Orbituous has a fantastic premise. A brick breaker game becomes self-aware when it realises you are killing the game by smashing up all of the bricks. By quite literally entering the chat as player 2, it starts to cause all kinds of glitches and weirdness to put you off and prevent you from winning the game. It is the 4th (brick) wall breaking that makes Orbituous stand out from the crowd, and it’s a shame the rest of the experience is a bit rougher around the edges.
After a traditional brick breaking level, getting used to the incredibly sensitive and faster mouse controls to move your bat around the screen to hit the ball back up the level again, we reach level 2. Here you’ll brick-break a cute duck, which sends the computer into a rageful frenzy. From here on in, levels are out to get you. The screen goes black at key moments. Messages flash up on the screen. A power-up sends the game into a red rage mist. Inanimate objects grow eyes and follow the ball, either scared or angry. There are some great ideas here, although they come with a firm epilepsy warning due to the number of flash effects used. Even I was getting a headache at times. That was in part due to the ear-piercing brick hit sound effect that sounds like a wind chime from hell. Each level gives you three lives to clear it and you do not lose progress upon death, which is a good thing. I found death came quickly and often – and it wasn’t down to my skill issues.
A key part of any brick breaker game is the ball physics. They need to be consistent and repeatable to feel fair and fun to play (for me anyway). Orbituous’ physics are difficult to understand as I could never work out what the ball was going to do next. Where you hit the ball on the bat doesn’t matter. There is no slice mechanic for steaming in for a sideswipe on the ball, either. This meant that sometimes the ball would just go up and down in a straight line. I couldn’t seem to alter it at all. Then, after 30 seconds of that, it’d randomly bounce off to the side. To say I was confused put it lightly. Sometimes, I’d just sacrifice a life to try again, but that’s something you cannot do when the ball gets stuck at the top of levels ping-ponging left and right. This happened to me on 4 of the 9 levels in the game and the only thing you can do is restart the level from scratch. All these niggles build up to create a game that felt fast and fluid but incredibly glitchy and unpredictable to play. My enjoyment was limited.
Aside from all the physics issues, there are a few other interesting design notes. I liked that each level tells you how many of each hardness of bricks are in the level. I’d have liked the numbers to go down as I cleared them to make it more meaningful, but it was a nice addition. There are lots of power-ups in the game, too. Multiball is only partially helpful as none of the other balls count if your main original ball goes out of play. Different ball shapes and sizes have a limited effect on physics but do change the strength of the ball. There is also a laser turret to try and clear a few problematic blocks, although the pace of the pace meant the turret wasn’t useful for very long. All this meant the old school breakout problem of trying to line up the last brick or two in the corner was just as much of a problem in Orbituous as it was in the 80s.
I hope that Orbituous gets some post-launch patches to smooth out the physics and sticky nature of the ball. There is a fantastic concept here that is being held back by rough edges. I can’t recommend Orbituous as a breakout successor, but if you like 4th-wall-breaking experiences, Orbituous is short and succinct if you can be patient with its problems.
Review copy provided by the developer. Orbituous is out now on Steam.
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