It’s by the creator of Elechead, which is worth playing if you haven’t. Like Elechead, this is an exploration puzzle game with simple presentation but a lot of polish for what it is and a consistently smooth experience (in a good way).
A clever thing that Öoo does is present you with a dead-end so you have to explore elsewhere, and then instead of giving you a new ability, teach you a new trick that you could have done all along to get through the original dead-end. And then you can immediately jump back there and try it if you want to.
I’ve played about an hour so far and it was just starting to get a little tricky as it was getting late.
There’s a demo on Steam and also here (this one in your browser, so no download required):
I adore this game and I think this is my new fav current dev. I can continue to love video games if I keep getting like one great Famicom game a year. That’s enough to earn my heart…
The mechanic that most impresses me is having semisolids automatically drop bombs after a delay. It’s really unintuitive but allows for a lot of puzzle possibilities. It feels like it took a lot of iteration to hit upon that combination of effects.
Turns out there are secrets all over the place. But it’s not like Zelda 1 where you have to try bombing every rock in the world. Once you stumble upon one you basically know what to look for. Yet another way in which this game seems to make an effort not to waste the player’s time.
To complete everything, you really have to think about the possibilities of what you can do and stretch some of the “hidden” mechanics yet further.
My running theory, based on the high occurrence of poo in ElecHead, is that the original ending was going to be exiting the dragon via the anus, potentially embedded in a fecal pyramid, but the “exit through the tutorial area” design ultimately won out for aesthetics.
Played the demo of this when it first came out, started the game proper tonight, less than an hour in but this is already just such a very pleasant thing to move around and mess around in.
Okay finished this and did all the post-game stuff I could manage (had to be nudged that it existed, the in-game hint went over my head) and yeah this is rather great, I feel like most of the 2025 games I’ve come across ended up not really landing as well as I’d have hoped but between getting to this now and Silksong the end of the year has turned things around a bit.
…Post-game stuff might put this ahead of Silksong (some of them are just absurdly clever), although I should probably see what its post-game stuff is like before saying that >_>
