Cosmochoria
I incubate trees, bushes, and towers alike, squatting on seeds or bricks and calling to them so they grow.
I don’t know why killing all the fauna on a planet is necessary to revitalize it. I also don’t know why every alien within fifteen light years is drawn to me, drawn to laser me off the surface of every rock and ice floe. Well, I know why. This is one of them games with a sense of progression, a sense of progression maintained by killing and being killed (and restarting with your cache of crystals intact), as well as by planting and incubating seeds.
The aliens never end. You don’t have even a breath to rest in.
Lots of firing around the curve of the planet. Lasers fly in straight lines, crash into the curl of the horizon. Only way you can heal is restoring the planet, which means-- wait, did I just die by hitting the sun?
Maybe I need to look up the controls. For flying. Or drifting moorlessly through space.
Um, well, here's a second planet and it continually spawns hornets from its withered heart. I can't figure out a way to survive more than a few minutes (other than leaving, but NEVER SURRENDER). One of the tips proudly proclaims that the developer is not here to hold your hand. I appreciate the desire to give players a stick and some twine and maybe a rock so they can work out a fishing pole and eventually figure out where the darn fish are over just, you know, giving them a fish.
But Cosmochoria's twitch-arcade mechanics aren't enough to engage me and I can't help but compare it to Waking Mars, which was gently actually about planting things, and had a zennish wonder of exploration that Cosmochoria, at least in early stages, rather lacks. It's appealingly drawn and I love the little plants and mystery boxes, but it's a bit too frenetic for wonder.
AND I AM OLD AND LAZY.
It's darling space, though, and you can fall into the sun. Five stars.
