Cosmic Top Secret Reviews

Really interesting and curious game, where you feel like you're part of T's journey to find out the story about her parents job. The controls take some practice to get hang on, but it's an exciting story to follow, and really a different game , you feel like you're inside the mind of the protagonist and trying to get the hang of all the thought strings.

I haven't been playing for long, but my initial impressions are that it is very, very good. It quickly drew me in with good storytelling, surreal yet deeply coherent visual design and surprising gameplay.

I love the use of a game to unravel real family (and Cold War) history, and the very literal cut-and-paste use of actual photographs, videos and documents. I sometimes had trouble adjusting the camera viewpoint in the later levels, but that's not a big issue. Rolling around as a crumpled paper ball was no problem on a PC at least. A slightly surreal, lo-fi gem with a simple, collect-em-all logic.

This game first caught my eye at a game festival a few years ago. It has some really neat mechanics that make it a lot of fun to play. I was taken right away with the idea of rolling around as a crumpled up piece of paper. You’ll do a lot of exploring in 3D environments, and the developers made sure that rolling, jumping and even flying around in these areas is fun and easy. So the game has mechanics and controls that probably everyone will easily understand. But what makes indie games like this so fascinating is that they broaden our perspective on what games can be. In addition to the clever graphical style, for example, this game sometimes morphs into something that’s part personal documentary and part history lesson (Cold War era and early computer history). What impressed me more than anything, though, was the sense of humor in the game. I found it tremendously funny in a kind of low-key but omnipresent way. My favorite part of the game was flying around in a paper airplane on a reenacted spy mission. I don’t play many flying games, but I found the controls here just right and, again, pretty easy to pick up. Don’t be discouraged by the puzzles. There are a few, but they’re not difficult, and once you do the first couple of them, you’ll basically know the drill. (And I think there’s even a walkthrough online somewhere for the first couple of levels.)

A nice, short puzzle that gives a very personal perspective on the Cold War era Overall, this game by far exceeded my expectations. It has a unique art design and some good puzzles and the levels are quite different. It is not a hard game, but pleasing and relaxing to explore. The main strength is following the journey of a woman getting to know her parents better. It has an interesting backdrop of secrecy about the Cold war, but really, the relation to the parents is more important. No serious bugs encountered, only a few graphic glitches. Re-play value is probably little. I spent a lot of time exploring the levels to collect everything and completed in about 10 hours. Just following the main story, the game can probably be completed in half the time. While a lot of attention is paid to historical accuracy, some artistic freedom still is present. Depending on your mood, you may be amused or annoyed to find [spoiler]a Danish fighter pilot on a reconnaissance flight in a soviet MiG-23![/spoiler]

Cosmic Top Secret is interesting. As the store summary says, it's a documentary game about a woman (T) trying to discover her parents' past as Danish Intelligence workers during the Cold War, but it's not particularly academic. The narrative is quite personal and close to T and her family, with their relationship sometimes overshadowing the Cold War topic itself - whether this is good or not depends on your taste in documentaries, though I personally found it quite endearing. Otherwise, the game is a mixed bag. The cardboard cutout collage visuals are striking and the sound design is generally strong, but I found the music quite grating at times. The gameplay is... not great. It's something of a collectathon platformer(?), but the movement is [i]remarkably[/i] crappy. You click and drag to roll your character in the direction of where your cursor is pointing, which causes minor freakouts whenever the cursor brushes across an object between the camera and where you want to go (a constant problem when trying to navigate in tight spaces). You right click and drag to move the camera, click to interact, and flick the mouse to jump. It's all mouse-driven, and as far as I can tell there aren't even optional keyboard bindings for anything except the jump, which is worse than a good flick and which can't be chained in mid-air. You also can't move the camera and move yourself at the same time, and you need to click on the character and drag away to start moving. It's a truly awful control scheme, but there aren't any platforming challenges that make it more than a general annoyance. Enjoyable overall, if not without some jank.

I enjoyed this game thoroughly, the weird presentation, aesthetic, simple but engaging gameplay and the fact I don't know if this was all real, lore, troll or a History Channel documentary makes it all even better. Also it has a heartwarming ending.

Cosmic Top Secret is unlike anything I have ever played. It's a story about relationships, secrets and the cold war all wrapped in a very charming and forgiving collect-a-thon with puzzle elements. The graphics are composed entirely of paper and cardboard with pictures on it, which is very fitting since it uses declassified documents from the Danish Security and Intelligence Service to tell the story. The way that CTS stands out from other games with a focus on collection, is the significance of each piece you collect. Every piece of intel has a story or fact tied to it, you'll recieve cursory knowledge of for example [spoiler]the cold war, T's parents, T herself and cryptography[/spoiler]. It took me about 7 hours to reach full completion, including going through all the video and audio material. Getting those last pieces was really worth it, so I suggest you aim for full completion as well. Cosmic Top Secret is my game of the year. Also a quick note, most of the audio is in Danish, which is my first language - I played the game using English subtitles and I imagine it still holds up, even if you don't know Danish.

