Osmos

8 Different Gameplay modes with up to 9 difficulty levels each: Playable in “Arcade” or “Odyssey”

Aesthetically Engaging: cells look incredible up close and far away, strong perspective-based experience, music is top-notch

Great value: easy to pick up, hard to master, good enough to warrant endless play

Color Palette can get old: changes to the standard base navy-blue would be refreshing

No Endless Play: each instance is confined to an arena

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Hemisphere Games’ Osmos has been out on PC for about a year now, but only recently released their IP port this past August. It’s amazing to experience Osmos the second time now, this time the way it was meant to be played. Having relinquished a mouse in favor of touch, the play is much more visceral and intuitive. While the PC version by all accounts was a totally playable game that, while it didn’t “wow” the player, provided a decent experience in a growing sub-genre. Osmos for the iphone, on the other hand, delivers.

In Osmos, you play a mote (tiny cell) whose objective (almost always) is to grow as large as possible, to become the largest organism in the pond. In Odyssey mode, you’ll play through a long series of scenarios which introduce you to the variety of variations you’ll find (gravitational objects, anti-matter cells, free roaming, sentient cells, etc) while simultaneously ramping up the difficulty as you progress through. “Progress” is a misleading term, however, as each instance is self-contained to make up a series of challenges. In Arcade mode, alternatively, you simply select the challenges you’ve unlocked and play them on your chosen difficulty.

The brilliance of Osmos is contained in the core gameplay mechanics: movement through space, and time. The conservation of energy is displayed in full effect in Osmos – to move you must touch “behind” where you want to go (in the opposite direction), which makes you discharge a small amount of your mass to “launch” you in the direction you’re proceeding to. As the goal is nearly always to grow, you’ll need to be strategic about the amount of dischange you let out, such that you don’t shrink too much. Discharge, is of course, another way of stating “small mote” as you’ll want to consume motes smaller than you, and other motes will do the same. This leads to important strategy, like moving an object by shooting discharge into it, to ram it into another mote which will consume it, so that you can consume for yourself a portion just slightly smaller than your size. Any time a mote touches any other mote, the larger one will steadily consume the smaller, so while you’re doing your darndest to grow, you’ll need to pay attention to the environment as well, as other motes (typically pure physical objects without programming, but not always) are also on this evolutionary quest.

At any time, you may slow or speed up time itself too. This allows for critical moments to play out perfectly and precisely, as you slide by a larger mote, steadily propelling yourself with minimum loss of mass. Or, to speed up your mote really quickly, by slowing down time and then discharging as much as you can before speeding back up. Alternatively, speeding up time makes waiting for your mote to travel a long distance at a slow pace much more bearable. The ambient music (which is very good, and rather diverse) will similarly follow pace with your speed (obtained simply by swiping your finger to the left or right across the screen) which helps keep the entire experience of a single cloth.

Visually, Osmos is very pretty, especially as you zoom in and out, with a strong sense of perspective, and even the finest details filled in when you’re in all the way (including the “emptiness” of space, which is actually filled with tiny wriggling particles too). Certainly, the color palette could use more of a variety. The mainly blue (and sometimes pink and green) becomes rather monotonous at times, leaving the player to wonder how difficult it would’ve been to float in a yellow or purple world for a change.

It is worth noting that Osmos, because it is a pure challenge-based game, doesn’t provide any endless play scenarios. Every single instance is contained. It’s unfortunate, because the evolutionary gameplay is so wonderful, it’s always a small letdown when you do finally become the biggest in any area. A few modes that really expanded the arena would’ve been a bonus, especially one that combined multiple scenarios into one gigantic sandbox. It’s a slightly trivial complaint, but it does leave Osmos more one-dimensional.

In the end, Osmos for the iphone is a stellar game. The touch control system works to immerse the player to a great extent, and the overall aesthetic presentation is strong. With loads of challenges to play through, and an array of modes to play in, Osmos is back and better than ever.