It’s Orbin’ Time

Feverdream Johnny makes games where you can fucking schmoove. My first exposure to his work was Peeb Adventures, which had some of the slickest grappling I’ve seen since the criminally underrated 3D Bionic Commando reboot. The demo for Nowhere, MI showed us an early glimpse at a first-person Metroidvania with all the jump and speed improvements that genre tends to entail. Now we’re looking at Orbo’s Odyssey, a Peeb-prequel (peebquel?) with an equally fun core conceit: firing yourself like a collectable-seeking missile.

Orbo and Peeb have a problem: they’re disarmed. Literally, these lads are limbless on the top half. As a result they cannot open the exit to their boss’ office and go home at the end of a long workday. Their solution is simple enough: venture through 4 portals to other worlds to collect gears and build Orbo a prosthetic arm so he can operate the doorknob. Your boatless odyssey will see you visiting strange lands inhabited by stranger characters, with plenty of Feverdream’s signature writing to keep you laughing no matter how surreal-bordering-on-spooky things get. It’s a fun trip, is what I’m saying.

OO is a 3D collectathon (kinda) platformer (even less so for reasons that will soon become clear). Your goal is to snag 5 gears in 4 levels. 3 of these have level-specific requirements, 1 requires you to race through a series of rings, and 1 wants to see you collect most of the purple dots littered throughout the level. If you’ve played a 3D platformer none of this will feel unfamiliar. It’s almost comfortable in a way, which helps set the scene for what you came here for: joy in movement.

Orbo’s moveset is a short list: walking, sliding, jumping, a speed-up thing if you jump-cancel a slide, and launching himself from midair at incredibly high speed with full flight control. One of these things is not quite like the others, and also the one you’ll be using constantly. The movement in OO is next level. You are ridiculously fast and equally agile, turning as quickly as you can whip the mouse, soaring through every area faster and faster as you figure out how to retain momentum and gain speed off each jump. Touching the ground periodically is a necessity and even a core part of going obscenely fast, but missing jumps will be a fairly rare occurrence once you get the hang of it. It’s more a question of which way you want to tackle any given obstacle than figuring out how to in the first place.

In summary: this game simply feels great to play. Words do not do it justice, you must see it in action.  Zooming around is such a power trip compared to anything else in its genre to the point where it feels singular. Comparing other platformer mascots to Orbo is like debating who would win in a fistfight between Bubsy Bobcat and a wood chipper. Orbo does have limitations, you aren’t just no-clipping everywhere, but it can feel damn close once you get it down. And yet despite all of that the dev times in the race segments feel borderline unreachable without serious practice. Even if I never manage to get all of those, blasting around while the drum & bass blares and knocking over Draculas never gets old. This game’s movement is absolutely sublime and warrants play just for that alone, which makes the discussion around recommending it particularly challenging.

I’m not sure Orbo even has bones, but if he does there isn’t a lot of meat on ‘em. Beating the game in its entirety, including the second ending, took me 90 minutes. I came back around to do the achievements I missed (aside from 100%ing the dev times, which remain deranged) and I’ve still barely played this for 2 hours. I suspect my time is shorter than average as I play an unhealthy amount of platformers and am familiar with FDJ’s work on top of that. Regardless, I would understand reading “game plays inside a Steam refund window” and feeling skittish. 

I personally have no regrets. It’s fairly cheap at an undiscounted $7, and the dev openly admits that this project was a means of securing funding for continued development on Nowhere, MI after a publisher relationship fell through. The game is short but you aren’t paying for a tech demo here; it demonstrates an immense amount of care and craft from every observable angle. The dev has also stated that he intends to add more content, though it’ll be “a bit more complicated” than a simple DLC or more levels. I have no idea what this will entail, but make no mistake, I am looking forward to it and will gladly play it again on release. Also I would pay at least the same amount for Super Orbo Maker, just to put that out there.

Orbo’s Odyssey is a fully-realized firecracker of a game: awe-inspiring, beautiful, and fleeting, only unlike explosives you can fire this right back up and get schmooving again whenever you please. Would I have liked more of it? Sure, but when that’s the only criticism I can level at a game I tend to be forgiving. Games this satisfying don’t come often and I’d be a fool to discourage folks from enjoying this as much as I have. Orb guy go nyooooooom.

8/10