Cosmic Top Secret

I bought this game thinking it was going to be a goofy comedy with weird visuals. It is this but it is also so much more. The story is a straight up documentary of a daughter interviewing her father and mother who were both involved in some high level secret stuff during the Cold War. A lot of the game revolves around you exploring a map and discovering recordings, intel, photographs anything that relates to the daughter, T’s, life or her parents and colleagues. You find the intel, solve a 9 digit code and get to the next level. Each level takes about an hour to play. --------------- [h1] PROS [/h1] + art. Let’s just get this out the way because it’s the first thing you see on the store page. The art is bizarre. It is all carboard cut outs which are drawn on one side and then are just natural on the back. You scrunch up into a little ball and roll around like Sonic the Hedgehog (but the controls are not good, see CONS). + immersive. For a game that looks the way it does, it sure does make a good point of keeping you deeply involved in the story by giving you lots of real life recordings, videos, documents, photographs, snippets of daily life. + its not just about the Cold War. There is a level of storytelling that moves away from the parents and their roles as intelligence agents. The story inverts and takes a look at T’s secrets, her pains, her quite frankly weird life. It must have been so strange as a kid and teenager to never really “know” your parents. In the videos and recordings they are masters of deflecting questions and changing the subject. It would have been a very frustrating upbringing for me and I could feel that although T loves her family with all her heart she has been so calm and patient with them, waiting for this day. + quirks ahoy! There are so many little powerups and things you will find along the way that keep the game fresh and interesting. I don’t really want to say what they are because that will ruin the experience I think. + unique. I haven’t really seen or played anything like this before. + puzzles. There are puzzles but they weren’t overly hard. There were only a couple where I had to rethink what I was doing. The game is fairly self explanatory. ___________________ [h1] CONS [/h1] - Movement. Oh my my. The movement is just terrible. I admit I did get used to it and I was much more adept towards the end. There was a lot of cursing going on before that though as this really bad, mouse only, controlling drove me up the wall. I think it might be because this released on PC and mobile and it is more suited to a touchscreen control. - Its all about the tudse bridges yo. (I have no idea if my take on Danish slang even works. Let me know below). It is a short game and could probably be completed a bit faster than I did my playthrough. So you might want to pick this up on a sale. ___________________ I want more of this. And I am sure I’m not alone. I have always said that games are an excellent medium for documentaries. We have games like That Dragon, Cancer and Kursk. We have excellent fictional narratives like Edith Finch, why not do the same with true stories? We also of course have excellent directors’ commentaries in tons of our favourite games. Devolver gave us a gamescon right here on Steam to play during the COVID-19 lockdown. There is a wealth of potential here and I am definitely dying to see some more high quality playable documentaries. If you are looking to expand your Steam library with some more diverse games, then Cosmic Top Secret is unlike anything you have ever seen before.

Cosmic Top Secret is unlike anything I have ever played. It's a story about relationships, secrets and the cold war all wrapped in a very charming and forgiving collect-a-thon with puzzle elements. The graphics are composed entirely of paper and cardboard with pictures on it, which is very fitting since it uses declassified documents from the Danish Security and Intelligence Service to tell the story. The way that CTS stands out from other games with a focus on collection, is the significance of each piece you collect. Every piece of intel has a story or fact tied to it, you'll recieve cursory knowledge of for example [spoiler]the cold war, T's parents, T herself and cryptography[/spoiler]. It took me about 7 hours to reach full completion, including going through all the video and audio material. Getting those last pieces was really worth it, so I suggest you aim for full completion as well. Cosmic Top Secret is my game of the year. Also a quick note, most of the audio is in Danish, which is my first language - I played the game using English subtitles and I imagine it still holds up, even if you don't know Danish.

I haven't been playing for long, but my initial impressions are that it is very, very good. It quickly drew me in with good storytelling, surreal yet deeply coherent visual design and surprising gameplay.

Initial impressions: A hybrid adventure/hidden object game. Great attention to detail with its cutout aesthetic with some live action recordings of the protagonist interviewing her family. A very personal project but fascinating from the position of an American with no deep perspective of a country closely tied to Soviet relations throughout the Cold War. Ready to dive in more.

Really interesting and curious game, where you feel like you're part of T's journey to find out the story about her parents job. The controls take some practice to get hang on, but it's an exciting story to follow, and really a different game , you feel like you're inside the mind of the protagonist and trying to get the hang of all the thought strings.

Full disclosure, my cousin was involved in the development of this game and i got it for free because i beta-tested it. With that said i thouroughly enjoyed the game even in the unfinished beta-state it was in at the time. Its charming paper/cardboard graphics and clever environments made collecting the different items enjoyable, and the interesting story made it rewarding too, as more information was revealed for each key item gathered. The game is about the story of the director of the game and her parents, who were doing top secret things for the danish government during the cold war, and her attempt at finding out what exactly they did. This is all told through our main character T, who we guide through the strange cardboard world trying to find pieces of interviews with the parents and their former colleagues and piecing together the full story ourselves. Aside from the story the controls are also very good, even good enough that it can be played on tablet with no problems (that is how i tested it originally, and it only took me two minutes to learn the controls well enough to not have to think about them, even though i have not played proper games on tablet before). All in all i cannot recommend this game highly enough.

Such a nice game.

I absolutely adore this game! Highly original and unique and clearly made with much love, it is without a doubt Surprise of the Year for me. I have enjoyed playing it immensely and it could very well end up being my personal GOTY. I highly recommend this game - Thank you T and team for making this :-)

This game first caught my eye at a game festival a few years ago. It has some really neat mechanics that make it a lot of fun to play. I was taken right away with the idea of rolling around as a crumpled up piece of paper. You’ll do a lot of exploring in 3D environments, and the developers made sure that rolling, jumping and even flying around in these areas is fun and easy. So the game has mechanics and controls that probably everyone will easily understand. But what makes indie games like this so fascinating is that they broaden our perspective on what games can be. In addition to the clever graphical style, for example, this game sometimes morphs into something that’s part personal documentary and part history lesson (Cold War era and early computer history). What impressed me more than anything, though, was the sense of humor in the game. I found it tremendously funny in a kind of low-key but omnipresent way. My favorite part of the game was flying around in a paper airplane on a reenacted spy mission. I don’t play many flying games, but I found the controls here just right and, again, pretty easy to pick up. Don’t be discouraged by the puzzles. There are a few, but they’re not difficult, and once you do the first couple of them, you’ll basically know the drill. (And I think there’s even a walkthrough online somewhere for the first couple of levels.)

I love the use of a game to unravel real family (and Cold War) history, and the very literal cut-and-paste use of actual photographs, videos and documents. I sometimes had trouble adjusting the camera viewpoint in the later levels, but that's not a big issue. Rolling around as a crumpled paper ball was no problem on a PC at least. A slightly surreal, lo-fi gem with a simple, collect-em-all logic.