Orbitals [Preview]: Tripping the anime light fantastic

Orbitals is going to leave several smiles on our co-op faces

I wasn’t expecting a short demo of Orbitals to capture me in the way it did. I’m not much of a co-op adventure person — I have limited time during my day to coordinate or find someone to connect with to play — but I was intrigued by the game’s visual design and thematic lean. But then these fifteen minutes, albeit fifteen fantastic ones, converted me. I am all in, I need to find someone to play with, I need to schedule time, I need to have my calendar ready: Orbitals is a playable anime that pulled at every bit of my gaming and TV nostalgia in the best possible way.

The very first thing to notice about Orbitals is how visually stunning it is. The animation studio behind it, Studio Massket (Pokemon, My Hero Academia), are utilizing actual hand drawn cells to create the frames. Their love of Eighties anime has been a huge influence, with brushed art, linework and even little details like that “screen jiggle” of the feed as it came over the air in classic television animation. Our demo opens with a lengthy scene of kids being sent into sort of special effect pods as a calamity is befalling their station. We pick up again 15 years later with the kids, Maki and Omura, a bit older and wiser, and handling their daily chores and tasks around the station. As the scene plays out and we pick up the controller to move around we can see the brush strokes in the art, and even the in-game animation has that great 24 fps design, with background characters at 12 fps to not only help with console’s memory load but also to really nail the effect of the classic  aesthetic that relies so much on foreground motion and background mood. There are even terrific details like black lines extending past surfaces to mimic sketches and hand painted backgrounds that look static and impassable until we notice a door on a wall in a slightly different color to purposefully stick out, denoting that it’s something we can interact with.

The team, made up of Hazelight Studios veterans that worked on games like It Takes Two and Split Fiction, is conscious of developing the game to have a design that is intentional, in every classic respect. It’s worth remembering why older animated shows looked the way they did; part of that was absolute necessity due to time or budget or technology. There are even some nice Easter Eggs to anime of that era scattered throughout the game to delight those of us who are a little more in tune with the genre. The developers don’t want to add things to the game that are just skins or textures or cute visuals, they want to make sure that everything is there for a very specific reason.

And that reason may be to remind us of what it was like to watch these shows as kids, to really capture those moments.

The play area we try the game in is set up like a living room. There’s a couch against the wall, bean bags on the floor to sit in, posters and pictures on the wall and the air of a CRT in our face. The games wants us to not just play something that LOOKS like it’s from that era but also to feel like it, and this room setup is indicative of that. I could almost feel as if I was a 7 yr old kid in 1986, watching an episode of ThunderCats with my younger and holding onto NES controllers pretending we were the characters on the screen.

The demo focuses on introducing us to the general motions and buttons and actions we’ll have to learn and undertake in the game to make headway in the plot. Here we need to handle our chores, activating servers and pulling levers in unison and attaching tubes to vents in specific order. I play as Maki, and notice that she interacts with the tasks and tools in different ways than my playing partner. This opening area on the station feels a little like taking in different types of quirky mini games that teach us how to coordinate with each other before they likely get too complex later in the game.

The loop of saying of “oops I messed up, let me do that again” is one of the cores of what makes co-op so enjoyable. Learning, and learning from each other, and then accepting that we’ll both mess up at some point. That’s obvious here, and it’s treated in a lighthearted way that doesn’t dock us for messing up (too many times). We constantly repeat to each other “you do this, and I’ll do that, and then I’ll do this,” knowing that a lot of communication can help in experiences like this. I’ve never chatted up a play partner so much to do actual stuff, but it starts to feel natural, more than just as a teammate. And it becomes even more wonderful when we eventually shout, “Oh, I get it now!” and figure out how to engage with a puzzle.

We run around the ship, and even hop outside at one point, taking in these small tasks. The ship is fairly big, with plenty to see and do and explore, eventually becoming our hub to travel and unlock even more mini games. When our demo’s onboard work is complete we even fly the ship around to different targets. We can hop out of flight mode and run back around into the ship, heading outside in a space suit to find out what the next big mystery is going to be.

I’m immediately zapped back into memory of holding that NES gamepad, of watching TV while telling my brother to beat up Mum-Ra while I grab the Sword of Omens, of being kids sucked in to a story.

Orbitals is a fascinating take on breathing life to anime. It was the best game I played at Summer Game Fest, and I can’t wait to take that Time Machine back to my youth, to sit on the floor in my living room, playing the next eye-glazing space adventure with someone close to me.

Or far, depending on how well my network holds up.

The voice cast has just been announced, too, with Rebecca Wang as Maki, Stephen Fu as Omura, Jonathan Ha as Togen, Cassie Ewulu as Kinakoko, and Brent Mukai as Jaga.

Orbitals arrives exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 on September 3.