The orbital levels really show off the mathematical prowess of the game. It will be in your best interest to capture these motes as quickly as possible, before they become too big to absorb. Unencumbered by other motes as it repels everything in its path, it becomes a very quick target to capture, requiring you to balance your need for speed with the minimum size still required to capture it. Some motes are intelligent and will run away from you, or absorb other motes in an attempt to become bigger than you, thus making their capture much more difficult. Many require you to capture a particular mote. For all of its slow-paced, fluid joy, Osmos does require more than a bit of thought and strategy to be a success.Īs you proceed through the levels of the game, you will run into different objectives. Not only that, other competing motes can in turn capture the mass that you have expelled to increase their own mass. The faster you want to go, the more mass you must expel.

But, in order to propel yourself around to capture motes, you must expel a part of your own mass, which in turn decreases your size.

This seems like a simple objective, and at its core it is. As your size increases, you are able to absorb more and more motes until you are the largest one in the area. The main goal in Osmos is simple: you, an amoeba-esque organism known as a 'mote,' must absorb smaller motes to become bigger.

If you're looking for something to keep you totally enthralled on a lazy Sunday afternoon, or a calming experience after a long day at the office, the ambient joy that is Osmos is just what the doctor ordered. Okay, maybe that's just me, but it is not unlike the feeling that you get when you play Osmos, the award-winning game from new indie developers Hemisphere Games. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you are floating around in space, slowly grasping at random objects as they pass by, with no real direction? It should be frightening, but instead you feel a level of calm serenity that you've never felt before.

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