Hey everybody, fancy some utter frustration?

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

(You can also buy, download and install it using Steam, which is what I 
did.)

The game is simple enough. You control a small mote. If you touch a 
smaller mote, you absorb it and become bigger. If you touch a larger 
mote, it absorbs you and you DIE. Don't do this. You can also manouver 
by ejecting small particles of mass. (But this gradually - or rapidly - 
makes you smaller, depending on your vigourusly you manouver.)

On later levels, they add other challenges - such as motes that don't 
just float around but actually swim themselves, wirlpools that move 
everything around, "antimatter" that destroys anything it touches, etc. 
The nice thing is that, once you complete the basic tutorial, you get to 
decide which kinds of levels you want to play.

The game is very slight. The graphics become repetative quite quickly, 
but they are quite pretty all the same. And the music is kind of 
atmospheric, if rather dull. You can quite easily spend several hours 
playing this game without noticing.

The major problem with the game is that it is ABSURDLY HARD. The major 
reason for this is that trying to make your mote go where you want is 
almost impossible. (You see that level in the video with everything 
spiralling around the attractor in the center? It took me THREE DAYS to 
complete that single level!) You have the power to slow down time [or, 
indeed, to speed it up if you're waiting for something to happen], but 
it'll do little good.

Basically, you see something worth eating, and by the time you manage to 
get to it, you've used up so much energy manouvering that you're now 
smaller than the thing you're trying to absord. Instead of sustaining 
you, it kills you. And even if it doesn't, you can easily spend more 
energy manouvering than you get out of your meals, so you never actually 
get any bigger.

I should also mention that manouvering involves ejecting mass, and this 
can also move other motes around. There are levels where you actually do 
this on purpose to move obstructions out of your way. (Hence the "speed 
up time" option.) These levels are extremely hard. It's almost 
impossible to avoid moving things you want to remain still. If you're 
not careful, you collapse all available matter into a single giant mote, 
many times larger than you, and you now have nothing left to eat, and 
it's a stalemate. (Alternatively, on the antimatter levels, you knock 
too much matter and antimatter together and end up with an empty space 
with no food.)

The number of times I've spent several hours playing a level, just about 
come close to completing it, and then accidentally touched the wrong 
mote for a split second and lost the game... Do you know what "rage 
quit" is? Because this game inspires *a lot* of rage quits. It can be so 
damned frustrating.

And yet, I keep playing it... Apparently my logical reasoning skills are 
faulty. :-P

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