn enables you to set your sights on bigger cells. Instead, you need to finesse your moves, gently setting off in the right direction without excreting too much of your mote's mass. Not only that, but it'll have left behind a trail of bubbles that other motes might absorb to make them expand. Tap too many times, and your mote might lose too much of its mass, and by the time it reaches its target, it'll have shrunk to a size too small to absorb it. It's here where the game's challenge can be found. So off you go, tap-tapping your mote to start it moving towards a smaller mote. On most levels, the objective is to become the biggest mote, which means absorbing all the other cellular organisms that are floating around the playfield. This mechanic isn't just true for you, but for every mote that exists on the screen. Likewise, hitting a bigger mote results in the larger mass absorbing your mote, causing it to shrink the longer it's in contact with the bigger body. Other motes gently float around the playfield, and if you collide with a smaller one, your mote absorbs its mass, and correspondingly grows in size. In other words, as you fly around the screen, your mote essentially shrinks.
OSMOS IPAD REVIEW SERIES
The way it propels itself is by excreting a small portion of its cellular mass as a series of bubbles. The player basically takes control of a single-celled organism called a mote that can float around the scrolling 2D playfield in any direction. It could be called an arcade game, but it also has an odd sort of dynamic puzzle overtone.
OSMOS IPAD REVIEW PC
So I re-downloaded it and immediately got sucked right back into its weird and wonderful action.ĭesigned by Canadian developer Hemisphere Games and originally released on PC and Mac back in 2009, it's difficult to categorize exactly what kind of game Osmos really is. It was one of the very first games I bought for my iPad back in 2010, and I'd forgotten just how much I loved playing it.
However, one of the titles that did catch my eye was Osmos. Since most of them cost next to nothing, I preferred to delete them to make way for something new. It's just that most of the games that I've bought over the years I played a lot when I first downloaded them, but just didn't feel the need to go back to them again. There are, and I'll be talking about them in future Digital Gems articles. That's not to say there aren't plenty of superb iPad games that offer long-term appeal. For me, most iPad games tend to offer limited engagement: Pastimes that are fun to play for a while, but whose novelty wears off sooner than most PC and console games.
To be honest, there wasn't much that I fancied re-downloading. In addition to the iPad version, Osmos is available for Linux, Mac & Windows.Last weekend, I was at a bit of a loose end, so I thought I'd spend some time rooting through my old iPad game purchases to see if I could find something worth replaying. If you’re not familiar with Osmos, it’s a physics-based game that features dreamlike visuals and a striking electronic soundtrack. The controls are simple, precise, and the use of finger gestures to do things like speed up time and access the menu are all wonderful, and make the game feel like it was designed from the ground up for an iOS device. That’s not even getting into the actual gameplay, which is astounding. Experiencing the game aurally as well as visually adds so much to the game, as it puts you into the mood of the game in a way that playing on mute or even just through the speakers cannot accomplish. The ambient soundtrack is amazing as well, and is very much deserving of headphones, as the game suggests you should do at the beginning. As well, the zooming is exceptionally done, as you can go from seeing exceptionally detailed motes to seeing the entire game board in a second with no slowdown at all. The graphics are simple but detailed, and feature great effects, from being able to see the other motes in the level shift color from being completely orange, to slowly get blue edges, to becoming all the way blue.
Hemisphere Games has brought its ambient game Osmos to the Apple iPad, and it’s a winner:
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