Osmos

''Osmos'' is a 2009 puzzle video game developed by Canadian developer Hemisphere Games for various systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, OnLive, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Android. It was designed by Eddy Boxerman, founder of Hemisphere and a former developer at Ubisoft Montreal.

Gameplay

The aim of the game is to propel oneself, a single-celled organism ("Mote"), into other smaller motes to absorb them. Colliding with a mote larger than the player will cause the player to be absorbed, resulting in a game over. Motes smaller than the player are blue, while motes bigger than the player are red. Changing course is done by expelling mass. Due to conservation of momentum, this results in the player's mote moving away from the expelled mass, but also in one's own mote shrinking.

There are three different "zones" of levels in ''Osmos'': In the "sentient" levels, the goal is to prevail over active motes of various types that hunt and absorb other motes, including the player. Hunting them typically involves absorbing as many inactive motes as possible before chasing down the active ones with the extra mass one has gained.

In the "ambient" levels, the player's mote typically floats in a large area surrounded by inactive motes, and must become the largest or simply very large. Variations on this theme involve, for instance, starting the game as a very small mote surrounded by many larger, fast moving motes, or the presence of "antimatter" motes which shrink normal motes during collision no matter which one was originally bigger, or starting the game stuck in a huge, densely packed area with a large number of other motes without much space to move about and having to nudge other motes out of the way by ejecting mass at them.

In the "force" levels, special motes ("Attractors") influence other motes with a force similar to gravitation. The player has to take into account orbital physics when planning movement in order to save mass when changing course. In these levels, the game optionally assists the player with a course trajectory tool that plots the mote's course, up to a short time in the future. Force levels are complicated in various ways, including levels with mutually repelling attractors, attractors bouncing randomly around an area full of motes, several "strata" of bodies in retrograde rotation about an attractor, and attractors orbiting other attractors.

A multiplayer version of ''Osmos'' for iOS was released in July 2012.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack includes:
# Vincent et Tristan – "Osmos Theme"
# Gas – "Discovery"
# Biosphere – "Antennaria" (from '' Substrata'')
# Loscil – "Lucy Dub"
# Loscil – "Rorschach"
# Loscil – "Sickbay"
# High Skies – "The Shape of Things to Come"
# Julien Neto – "From Cover to Cover"
# Julien Neto – "Farewell"

A free download of many of the tracks was made available in March 2010.

Reception

The iPhone version received "universal acclaim", while the PC and iPad versions received "generally favourable reviews", according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.

At IndieCade in 2009, the PC version was named "Best in Show" and won the Fun/Compelling award. Apple Inc. selected the game as the iPad game of the year for 2010. It also won many other awards that year. ''IGN'' awarded the iOS version its best video game soundtrack of 2010.

References

External links

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2009 video games
Android (operating system) games
Apple Design Awards recipients
Biological simulation video games
Games for Windows
IndieCade winners
Indie games
IOS games
Linux games
MacOS games
Microsoft games
Multiplayer and single-player video games
Puzzle video games
Video games developed in Canada
Windows games