Osmos is being put out by Hemisphere Games, and there are far worse things you could do with an hour than trying out its free demo.You play as a little glob of matter, possibly some kind of microbial lifeform. You can crash into blobs that are smaller than you to absorb them, and grow in size, but contacting a blob which is bigger than you will result in you getting eaten.
You move by firing off some of your mass in the opposite direction; losing mass in this way makes you smaller, but can put you on a trajectory to absorb other blobs. When you're smaller, you're faster and more manoueverable, but when you're larger you're in less danger of getting eaten.
The demo's quite short - you can blow through it in about 30 minutes - but it sells the concept well enough. The controls are simple, the ambient music is relaxing, and the gameplay is compelling. Like all the games I've been talking about over the last few days, it's a 2009 Independent Games Festival finalist, and it appears to be one of the better ones, so go get your hands on it and form an opinion for yourself.
3 comments:
I really liked this one, especially chasing the Scaredy around. Great fun herding it into a corner and watching it madly throwing globs off all over the place in an effort to.....confuse me? :)
It took me ages to catch the Scaredy; I in fact failed my first attempt because I ejected so much matter going after it that I let another blob become bigger than me and eat me.
Yeah, it's deceptively hard because the Scaredy will expend nearly all its mass getting away from you, whereas you have to maintain some sort of size. The blobs are very pretty as well, I love the way they glow when they assimilate a smaller blob, and the white glow where they touch.
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