[Review] Odysseus Kosmos and his Robot Quest - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Pavel Kostin
Published By: HeroCraft
Categories: Adventure 
Release Date: 02.04.21

Odysseus Kosmos is a funny, good looking, and rather lengthy adventure game. It has one big issue that kills my entire experience with it though.

Odysseus Kosmos is a port of a PC game. PCs are great for point and clicks because you can point and click. The Switch having a touch screen is also perfect for them. Too bad you can’t use the touch screen in this port. It makes what is a normally simple and easy process to a time consuming one where scrolling through the background objects to examine or touch is done purely from the shoulder buttons. It takes forever and made playing this a chore, which from seeing the reviews online for the PC version was incredibly disappointing.

Lets discuss the game proper though. You play as a bit of a lazy scientist. He’s super smart, but a bit of a jerk. He really likes to snack too, even if he should be on his diet. Odysseus, called Oddy by his Robot, Barton Quest is probably more relatable to people than they like to admit. He could be nicer to Barton though…Both of them are the lone creatures living in a space colony, for years at a time. Oddy’s job? The single man in charge of keeping the colony maintained, for years on end. It sounds a tad boring, but they do get a little too close to a black hole…

It’s the kind of solve puzzles and figure out how to use items kind of adventure game. Locked in a room and given tasks, needing to make use of the items you find. The game can be creative with how they want you to solve puzzles and use the items. In the prologue for instance, you need a cup of coffee, so you find the cup to brew it, but then once you’re done, the machine automatically cleans the cup. Your window for a telescope is dirty though. You find your glasses case and take the microfiber cloth out of it. Now that you have that, you can get your coffee cup full of the cleaning solution and dip the cloth into it to clean the window. I was able to put the pieces together, but I can get why this might be a bit of an odd chain of events. Such with many adventure games, if you don’t know what to do, you can always exhaust every option. That said, I ran into issues where items I could combine would not combine unless I did it in the PRECISE order they wanted. This seems like such a silly oversight.

Odysseus Kosmos is pleasant to look at and listen to. If there’s one thing I can definitely praise it’s the game’s presentation. I always love colorful, detailed pixel art. However, the key objects to examine in the background can blend it at times, even with something telling you were they are. It again, ultimately doesn’t help that you can’t use the touch screen.

Please patch a touch screen option into this game. PLEASE. This game is begging me to play it and I want to like it, it has so much for me. But using just the buttons is not enjoyable and makes playing a task in itself.