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Tag: namatakahashi

  • Öoo (NamaTakahashi, 2025)

    Öoo (NamaTakahashi, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: NamaTakahashi, tiny cactus studio / NamaTakahashi
    Released: 07/08/2025
    Completed: 14/02/2026
    Completion: Finished it!

    Öoo is… perfection. I’m not sure I can phrase it any other way, actually. It’s not simply a textbook case of a game that’s doing exactly what it set out to do as well as it absolutely could, it’s doing something so clever–on a level that I didn’t think was possible–that I actually could not believe it was doing it. I actually think Öoo might be the gold standard for mechanic-first game design now. It’s that clever.

    I mean the cleverness starts with the name, doesn’t it? It’s called Öoo, and you play a wee “bomb caterpillar” that looks exactly like the title. They must have felt like a god when they worked that one out. As the caterpillar–is it named Öoo? I’m not actually sure–you find yourself snaffled up by a big bird when you were innocently planning on snacking on an apple and have to escape by, well, getting as deep into the bird’s guts as possible so you can blow up their heart and then jump out of their mouth (I mean, I’d just have waited until they yawned or something, but you do you, Öoo. Yoo doo Öoo.)

    You do this by navigating platforming challenges, but you can’t jump. Initially you can’t do much of anything, but you quickly unlock your first tail segment and then the trick is that you can drop it as a bomb and choose when it explodes–and when it does, it propels anything near it in the opposite direction the explosion hits it from. So you can, for example, drop it, stand on it, and then blow it up to propel yourself into the air to get you to a higher platform, or stand next to it to get you to blow you over a spike pit.

    One amazing thing is that the game is able to do so much with that before it even introduces the second tail segment, thanks to the thoughtful implementation of other mechanics. The game immediately introduces a generous warp system where you can easily warp between any two warp points, and then begins to gate your progress with yellow frogs who require you deliver them flies to let you pass, along with a variety of other obstacles–the usual spikes, but also blocks that need to be blown up (which may reappear on a timer) buttons to press to open or close doors and… huh, you know what? That’s about it.

    But here’s the most incredible thing about Öoo. They never give you more than the two exploding tail segments and they stop introducing new obstacles about half an hour into it, but the game is full of a sense of discovery I don’t think I’ve ever felt in the game before because (and I’m going to spoil the “trick” of the game here, so if you don’t want that spoiled, please stop reading and just play it):

    You are never truly “gated” at all by the frogs. In each situation you’re stymied by one, you just need to know how to use your caterpillar’s already existing abilities to pass it right there and then. The section of the level you’ll go and play leads to a dead end that you just warp back from and it is entirely there to teach you the mechanic you need to perform.

    I’m not sure if I can express how revelatory this is. It’s like in a movie when the hero learns they always had the power inside them and they just had to ~believe in themselves~ happening to you, repeatedly. I can’t say for sure if you’re going to have the reaction I did, but not only did I enjoy the game so much even when I understood the trick that I was happy to progress through the game in full–not stopping to try and figure out the “shortcuts”–and I definitely never knew how to do what was required to progress via frog gate until I’d done the whole thing anyway, because it was never as simple as knowing the mechanic; you needed to understand the mechanic fully.

    It is wonderful. It’s made me look at Metroidvanias, roguelikes, even “git gud” games in almost a whole new light, imaging a world where rather than making the player jump through hoops for required unlocks or permanent warps or extreme mastery players were simply shown ways to use the mechanics in new ways through play.

    I imagine this world, but I also find it hard to believe it’s possible, because I can think of every way it can go wrong immediately. And that’s why Öoo is such an incredible piece of game design. There’s a version of this game where the average player hits a gate, goes “oh, maybe if I do this” and then skips 10, 20% of the game, possibly backtracks to do it and discovers that there’s just a dead-end there and wonders “well what was the point of that.” You have to have incredible confidence to decide you can hide a solution that’s already accessible to a player from them until you want them to have it, and bloody hell does Nama Takahashi have it.

    The only caveat I have here is that was my experience, and maybe you’re king shit problem solver, and you’ll grasp what do to immediately in every situation. You cut your teeth on kaizo and never thought “well, I’ll take that other easier path instead.” But I’d be surprised if that wasn’t a statistical irrelevance in terms of players of this game (maybe only slightly heightened by people who read things like this who learn the trick in advance.) The funny thing is how much trying to break Öoo would be to not just miss the point but to actually ruin the fun completely. That rather than learn a mechanic that allows you to unlock the doors as you go you hit your head against them until they bust open.

