As a huge fan of puzzle games, not many titles have captured that “a-ha!” moment for me. I’ve played plenty, from metroidbrainias like Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds and Simogo’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes to Valve’s Portal 2 and a few hours of The Talos Principle, to name a few. I admit, the genre has become so formulaic that I rarely know what to expect anymore.
Orbyss was a wonderful surprise. It has a simple premise that borrows familiar mechanics from puzzle games that came before it. You can see the influence of Portal’s design, with a touch of Braid’s platformer puzzles, but Orbyss takes it down a notch with its own 3D approach.
The main goal is to purge a mysterious threat that has somehow breached the Orbyss facility. In a strange way, it reminds me of the human body’s tendency to expel foreign intrusions, using the intricate work of red and white blood cells. But instead of blood cells, you play as an Orb chasing the foreign threat. From a broad perspective, that’s essentially what Orbyss’ gameplay feels like.
Sound also plays a vital role in its puzzles. At times, your small orb must take on a “safecracking” minigame, where you carefully adjust your mouse position whenever the noise grows louder. Oddly enough, this was my favorite part of the game due to how satisfying it all is.
There’s something distinctly alien about Orbyss’ design. The architecture is unlike anything familiar, and its overall atmosphere feels otherworldly. There isn’t much of a story here, either. Orbyss is built purely to challenge your mind. It has the same kind of layered complexity as Baba Is You, which was equally nerve-wracking.
To be fair, I have seen many of Orbyss’ puzzle ideas before, but the game often pushes them in unexpected directions. I breezed through its supposedly more difficult puzzles in the demo, only to hit a wall in the later stages. The demo let me play Chapter 1 and Chapter 3, skipping Chapter 2 entirely. Chapter 1 was fairly easy, serving as an introduction to its logic-based mechanics, while Chapter 3 ramped up the challenge with intricate, carefully planned level designs.
For the most part, Orbyss feels like it draws heavily from Annapurna Interactive and Geometric Interactive’s COCOON, one of my top games of 2023. It shares the same sense of layered puzzle mechanics, where you manipulate multiple orbs and switch between them to progress. It’s not a completely original idea in general, but I can see fans of COCOON, The Witness, and other logic-heavy puzzle games enjoying Orbyss’ approach.
Overall, Orbyss is an intriguing addition to the logic-puzzle genre. While it doesn’t break new ground mechanically, its smart and intuitive controls make for satisfying brain-teasers. I’m looking forward to seeing just how much harder and more elaborate the puzzles get in the full release this September 3, 2025.
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