Öoo Is A 4 Hour Platformer About Solving Problems With Bombs, And...
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There are no words in Öoo. Even the title is a calligram: the umlauted O is our hero—the umlaut represents their ears—while the lowercase os are the bombs they carry around. In this puzzle metroidvania, the hero (let's just call them Ö from now on) can't really do much except explode those bombs. There is no jumping, no mantling, no attacking, no nothing, unless it can be achieved via the detonation of a bomb.
When Ö starts with one bomb things seem simple enough: to jump, I spawn a bomb beneath myself and detonate. If I place a bomb and stand to the left of it before detonating, I'll be propelled leftward, which can be useful to clear a pit. Eventually Ö gets a second bomb, which offers a little more manoeuvrability while further complicating the puzzles.
All this points to a clever but by no means revelatory puzzle game. But Öoo is a truly impressive piece of design, mostly for the way it removes the dependable power-up driven progress structure of metroidvanias and replaces it with player knowledge. In Öoo, impassable obstacles are made passable not by a fancy new ability—like Hornet's dash, or Samus' Morph Ball—but with a new bomb-centric technique the game has taught me via a series of clarifying problems. And this is achieved with no text and no explanatory videos. (Not even the menus have text, resorting to glyphs instead.)
Early in this four-odd hour game I reached a confusing dead end. After all my efforts, there was nothing in this dead end for me to collect. There was a warp point, but why would I come this far just to warp backwards?
Then it clicked: during the preceding five or six screens I had learned how to get a bomb on my head. This is not a straightforward task for a legless and armless blob. The game had quietly taught me how to do it, and now I could destroy blocks that were otherwise too far above me.
The second bomb is introduced quite early on and opens up a lot of potential. One simple example: What if I need to collect an item hovering above a pit of spikes? It's possible: place a bomb to my left and right. Detonate the left, which will propel me to the item, and then detonate the right, which will propel me back to safety.
Öoo constantly surprised me with strange new ways of approachi
Source: PC Gamer
