Space isn’t supposed to be charming. It’s cold, dark, unforgiving, and unapologetic. And yet, In Tales of Cosmos, space is an anxiously charming place to be.
The premise couldn’t be simpler: you play a pair of anthropomorphized animal space explorers who become stranded in an unknown solar system and have to travel from one inhabited planet to another in search of a way back home. Along the way, you’ll meet a sleepy ghost, a crew of stranded moon mice, a hard-drinking space pilot, an angry pumpkin, and many others as you traverse worlds than range from leisure beaches along a chlorine coast, to forgotten tunnels below war-torn cities, to a tiny planet permanently covered in shadow.
The interaction and navigation are some of the things that make Tales of Cosmos truly stand out from the crowd. You control the two explorers either together or separately, and each has different abilities. Perseus, a canine cosmonaut, can talk to other characters, use voice activated controls, inspect and examine things, and when needed, use a powerful space-bark to frighten enemies (such as greedy crabs or disrespectful birds). Gagayev, the bug-eyed chimp, while silent, is the more lively of the pair, with his ability to pick up objects, operate machines, build and fix things, and generally interact with the environment. The puzzles scattered throughout the worlds make good use of these skills, several of which require you to use the characters together. It’s a nice way to add variety to the game, while also keeping the mechanics quick and easy.
Wandering around the planets is a circular delight. Each world is unabashedly two-dimensional, and exists as a spinning disk which you circumnavigate. This movement is visually pleasing, and the constant circular motion provides a break from traditional angular adventure game designs (such as isometric or side scrolling). This also allows for a few unexpectedly amusing moments, such as launching an object only to see it orbit around the planet and land back at your feet.
Moving between worlds is also a simple pleasure. Using a tiny makeshift rocket, Perseus and Gagayev can fly around the solar system. The mouse controls your movement, and as you fly around space spins around you. This is a game where things are constantly in motion, including the orbit of each planet through the solar system. This makes finding the planets a unique experience in its own right, as they’re never in the same place twice. Thankfully you have a star-map HUD that can help guide you, and truthfully there are only seven locations, so you’re not likely to get lost.
Although the animation is fairly limited, the artwork is enough to make up for this. The characters and backgrounds are well drawn, yet still retain a rough, unpolished quality that keeps them unobtrusive; no single aspect of the visual design overpowers the others, and even though each of the worlds has it’s own unique look and feel they all work well together in the same universe. The color palette is intentionally cool and murky, and most of the scenes are bathed in darkness with only small pools of light to guide you.
The music deserves special mention, as it’s more of a soundscape than a soundtrack. It’s always present, though frequently shifts from moody electronic to abstract instrumentation, from droning to rhythmic, and then back again; all very slow, and quiet, foreboding yet reassuring, like the lapping of water at the shore, the music comes in waves, then gently fades out again into the drone of space. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t really repeat itself either. This further lends to that sense of soundscape, because each moment is a new sonic discovery.
The heart of any adventure game, of course, are its puzzles. For the most part, the puzzles here are clever without being frustrating, and follow enough logic that you can arrive at a solution without having to resort to trying random inventory items or pixel hunting. The game has a decent amount of self-standing puzzles, so even though the main game is linear, you can tackle most of the scenes in any order. The only downside to this freedom is that most puzzles require frequent back and forth to other planets in order to be solved. This is fun at first, since you’re still discovering the worlds and their little secrets, but as you get further into the game, these constant interplanetary errands can really bog down the sense of achievement.
Although I generally praise the game’s lack of a rigid plot or narrative, one disadvantage is that there are times in the game where your path forward is not entirely clear, mostly because there’s just not much in the way of guidance. Little clues can be gleaned by showing objects to Perseus, but nothing that really instructs you as to what overarching goals you should be working towards, or even what the limits of the game world are.
A few other minor annoyances impeded my progress once in a while, but nothing game-breaking. Occasionally the graphics would glitch and just turn black; the inventory screen and main screen still worked, but all the sprites and background just vanished. A quick reload fixed this, and since the game is very generous in its autosaves, I didn’t lose any progress. Flying around space is initially fun, but owing to all the back and forth required during puzzle solving, this can become a bit of a chore. Also, the auto-landing is a bit overly sensitive, drawing you in toward a planet more often than intended.
What I like most about Tales of Cosmos, however, is its most indescribable aspect: the mood. The music, artwork, characters, and environments have a very distinct atmosphere that I can only describe as "cute existential dread". And I don't know why the game make me feel this way, there's nothing overt in it that would lead to this mood; the game is genuinely innocent, the characters are upbeat, and even the story is light-hearted. Yet the scenes are swathed in dark colors, no matter which planet you visit it’s always night, and there is a pervasive sense of cartoony apprehension that underlies the innocence in this universe. Chalk it up to Eastern European influences, or maybe a hint of film noir, but the aesthetic is truly engrossing and adds just the right amount of dread to the otherwise low-key game.
A lot of adventure games can be a turn-off after a while, as they might be too goofy, full of bloated self-importance, melodramatic, opaque, or just plain cold and lifeless. But there are a magical few that somehow manage to get the alchemy just right. They present you with a world that is charming and alluring, but not demanding or dull, stories that invite you participate, but not overpower you with backstory or lore, and characters that are open ended enough to invite your empathy, yet distinct enough for you to care about guiding them through their plight. These few titles also offer accessible, yet logical puzzles, as well as unobtrusive controls that make it easy to feel like you are part of the story unfolding before you. Those are lofty goals for any game, so it’s impressive that Red Dwarf largely succeeds. Despite it’s short length, minor glitches, and occasional lack of direction, Tales of Cosmos is a charming, humble, and creatively confident journey through the universe.
[i]Full review [url= saveorquit.com/2018/08/14/review-tales-of-cosmos-2/] here [/url].[/i]