Cosmic top secret is quite a peculiar game. It has a very unique art-style where landscapes and characters are made of carboard, paper and photography cuts. The game is a mix of documentary and collecthaton with some puzzle elements. It tells a very personal story recollected by T, the game dev director and player in the game, whose parents used to work for the Danish Intelligence during the cold war. The game felt like an homage of T to her aging parents while showing how "growing up in the clandestine climate of the cold war" affected her. This is a Danish game and most of the voiceovers are original audio and video interview recordings, so the game is mostly in Danish with English subtitles. I found the game very well done. It talks about serious topics but presents them with a light and amusing way that incite us to keep playing and discover more. We will learn things about various subjects such as cryptography and the first Danish computer. The game also has some mini-games such as grenade throwing or piloting a paper plane. The gameplay consists mostly of walking around and collecting various pieces of intels while interacting with different characters and objects. Each intel consists of either a "declassified" Intelligence or personal document from the past. The game has 5 levels and in order to progress, we have to find 9 special pieces of intel, each giving or hinting at a certain digit, the digits forming a code to access the next level. But there are way more intels to collect if we want to fully explore the game content. Collecting and completing each series of intels will unlock an interview/documentary video about a certain topic. After finishing the 5 chapters, it is possible to go back to any levels in order to collect the intels we missed the first time and unlock every videos. The game can be fully played with a mouse, but mouse controls are awkward and need some time getting used to. It took me a while to understand how to jump with the mouse. But jumping is only really required if we want to collect every pieces of intels in the game. It is also possible to play the game with a controller, but I haven't tried it. In all, it is a very original niche game that is quite fun to play after we get used to the controls. I would recommend it to anyone who would like to play something "different" and would be interested to get a glimpse of the times during the cold war.

I bought this game thinking it was going to be a goofy comedy with weird visuals. It is this but it is also so much more. The story is a straight up documentary of a daughter interviewing her father and mother who were both involved in some high level secret stuff during the Cold War. A lot of the game revolves around you exploring a map and discovering recordings, intel, photographs anything that relates to the daughter, T’s, life or her parents and colleagues. You find the intel, solve a 9 digit code and get to the next level. Each level takes about an hour to play. --------------- [h1] PROS [/h1] + art. Let’s just get this out the way because it’s the first thing you see on the store page. The art is bizarre. It is all carboard cut outs which are drawn on one side and then are just natural on the back. You scrunch up into a little ball and roll around like Sonic the Hedgehog (but the controls are not good, see CONS). + immersive. For a game that looks the way it does, it sure does make a good point of keeping you deeply involved in the story by giving you lots of real life recordings, videos, documents, photographs, snippets of daily life. + its not just about the Cold War. There is a level of storytelling that moves away from the parents and their roles as intelligence agents. The story inverts and takes a look at T’s secrets, her pains, her quite frankly weird life. It must have been so strange as a kid and teenager to never really “know” your parents. In the videos and recordings they are masters of deflecting questions and changing the subject. It would have been a very frustrating upbringing for me and I could feel that although T loves her family with all her heart she has been so calm and patient with them, waiting for this day. + quirks ahoy! There are so many little powerups and things you will find along the way that keep the game fresh and interesting. I don’t really want to say what they are because that will ruin the experience I think. + unique. I haven’t really seen or played anything like this before. + puzzles. There are puzzles but they weren’t overly hard. There were only a couple where I had to rethink what I was doing. The game is fairly self explanatory. ___________________ [h1] CONS [/h1] - Movement. Oh my my. The movement is just terrible. I admit I did get used to it and I was much more adept towards the end. There was a lot of cursing going on before that though as this really bad, mouse only, controlling drove me up the wall. I think it might be because this released on PC and mobile and it is more suited to a touchscreen control. - Its all about the tudse bridges yo. (I have no idea if my take on Danish slang even works. Let me know below). It is a short game and could probably be completed a bit faster than I did my playthrough. So you might want to pick this up on a sale. ___________________ I want more of this. And I am sure I’m not alone. I have always said that games are an excellent medium for documentaries. We have games like That Dragon, Cancer and Kursk. We have excellent fictional narratives like Edith Finch, why not do the same with true stories? We also of course have excellent directors’ commentaries in tons of our favourite games. Devolver gave us a gamescon right here on Steam to play during the COVID-19 lockdown. There is a wealth of potential here and I am definitely dying to see some more high quality playable documentaries. If you are looking to expand your Steam library with some more diverse games, then Cosmic Top Secret is unlike anything you have ever seen before.