Öoo Review: Good games don't need to be long

Nowadays most games are made to be long and most of them really overstay their welcome. Öoo is a short and sweet puzzle Metroidbrainia that has simple mechanics and evolves a whole game around it in a masterful way.

Inspiring Gamedesign

It's really hard to talk about Öoo without spoiling its magic, that's why this review will be very short and vague. Öoo is a 2-3 Hours long puzzle game with a Metroidvania like map. You play a little cute blob who learns the ability to place a little bomb. If you for example stand on this bomb while it explodes you fly into the air, if you stand next to it you get pushed and so on.

During your playtime you won't get any new abilities and yet it still feels like a metroidvania, but why is that? Well because Öoo is what people call a Metroidbrainia. You don't learn new skills but the game smartly and without any dialogue teaches you its ruleset. What starts as a very simple game fast becomes more and more complex.

Now this is the part where it becomes very hard to talk about the game without spoiling it. Let's just take the mechanics I already told you about as an example. When you start the game no one explains to you that a bomb pushes you in one direction if you stand in front of it. But you quickly get into a puzzle room that you can only solve if you do this.

As the game doesn't have many mechanics you will quickly figure out what to do and you will feel smart about the fact that you came up with this yourself. There are many of those aspects to the game. Some have to do with your skillset, others are more about the rules of the world itself, like how certain blocks react to your bomb and so on.

It's honestly an inspiring game design and works in a way classic Nintendo games did. It's a show don't tell approach. The game never felt impossible but it does have some tricky puzzles during its playtime.

Öoo deserves your time

I never heard about Öoo until a few days ago when I saw one of my favorite German content creators Hooked playing it. If you are someone who loves gaming as much as I do you should honestly give this game a try. It reminded me again that games don't need insane production values or length to be amazing. It doesn't have the emotional impact of a game like Neva did, but its gameplay often gave me those “Wow this is possible?!?” moments. It's a short game that knows exactly what it wants to be and nails every single aspect of it.

Rating: Strongly recommended