Bombs Away: Öoo Is an Oblique, Bite-Sized Magic Trick of a Game

By Moises Taveras | August 19, 2025 | 11:45am

Video Games Features Öoo

Bombs Away: Öoo Is an Oblique, Bite-Sized Magic Trick of a Game

When’s the last time a game surprised you? I mean well and truly shocked you. I play a lot of games that surprise me in their quality (and others that shock me for their lack thereof) but I find it increasingly hard to be genuinely taken aback by a game—to have my mind melt at the things it’s doing that other games simply aren’t. I think maybe the last title to pull off such a feat was Baba Is You, and even then, that’s before that all-too-great game eventually grew so difficult and convoluted that it kind of pissed me off. Öoo, an immensely satisfying and tricky platformer released earlier this month, has pulled it off, though, continually surprising me to no end over its short runtime.

Öoo is the latest game from developer Nama Takahashi, who previously developed the platformer ElecHead. Like ElecHead, Öoo is an utterly charming side-scrolling game with a pretty simplistic conceit stretched to its limits. In the former, the central mechanic is that the player character’s head carries an electric charge and that has to be manipulated to sometimes make and unmake platforms as well as obstacles. In Öoo, you are a caterpillar who can eventually use little orbs broken off from their body as bombs in a slew of creative manners that are steadily revealed to the player over the course of the game. Both are exceptional games at deceiving the player into thinking they are fairly straightforward romps at first glance, only to reveal that they are in fact devilishly clever puzzles. Both also prompt their fair share of “a-ha” moments.

Most Popular

But even this fairly adequate and apt description of Öoo (as well as its predecessor) kind of feels like it lets the game down, which has quickly shot near the very top of my running list of game of the year candidates. Sure, I’ve tried all the right descriptors (excluding an ungainly genre portmanteau that has become all too common), but they all feel too formal—too conventional a way to talk about a game that consistently performs awesome, unexpected magic tricks.

Öoo accomplishes this feat by essentially taunting you into the act. Its opening minutes betray very little of its depth, but as Öoo grows in complexity, it increasingly dangles completion just outside the realm of the player’s believed capabilities. Some simple instructions detail the game’s simplistic bomb mechanic at the start, but otherwise, it’s quite content to leave you to your own devices, inviting you to feel it out for yourself by testing the game’s bounds.

Öoo

For example, at the same time that the game gives you the ability to make bombs, it also wordlessly teaches you that a) bombs can be stood on b) they can propel you forward and c) they are essential to jump over chasms and gaps. Each of these facets of the bomb is then painstakingly built upon in order to solve some genuinely difficult puzzles on the main and optional paths, but Öoo largely communicates this and some of its later twists with tantalizing bits of design. I often thought to myself, “I simply cannot beat this room without seemingly breaking a rule of the game,” only to find that Öoo absolutely encourages you to try.

This is perhaps the thing that I love and respect about Öoo above everything else. As its challenges ramp up, you might expect to uncover a new powerup or mainstay ability like you would in similar games like Metroid or Celeste. That never happens here, though. Instead, it basically dares you to flout its own rules by layering your existing tools and strategies as expertly as you can. It explicitly trusts you to jerry-rig a solution, sharing more in common with a game like Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom than it does with other platformers. And when you workshop something and it just clicks, there is rarely a better or even equivalent feeling in a modern game right now. Right up until its end, Öoo is constantly teaching the player to throw away what they believe to be the conventions of platforming logic and think outside the box in order to make breakthroughs that crack the game wide open.

This means that I largely spent my four hours with Öoo just bouncing between zones and dead-ends based on my own gut feelings, all the while divining the location of secret routes through experimentation, and intuiting mechanics and solutions. And I’m happy to report back that it absolutely ruled, and is exactly what I’ve wanted out of games that often position themselves as throwbacks or wear the aesthetics of foundational games, but often fall short of these ambitions.

In a sense, Öoo is a steady stream of tricks played upon the player, and the best surprise of the game is how well that works. Every new “ability” is actually just a rug pull on behalf of the developers, considering each new trick is in fact something you can do from the very outset. Its early levels just condition you to think within such constraints so that every subsequent discovery feels like it threatens to break the game wide open. Only it doesn’t, because Öoo, one of the most cleverly crafted platformers around, has already accounted for that and so much more than it initially lets on. The wrinkles that it introduces from level to level may feel like throwaways, but in reality Öoo is simply building you up, as well as quietly informing you of the rules of its world, and testing your ability to move heaven and earth. It is, without a doubt, a stroke of platforming genius, and a game everyone ought to make time for.

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.