ORB, a beautiful interstellar puzzle game mixes shoot em’ up-esque space exploration and grid based puzzles as you collect new abilities, chase stars and attempt to piece together your fragmented world.
In ORB you control a ball of light that floats around outer space, exploring the environment and chasing stars. Each star is quite far away, so you must travel to it avoiding asteroids as you go. You have some useful abilities, like dashing and shooting pulses which destroy asteroids or enemies who are trying to stop you. If you break asteroids, you have a chance of gaining some life or power to dash. Not all of the game is floating around space chasing stars though – it’s split into grid based puzzle sections too.
Soon, you unlock constellations. These constellations are full of a variety of puzzles and upgrades that then will help Orb collect stars. These puzzles have blocks to push, timers to activate, buttons to match to specific blocks, enemies and bullets to avoid – providing a huge amount of different puzzles to take on. The level select for ORB allows you to sometimes skip levels, however, some of these levels do hold power ups that are very helpful to you – so you may need to explore then anyway.
ORB is a very challenging, unforgiving game that takes a lot of precision to solve. One wrong move may mean you have to completely restart the entire puzzle, but it is worth it to gain the power ups to help Orb. It’s mixture of gameplay styles makes for a very unique experience and the particle effects are very cool. A cerebral celestial puzzler well worth checking out.
Note: We ran into some issues when using WASD controls in the puzzle grids. We’d recommend using the Arrow Keys instead if you have any problems.
Check Out a Video of the ORB Alpha Here
Download ORB Alpha Here (Win Only)