Osmos Reviews

good

Osmos is a game that admittedly is somewhat special to me, in light that it was one of the items acquired for the still-deemed-to-be-almost-completely-insignificant 8th Grade Graduation event in 2010, yet also a completely baffling, confounding, fundamentally broken experience. I haven't the foggiest of clues how literally [b]anyone[/b] could try to play through 2 of the three level branches in-game, and not only deem it a [b]finished product[/b] that's ready to send to market, but also charge $10 for it. Similarly, I very much want to know which game everybody that pushed its Metacritic Score up to [b]EIGHTY[/b] was playing, and/or how much of it was done so before passing judgement. To delve into what's wrong with this slow, plodding, almost-entirely-unengaging disaster, I first need to have you, dear reader, imagine you're playing literally any game with a level (style of game doesn't matter), and end goal for said stage. Now imagine that instead of making sure you have even the [b]chance[/b] of [b]starting to play[/b] this level, you instead need to repeatedly pause and generate a new map to make sure the game bothers giving you collision to stand on, then literally anything else that's needed to clear said stage. I would say “This is at least two levels in Osmos”, however, this analogy is not over, because even if the game you're imagining gives you a starting piece of terrain, allows you to move within it, and grants you the equipment needed to have a chance at beating the stage, no guarantee exists the end goal was generated alongside it, This is to say that after spending sometimes up to 10 minutes trying to beat this stage, you can be at the second to last action needed to fulfil the objective, only to find the switch you needed to push, unit you needed to spawn, and/or edge of the platform you need to jump from to get to the goal is completely missing. Guess what this means you need to do? Keep generating a new map until the basics are granted, then hope the game gave you a complete level that can finished this time around. [b][u]This is to say that levels in Osmos are not designed, they're generated, and not only that, seemingly nothing by any flags, checks, or programs are in-place to make sure said stage can be completed was bothered to be programmed[/u][/b], making the gameplay loop “play until you get stuck on a level, regenerate said level until you can even start to play it, and hope that the system blessed you with the apparently unheard-of privilege of being able to beat said stage. I have gone back to this game at least twice since acquiring it almost 15 years ago, and each time, I reached a “level” that's not only entirely reliant on RNG to be able to not only do anything at-all in, but seemingly completely unable to be finished. The first revisit saw one of the “Force” clusters be perpetually beyond even beginning, and while the A3B cluster seemed doable at first, after – no joke – at least 30 restarts, 1 hour and a half wasted, and only 15 that I wasn't completely blocked out of doing anything with, none of those were finished. It gets worse, though, because in order to have a chance at defeating any enemy (in this case stationary blobs for most of the levels I bothered even trying to play) you – so to speak – need to take health from yourself, and give it to whichever adversary you may be facing. This already sounds completely unreasonable, but once you assimilate the “Health” of the other enemy, you grow to their size, unable to get through corridors, and use weaker ones to hope to try and beat the bigger ones, while hoping beyond hope nothing happens to give imperative health to your adversary, causing it to grow bigger, and completely block you off from progressing. [b][u]The fundamental laws of game design state:[/u][/b] 1: If you must have a randomiser take the place of intentional design, include checks, and flags, then redundancy on redundancy to make sure every level can be completed via player agency, and skill, rather than the randomiser putting everything in. 2: Once these are in-place, make absolutely sure that everything it makes can be consistently completed, playing each level multiple times, and perhaps have multiple people also do so, to increase the amount of tested instances/generations. 3: Once everything is confirmed to be working [b][u]then[/u][/b] publish it. As such, we reach the [b][u]Verdict:[/u][/b] A seemingly-untested, unfinished-feeling frustration-fest that relies entirely on luck to allow the player to do anything, with two levels either taking hours of restarts to beat, or otherwise are completely impossible to finish. [b][u]Placed In:[/u][/b] Were this acquired on any other occasion, I would have 0 qualms whatsoever about ousting it from my account such that I never have the temptation to be disappointed by it in the future again, but as it stands, it's shakily at 6: Traumatically Toxic, and “Remove it anyway.”