How many times have you picked up a cheap (or even free) game on the PSN store, only to play it for a brief while and never open again? Don’t get me wrong, PlayStation has had some fantastic Indie support lately, and there are tons of them well worth playing. There are even more that fall flat within a day or two, if not instantly. Lost Orbit is not one of those flops. Lost Orbit asks you for the commitment of a mobile game; You can marathon through it, or play it out in small satisfying chunks, but it packs the polished aesthetic and engaging story of AAA standards.
You play as Harrison, an everyman space engineer — Joe Jetpack if you will — who finds himself stranded in space with nothing but a jetpack, recycled air, and one hell of a will to survive the journey home. It’s not an awfully long game, and its game design is pretty straightforward. It plays like a mix of a racer/bullet-hell dodge ’em up where the slightest mistake leaves you floating dead into the cold void of space. The gameplay is incredibly addictive, the environments vary both in the obstacles you encounter, and the aesthetic of your surroundings. The whole adventure from start to finish feels finely polished. What really blew me away was how wonderful the story and characters were, even in such a short experience.
Lost Orbit, like its protagonist Harrison, has a lot of charm in a relatively small package. The albeit light story is told through such a beautifully nuanced narration that even after the frustration of crashing into the same damn asteroid a dozen times, you’ll want to push on further just to see what happens next. The story is narrated in the cold logic of a robot’s AI, first from a distance, and then by your side as it joins Harrison as a very passive sidekick. A gradual bromance develops between the two full of playful rib jabbings. There are also a couple of really subtle, but fantastic, pop-culture references. The narration is infrequent and mostly comes into play during specific story beats, but it ends up being the cornerstone to the experience, and a solid motivation to endure through the narrative.
As I played through Lost Orbit, I kept wanting to say that it was adorable, (and it was) but never seemed to hold the thought for long before being interrupted by a gruesome death animation. The character suffers through vivisection by lasers, gibbing into pieces, or hitting something so hard that his bloody skeleton flew right out of his body into space — because that happens. There is a glimmer of charming innocence to the art design, and dialogue that makes even the most violent moments conjure the descriptor of adorable — even if only briefly.
The gameplay itself is engaging, and the levels add new mechanics that gradually build on each other with a perfect pace. It has that “easy to learn, difficult to master” arcade game feel to it. You start with the ability to turn left and right, and boost as you travel upwards. You can catch yourself in a small planet’s orbit, circle around it and boost out of it, or boost through the side of its orbit to pick up some extra speed. You (ideally) avoid incoming asteroids and space debris, and travel through frequent checkpoints before reaching a warp gate at the end of the level. Eventually, you’re managing your speed and maneuvering with the addition of a few more abilities all while you deal with a variety of lethal obstacles and items that boost or teleport you forward.
Lost Orbit is a powerfully narrated arcade experience that you can play out in small pieces at a time, or power through in one sitting. There’s hours of replayability in revisiting areas for speed runs and challenge modes, which both make Lost Orbit a strong indie game in the PlayStation Store right now.
A press copy of Lost Orbit was provided by PixelNAUTS for the purpose of this review