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My favourite thing about Cosmochoria is how it's a space game that actually feels like it may have come from a distant galaxy. This galaxy's been watching our world, certainly, but it hasn't been paying too much attention. As a result, this is an arcade game, a roguelite, and something of an ecological fable - and yet it feels nothing like any of these things when you actually play it.The set up is so simple that you won't initially trouble yourself with how odd it is. You're a naked astronaut, tubby and clad only in a fish bowl helmet and jetpack, and your job, it appears, is to unleash vegetation throughout a barren 2D galaxy. You do this by jetting across empty space - a tricky business until you learn to steady yourself with short thrusts and trust in inertia to carry you over the really long gaps - and then landing on planets and seeding plants to nurse them back to life. Planets of different sizes have different plant requirements - any day you get to type a sentence like that is a good day - and there's a chicken-and-egg thing going on, since for the most part you'll need to harvest fresh seeds from the plants you've already grown. It's a time-consuming business, too. First you must claim your new planet with a flag - the kind of thinking that probably led to the destruction of all life in the galaxy in the first place - then select the plant from a radial menu. After that you must also stay there, immobile and holding a button, while the plant takes root.
This gets nerve-wracking, and that's because although the planets you visit are initially dead, you are not alone in the universe. It's a pretty busy place, in fact, and most of the stuff out there wants to kill you. As soon as you touch down and start bringing a new world to life, UFOs pop up and begin shooting or dropping off tentacle things that want to do you in, giant crabs sprout from the ground and make for you, and other intergalactic oddities like floating eyeballs or deadly cuttlefish swarm in hot.
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