Osmos - Most Relaxing Game You've Never Played

There are certain games that sneak into your life, you've never heard of them, they have no real advertising budget, and when you play them you are astounded that it took you this long to find out about it. Osmos is one of these games. It is an award winning, critically acclaimed game that has an amazing artystyle and an equally amazing soundtrack. Yet until a holiday sale on Steam I had never even heard of it, which is a shame.

Osmos finds you, a small little creature, like an amoeba or single cell animal, capturing other motes of matter and devouring other creatures. This may sound violent, and honestly I'm not 100% sure what you are playing as. It doesn't matter as the games storyline is frankly irrelevant. The gameplay is what is most important here, and this of course where developer Hemisphere Games put in the most work.

Gameplay in Osmos finds you floating around in a level with an objective (become the biggest or devour the repulsor) and it's up to you to find out how to best do this. The way you move around takes a little getting used to, or at least it did for me. You move by ejecting matter from yourself propelling you in the opposite direction. Of course this makes you shrink, and seeing how you can only devour motes smaller than you this can have a negative impact on your ability to finish the level.

At its heart Osmos is a physics-based puzzle game with action elements, but it also forces you to slow down and relax. There is no life limit, and you are never going to get tensed up during this game. you might get frustrated, but there is a soulution to this. If you find you just can't beat a level after trying it 10 times, you can always try a random placement of all the motes the next time you start, giving you different opportunities. Another reason you can relax is that the levels don't end when you beat them, you can just keep playing the same level until you have devoured every other mote before you move on.

Hemisphere Games really knows how to leverage an art style. The game itself doesn't have high system requirements, but the art used in the game is so well done it won't matter to you that it doesn't use all the bells and whistles of other games. The music is serene, it always fits the game perfectly and really does bring the game to life.

I am reminded a bit of Nintendo Wii-Ware title Art Style: Orbient while playing Osmos, and while the core concept might be similar, the way you play is entirely different as is the style of movement. In the end Osmos is an amazing and highly acclaimed game that many people have just never heard of, which is a shame because it is one of the few games to offer a balance between the challenge hardcore gamers want as well as the easy accessibility that casual gamers desire.