Öoo is a 4 hour platformer about fixing issues with bombs, and it's the cleverest puzzle sport I performed in 2025
Private Decide
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There are not any phrases in Öoo. Even the title is a calligram: the umlauted O is our hero—the umlaut represents their ears—whereas the lowercase os are the bombs they carry round. On this puzzle metroidvania, the hero (let’s simply name them Ö any further) cannot actually do a lot besides explode these bombs. There is no such thing as a leaping, no mantling, no attacking, no nothing, until it may be achieved through the detonation of a bomb.
When Ö begins with one bomb issues appear easy sufficient: to leap, I spawn a bomb beneath myself and detonate. If I place a bomb and stand to the left of it earlier than detonating, I will be propelled leftward, which could be helpful to clear a pit. Ultimately Ö will get a second bomb, which gives a bit extra manoeuvrability whereas additional complicating the puzzles.
All this factors to a intelligent however on no account revelatory puzzle sport. However Öoo is a really spectacular piece of design, principally for the way in which it removes the reliable power-up pushed progress construction of metroidvanias and replaces it with participant information. In Öoo, impassable obstacles are made satisfactory not by a flowery new capability—like Hornet’s sprint, or Samus’ Morph Ball—however with a brand new bomb-centric method the sport has taught me through a collection of clarifying issues. And that is achieved with no textual content and no explanatory movies. (Not even the menus have textual content, resorting to glyphs as a substitute.)
Early on this four-odd hour sport I reached a complicated lifeless finish. In any case my efforts, there was nothing on this lifeless finish for me to gather. There was a warp level, however why would I come this far simply to warp backwards?
Then it clicked: throughout the previous 5 or 6 screens I had discovered easy methods to get a bomb on my head. This isn’t a simple process for a legless and armless blob. The sport had quietly taught me easy methods to do it, and now I might destroy blocks that have been in any other case too far above me.
The second bomb is launched fairly early on and opens up lots of potential. One easy instance: What if I want to gather an merchandise hovering above a pit of spikes? It is doable: place a bomb to my left and proper. Detonate the left, which is able to propel me to the merchandise, after which detonate the appropriate, which is able to propel me again to security.
Öoo consistently stunned me with unusual new methods of approaching its two bomb toolset. For each half-dozen rooms, one would have me stumped, earlier than I managed to seek out some new bombing method that hadn’t occurred to me but. Creator Nama Takahashi has, I really feel sure, discovered each doable drawback that may come up for our harmless, bomb-reliant Ö. However what’s extra spectacular is the quantity of confidence Takahashi has in Öoo’s studying curve. If gamers have been capable of glean a number of the extra superior methods with out the sport’s gradual, ambient instruction, this sport could be a failure: one with a pitiable 15 minute runtime.
Öoo elegantly and procedurally explores each permutation, each doable wrinkle, in its easy ‘transfer round with bombs’ idea, and every of its main areas brings a brand new overarching thought to the desk. A number of the late sport epiphanies had me fistpumping greater than the rest I’ve performed in 2025, not only for satisfaction at having overcome the impediment with out checking Takahashi’s personal walkthrough (I consulted it twice) however on the single-mindedness it should take to conceive it.
After enjoying Öoo I browsed the Steam boards and located some hypothesis that there may need been a 3rd bomb deliberate however finally scrapped. I can completely perceive why Takahashi may need deserted that third bomb, if he had ever supposed it within the first place: the complexity could be unmanageable. The sheer variety of issues a 3rd bomb might convey to the desk is doubtlessly infinite. And since it is not Takahashi’s model to go away issues on the desk, it is in all probability for the perfect that we solely received two.