Starting at a new school is always a difficult experience for children. Whether it’s the first day of nursery, primary school or secondary school, you’re always one of the smaller fish in a new pond. Things are only more trying if you’re joining class some years later or mid-term, with established cliques and friend groups to figure out as the only outsider. Thankfully, Cosmonious High is about as harmonious, positive and uplifting a school as you could possibly imagine. Its AI has gone completely off the rails, though….
Cosmonious High is the latest game from Owlchemy Labs, a much more ambitious successor to Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator in every way. It’s lost none of the vibrance and colourful graphics, the quirky, playful interactivity or feel-good vibes, though.
This is an inter-galactic school with a handful of different species amongst the student body, with tall Bipids with tentacle hands sprouting from the heads, squat Flan slimes, and brilliantly rendered 2D Trisks that are flat, but with the look of 3D to their internal shading – it’s difficult to describe. The whole game is luridly colourful, like a Saturday morning cartoon that’s been through a neon filter, but it’s remarkably consistent, and nicely in keeping with the rest of Owlchemy’s work.
Even within this alien-filled school, you’re something new altogether: a Prismi. That’s a little Rayman-like character with a large head and floating hands, and as you prepare for the school bus you get to pick out a hat, backpack, glasses, and a few other little incidental customisation bits. You generally won’t see them, but you do have a neat little camera in your backpack for snapping pictures and selfies.
Getting on the bus is where things start to go wrong. It crashes into the side of the school in the middle of a meteor shower, and trapped in a burning wreck of a space bus, the stress brings about a transformation within you, revealing an ability to start squirting water from your hands to put out the fires.
It’s just the first of a bunch of abilities, including ice, telekinesis, resizing, and thought reading. Each one reveals itself as you step into a new and uniquely stressful situation – usually in a new catastrophe-laden classroom, where the first thing you’ll often do is put out literal fires and fix broken things.
Cosmonious High’s classrooms gradually open up to you, providing you with lessons and tasks to complete, but they’re daft alien classes of familiar human ones. It could be painting by throwing moon balls and squirting paint from your hands, setting off rockets in astronography, expressing a range of alien emotions with arm motions. And there’s rewards even when goofing off with the other kids, getting involved in the race for student president, getting distracted from the prescribed art curriculum and making a mess.
Each completed lesson nets you a class credit that goes toward opening up further classes, but the fundamentals spread throughout the school. There’s ways to use each and every ability you unlock everywhere – trouble spots are highlighted by little floating 2D creatures – and little credit-awarding stations that give you quick and simple puzzles. The thing is, you’re only really asked to use abilities in combination at a couple of late-game moments. Each class teaches you about an ability’s uses, but step outside and you use them all in isolation, your interactions staying at the first level.
Getting around in Comsmonious High is done via teleporting – there’s no smooth motion options here – with gestures to access your backpack on your shoulder, and to switch between abilities by moving one hand over the other. You can have different abilities equipped on each hand, which is handy when exploring and fixing things on the fly. There’s a pleasing amount of interactive objects wherever you look, and you can happily grab things, and hand them to students to comment on – even just talking to people has you wave to engage their dialogue. It’s a much broader space and environment than the miniature sandboxes of Job Simulator, but does also feel like a similar entry-level game for new VR players to try.
It’s unrelentingly cheerful and positive throughout – it’s almost too nice! Sure there’s a mystery to solve, there’s the AI to fix, but outside of that there’s only the slightest moments of any interpersonal conflict that are resolved almost instantly. I wasn’t really that invested in getting to know them, but by the game’s midpoint I did warm to the company they provide. It’s certainly family friendly, and would be great for younger gamers – Sony’s guidance is that PSVR 2 is not for children under 12, and Meta’s is that Quest is for 13+, mind you.
