Do you believe in love at first sight? What about when the subject of that affection is a video game? I don’t think I would have said I do, until the first trailer for the heavily anime-inspired Orbitals from developer Shapefarm and publisher Kepler Interactive dropped. And, all of the sudden, I did believe in love at first sight – maybe especially for video games. But this also turned out to be Orbitals’ fatal flaw.

My immediate infatuation obscured a much more important fact: Orbitals is a co-op only video game. There’s literally no way at all to play on your own, though you can do local co-op or more traditional online multiplayer. Whatever the case might be, you’re playing with another person. Discovering this particular detail so late was, in a word, deflating.

Pondering the Orb’

While the aesthetics and art design of Orbitals are heavily influenced and inspired by ’70s and ’80s anime, the actual game underneath the surface is much more modern. The style of co-op game so closely associated with Hazelight – It Takes Two and Split Fiction, for example – requires some decently clever puzzling and well-timed responses from a duo in order to progress. Sounds satisfying, right? In my specific case, this is actually a problem.

Let me begin by saying that I love my partner, the person I most want to play couch co-op games with and the one that I previously attempted to play It Takes Two with some years back. After some particularly excruciating platforming, however, we ultimately stopped, and I didn’t even consider bothering trying out Split Fiction with them. (That one would, ultimately, wait until my brother was briefly back in the country, and even though we didn’t complete it – I have never once considered asking my partner to tag in.)

The simple fact of the matter is that my partner does not have the institutional gamer knowledge required to effectively play games like Orbitals. Even with it being entirely up both of our alleys, artistically, the actual act of play at work here is a significant barrier. While they grew up playing games, they were turn-based RPGs like Final Fantasy 7 or something like Katamari Damacy or Spyro. Orbitals, and games like it, require an entirely different set of skills.

Something I increasingly think about is how certain games assume a standard level of knowledge. If you’ve played a platformer before, you likely understand how jumping often works in video games. If you’ve played a first-person shooter before, you understand aiming and shooting. Many modern video games don’t bother to start with first principles and instead opt to leap several steps ahead to combining preobtained knowledge.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, or at least an exceedingly common problem, but it’s certainly one for my own personal experience. Having not grown up on platformers or shooters or really anything that required twitchy reflexes, my partner struggled to keep up with what many people might assume to be simplistic tasks. Need to jump and shoot at the same time while swapping between targets? Orbitals might as well have been asking them to complete a CIA tryout.

I hesitate to lay any of this at Orbitals’ virtual feet, in part because I’m not one to judge a game by what I wish it were rather than what it is. But I would love for there to be something in this style of game that both encourages significant others to play a game together while also dialing down the absolutely necessary requirements to do so. Whether that’s some kind of scaling slider or what I don’t know – I’m not a game designer – and maybe this kind of wishful thinking is actually in direct opposition to why games like It Takes Two or Split Fiction work for so many people.

I just wish they worked for me and mine.

Orbitals was played on Nintendo Switch 2, with a code provided by the publisher.

Orbiting around wanting to play more like this? Our best co-op games has recommendations for more with a pal, or our best single-player games has advice for those craving going solo.