Orbitals

Orbitals has no single-player mode. That isn’t a footnote on the store page; it’s the whole design. Shapefarm has built a game that won’t work unless two people pay attention to each other. The premise is pure Saturday-morning sci-fi. Maki and Omura are two inseparable explorers whose home space station is trapped inside a supernatural cosmic storm. Help isn’t coming, so they go looking for it. They cross the deadly Storm Wall into uncharted regions full of abandoned facilities, environmental hazards, and creatures with unclear intentions. The setup is built for momentum rather than mystery, and the game knows it.

The obvious comparison is Hazelight’s run of co-op-only hits, It Takes Two and Split Fiction. Orbitals borrows Hazelight’s smartest business idea: a Friend’s Pass that lets your partner join without buying their own copy. The two studios aim at different scales, though. Hazelight goes for blockbuster spectacle and constant genre shifts. Orbitals stays small and focused. Its puzzles use a compact set of tools, its look comes straight from 1980s Japanese anime, and it plays like a confident mid-priced game rather than a cut-price one.

That modesty is its best quality and its clearest limit. Orbitals is a strong first date and a somewhat thin long-term relationship. Its target audience is couples, siblings, parent-and-kid pairs, and friends with very different skill levels. For them, it’s an easy recommendation. Anyone hoping for a sprawling, brain-melting puzzle marathon should adjust their expectations.

• Strict asymmetric co-op: Maki and Omura have different abilities and different jobs. Most puzzles and action sequences are built so neither player can solve them alone, which means progress always takes negotiation.
• A small toolset used deeply: Instead of handing out a new gadget every chapter, the game gets its variety from a limited kit placed in new contexts.
• Flexible ways to play together: Local split-screen on one console, online play, Nintendo Switch 2 GameShare, and the Orbitals Global Friend’s Pass for a partner who doesn’t own the game.
• 1980s anime art direction: The look draws on the hand-drawn space opera of that era, and Studio Massket produced the cinematic cutscenes.
• Multilingual voice acting: Full voice work in several languages, which matters more than usual in a game built for two people who may not share a first language.
• Every play mode supported: TV, tabletop, and handheld.

The Gameplay Loop: Talking Is the Mechanic

The core loop is simple: enter a space, read it, split the work, and do it together. Different abilities alone don’t make asymmetric co-op interesting. What matters is that each player knows and can do different things. When one player can do something the other can’t, the conversation on the couch becomes the actual game, and Orbitals understands this better than most of its peers.

Its best moments follow a recognizable pattern. Both players stare at a room that looks impossible. Then one of them realizes their kit has a role here that the other didn’t consider, and the plan comes together out loud. Very few genres produce that feeling, and Orbitals builds toward it again and again. Because almost every puzzle needs both players, neither one gets parked as a passenger while the other plays the real game. That’s a common failure in co-op design, where the “support” role amounts to holding a button and waiting.

The Small Toolset: Discipline With a Ceiling

Shapefarm’s most important decision is restraint. Many co-op puzzle games confuse novelty with depth. They introduce a gimmick, use it for twenty minutes, and drop it. Orbitals does the opposite: it keeps the verbs and changes the situations around them.

The benefit is that skill builds over time. Partners develop a shorthand, and by the back half a single word can replace a full sentence of planning. Two people getting better at playing together, not just individually, is the most satisfying thing the design offers.

The cost is a lower ceiling. Late puzzles often feel like variations rather than escalations. The game rarely reaches a final exam that pushes an experienced puzzle-solving duo to its limits. This is where the common “lightweight” criticism is fair. The design is elegant, but it seldom becomes truly demanding.

Onboarding Friction: Close to Zero

That ceiling is also what makes the game so welcoming. Success depends more on coordination than on fast reflexes, so the gap between an experienced player and a newcomer shrinks considerably. A partner who hasn’t held a controller in a decade can contribute as much as the one who plays every night, because the hard part is communication, not execution.

It’s the game’s strongest real-world selling point. Plenty of games claim to be “for everyone” and then hand the less experienced player a lesser role. Orbitals makes both roles essential, which is the honest way to deliver on that claim.

Where It Stumbles: Signposting and the Camera

Two problems take the edge off. First, objectives are sometimes unclear. In a single-player game, getting stuck is a private frustration. In co-op it’s shared, and it can turn into blame, because two people are stuck together and each may suspect the other missed something. Unclear goals do more damage in this genre than almost any other, and Orbitals doesn’t handle them well.

Second, the camera sometimes frames the action badly. In a game where each player depends on seeing what the other is doing, a camera that hides key information is more than a cosmetic problem. It disrupts the communication the whole design depends on.

Story: Big Feelings, Modest Payoff

The story of Maki and Omura’s bond clearly aims for a big emotional payoff, and it doesn’t land the way it means to. The premise of a trapped home, a wall of storm, and two friends heading into the unknown works fine as a frame that keeps you moving forward. The writing just doesn’t build the attachment its climactic moments assume you have. Solving the next room will matter more to most players than what happens to the characters, and that’s a problem for a game that clearly wants it the other way around.

The art direction is the first thing you notice and one of the last things you’ll forget. Orbitals commits fully to its 1980s Japanese anime influences instead of just quoting them. It evokes an era of hand-drawn space opera that most modern games ignore, and the commitment gives the game an identity that sets it apart in a crowded eShop.

Studio Massket’s cutscenes are the visual high point. They’re cinematic and confident, and they’re often more emotionally convincing than the script they illustrate. The multilingual voice acting is a thoughtful touch for a game built around people sitting side by side.

The UI is where style and function disagree. The presentation looks great, but the game doesn’t always make clear what the room expects of you. Some of the unclear-objective complaints trace back to this: the screen looks good but doesn’t communicate enough.

The design’s technical weak spot is framing, not horsepower. A 2D-styled game of this scope is light on hardware; the camera is the real issue, and it’s most consequential in split-screen, where each player’s view is already halved and a bad angle costs more.

The Switch 2 is a natural home for this kind of game. The hardware has always been designed around handing a controller to the person next to you, and Orbitals builds on that.

• TV mode is the best way to play. Split-screen needs real screen space, and a living-room display gives both players room to read their half of the puzzle.
• Tabletop mode works well for travel, since two players can share one console on a tray table or a desk. It’s the setup that best fits the game’s couple-friendly appeal.
• Handheld mode is supported, but it’s better for solo exploration in an online session than for shared-screen play. Split-screen on a single handheld display is cramped, and cramped views make the camera problems worse.

The real platform advantage is reach. GameShare lets a nearby second console join from one copy, and the Global Friend’s Pass lets an online partner join without buying the game. Together they remove the biggest barrier to a co-op-only game: persuading a second person to spend money on a game they haven’t tried. A Deluxe Upgrade Pack is available as DLC, but it makes sense to wait until the base game has clearly worked for your pairing before buying it.

Orbitals is a first game that understands what it is. Shapefarm hasn’t tried to beat Hazelight at blockbuster scale. Instead, it built a tight, good-looking, communication-driven puzzle adventure where neither player is ever just along for the ride. The restraint in its toolset produces the game’s best moments and also its ceiling. The story overreaches, the camera sometimes undermines the cooperation the game depends on, and the occasional unclear objective will lead to a few tense moments on the couch.

None of that cancels out the main achievement. Orbitals gets two people, often with very different gaming backgrounds, to solve problems together, and it rarely makes either of them feel unnecessary. Its Friend’s Pass makes getting a partner nearly free. If you have someone to play with and want a focused, conversation-driven puzzle game rather than a genre-hopping epic, Orbitals is worth your evening. If you don’t, it isn’t for you.