    It would be pointless, too, because for the real heads there are loads of hidden extra hard sections to do found via hidden trophies that test your abilities as far as you can go if you really want to (in my case, not very far.)

    Öoo is short–my completed playthough clocks in at 2.4 hours–but if it were to be any longer I think either cracks would start to show or new mechanics would have to be introduced, and the perfection would be sullied. But if you want to play a puzzle platformer, there is no better option. Probably at all.

    Will I ever play it again? No. I am interested to see what Nama Takahashi does next, but good lord what an act to follow. I don’t think I could, but then I also couldn’t have come up with Öoo. It’s humbling.

    Final Thought: If you’re going to play this or Elechead, Öoo wins; but if you think you’ll play both, I recommend playing Elechead first, as it has a rougher design but you can see the evolution towards Öoo in it (whereas playing it second will just feel like a step backwards.)

  • Elechead (Namatakahashi, 2021)

    Elechead (Namatakahashi, 2021)

    Developed/Published by: Namatakahashi, Tsuyomi / Namatakahashi
    Released: 14/10/2021
    Completed: 31/08/2025
    Completion: Hard to say if the game has a “good” and a “bad” ending, so let’s just say I saw one of the endings.

    Before we get into the article: you can pre-order a copy of exp. 2602, my brand new zine, right now. If you haven’t picked up any issues yet, there’s a discounted bundle of all three zines! Patreon members get an even bigger discount: subscriptions start at just $1!

    Saw people talking about Öoo, the latest Namatakahashi game, so of course I had to look up what they’ve made before that, saw that they’d made a game called Elechead, and played that instead.

    And I’m glad I did!

    I talked a lot about process in my recent essay on Many Nights A Whisper, and I think Elechead represents a more expected way of centering a low number of game mechanics (or especially, single game mechanic) in a video game: not focused on the player’s process toward a singular mastery, but on playing with the player’s believed mastery, taking the mechanics and bending them, requiring lateral thinking and moments of inspiration to progress.

    In Elechead, it’s something so simple and clever that I’m surprised I haven’t seen it before. It’s actually described wordlessly in game and even on the Steam page (perhaps, originally, to avoid localisation issues–even the settings menu relies on pictograms). You’re a wee robot with an electric charge. Anything you stand on is powered. So, for example, if you stand on a platform that moves, it moves. If you stand on a platform with some bulbs attached, those bulbs light (in game, creating a dangerous barrier.)  As soon as you jump, everything turns off; when you land again, everything turns back on. Instantly.

    The game plays like that for a bit longer than I expected it would, before it introduces its main twist: your head is what holds the charge, and you can fling it off and run around as a headless body for ten seconds. So where previously you might face a barrier and just have to jump to break the connection to get through it, now you might have to throw your head across to make a connection somewhere else–and then get there in time.

    The thing that stands out about Elechead is that it sucks the bones of its concept, and that it does so with a thoughtful difficulty curve (well, to an extent). There’s always a new way at looking at your abilities or how they interact with the world, and what you will be able to do can be surprising. It’s generally deeply satisfying when you work out what you need to do, but if there’s an issue, it’s that the game relies on a couple of (in my opinion) bad mannered “tricks” to stymie you: hidden paths with no “tell” (in walls, or off screen) and a final upgrade that’s completely hidden behind one of them (my understanding is that you can beat the game without it, but I struggled even with it…)

    It’s a bit of a shame, because the game leads to a climax that I really loved. If you’ll allow mild spoilers, the game is a linear trip through a series of puzzles (outside of some side paths to collectibles) and when you reach the end, you simply get a few hints to where you were actually supposed to go. But heading backwards requires you revisit puzzles you’ve already seen and solve them in entirely different ways as you reach what appear to be the game’s tutorialising “one way” valves!

    So I don’t love that this game stretches the player slightly beyond what’s fair, but that does mean it fits into the milieu of Japanese video games inspired by Xevious and Tower of Druaga.

    What, you thought I was going to get through an article without mentioning them?

    Will I ever play it again? Probably not, but I enjoyed this so much I’m having to pace myself to not just start Öoo immediately. 

    Final Thought: Weirdly, after I beat this, I looked up some playthroughs on YouTube, and everyone skips showing the trip backwards, my favourite bit! They do the collectibles ending and take an unrewarding shortcut to the other ending. You’ll only have yourself to blame if you do this. Just remember that things can be hidden in walls and off screen and you’ll be fine.