Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (1992)

Name:Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure
Number:239
Year:1992
Publisher:Apogee
Developer:Apogee
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:4 hours 30 minutes
Won:No (104W/77L)

For the most part, Apogee's titles have generally not felt like direct analogues to the console games that dominated side-scrollers from the late '80s to the early '90s. Keen or Duke might have bits that are similar, but there's nothing about them that felt like they were inferior copies of Megaman or Contra. In fact there's been a pretty clear progression from the old single-screen titles to finally throwing off the shackles of poor screen scrolling. Cosmo is different, because Cosmo has that whiff of copying about it.

The story is, Cosmo's birthday is coming up tomorrow and his parents are taking him to Disney World, but a comet crashes into their ship, forcing them to make an emergency landing on an uncharted planet, which the episode's title helpfully calls Forbidden Planet. Which, when I think about it, feels like shoehorning a reference to a famous sci-fi film than an actual name. After landing, Cosmo's father repairs the ship while Cosmo then decides to go wandering off, because Cosmo is a small, dumb child. Only, it turns out that when he returns, his parents are missing, and there's only strange footprints there. Cosmo worries that monsterous aliens are going to eat his parents and he needs to rescue them.

In contrast to most Apogee characters, Cosmo is unable to shoot things, because he is a small child with suction cup hands. However, he can jump on enemies and can climb walls. Jumping on anything, be it enemies or crates with goodies inside, cause Cosmo to jump up a little. The instructions also tell me that he can find and use bombs, because shooting people is bad, but using hi-powered explosives is good. They work like you'd think, slow timer until they explode, so you shouldn't be using them willy-nilly.

Bombs are comparatively high-powered. Anything that I had trouble killing with it was less because it couldn't damage it, but rather because it was hard to actually land one on it. It spawns a little in front of Cosmo, so you can't deploy it if that isn't possible , and you have to safely get close. One it explodes, seemingly any non-wall object touching it dies with it. Random eyes on the ground, and basically every scenery trap. Even spikes. To say it's useful is understating it, the bomb is a tool more clever than any gun could be.

Cosmo is actually a kind of crappy protagonist from a playability standpoint. He moves slowly, possibly because the screen scrolling isn't all that smooth. His jump has one of those thin arcs that feels annoying to jump around with because you don't get enough horizontal reach. I've had the problem more than once. The wall climbing is also quite weird, rather than walking up it, you stick to the wall until you decide to jump off. It's also a bit disconcerting to have to do it, but gradually it's validness as an option becomes second nature At least he can look up and down, a very handy skill with some of these areas, and a health bar. Which can be increased, but is quite rare to find and almost always is in a secret area.

The DNA of proceeding Apogee games is very obvious. While Cosmo isn't just Duke with a few changes going on, the menus and probably a significant chunk of the underlying game logic was taken from there. Judging by Cosmo's occasional appearance in Commander Keen source ports, I suspect the two were frankensteined together. Since it has more handcrafted backgrounds along with free floating objects, as opposed to being on a grid.

There are also crates and barrels with stuff in them. Usually the barrels are better, bombs and health pickups are inside.Crates usually just have fruit inside, which just give points, something there is no shortage of. Rounding out the pickups are stars.

The opening level does a good job of introducing the game's central design in a clear way. To start with, there's a hint orb, which really looks like a trap of some sort, and the first one activates when you automatically go into it. Future ones you have to press up on in order to use.

But there's that whiff of what I dislike in plain platformers. Just plain old going left to right, with the occasional branch upwards. It's Apogee, so there's a bit more to it, a hidden secret in a pit, a little bit of verticality required and some unusual monster designs. I must admit, I wasn't expecting what I thought of as a children's game to have enemies which stopped to roar once in a while. But that said, it's another game where you're supposed to get enjoyment from collecting hundreds of pieces of fruit.

Every two levels you get a bonus stage, which I must admit feels pointless at first. You get unlimited lives, and while it does drop health and bombs occasionally, I was in no danger of running low on the former, and the later was not very helpful in a bonus stage. You also see enemies which can suck out the fruit you collect. Of course, later on I appreciated them, since health and bombs were not rationed out quite so generously.

Here are the enemies, unlike Keen, there's no easy names for these guys, so I made up my own. Enemies take variable amounts of hits.

• Croc Heads, red walking enemies with giant teeth. Stops to roar occasionally, don't do anything else. Your basic enemy, even if the roars add a little character.
• Purple Worms, also walk around, but if you stomp on them, you create a little puddle of acid where they once were. Which is as unpleasant as it sounds. Touching them beforehand isn't actually lethal, only the acid is.
• Blue Balls, which come to think of it, might be an inappropriate reference. They roll back and forth, but if they fall off an edge, they parachute down.
• Cyan Balls, more like obstacles than enemies, because they don't move and stand in the air. I don't think they're killable, but I didn't try. Basically there to allow Cosmo to jump to places he wouldn't be able to otherwise.
• Butterfly Worm, segmented worms with wings. Like the Cyan balls, they're more obstacles than enemies. You use them to reach areas you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach.
• Flying Worms, which are the enemies in the bonus stages. They steal points, and don't cause much trouble otherwise.
• Climbing Vines, segmented green plants. They don't move around, but you can't kill them. Jumping just causes Cosmo to bounce off, and bombing just momentarily causes them to retreat into the ground.

• Gob Blasters, blue monsters with yellow spots and a tube. They shoot at you with pinpoint accuracy. Which sucks in one way, but makes them rigidly easy to avoid on the other.
• Jump Flowers, less an enemy and more an obstacle. It grabs whatever enters it and then spits it out like a spring pad.
• Blue birds, which fly around in a set pattern. Not a pattern at you, just a pattern near you.

• Muscle ghosts, cyan enemies that look like ghosts. They hang around, then fly a really short distance in the direction you're in. If you're not looking at them. Of course, if you're stomping on them, it doesn't matter, they won't do squat. Once you do it enough, they turn into smaller forms which are easy enough to avoid.
• Tube Sponge, yellow sponge-like enemies with two sets of legs, on the top and on the bottom. You have to use bombs on these guys, you can't jump on them.
• Bootleg Thwomp, basically just stone Thwomps. Considering the Muscle Ghosts are boos, I wonder how many enemies in this game are just reskinned Mario ones that I haven't played enough to understand? Oh, and they have no range limit, hope there isn't one on the ceiling five floors up.

• Face Plants, look like the Cyan Balls, except they're attached to a wall. You can't stomp on them, and they shoot at you. Basically wall guns.
• Spring Bot, robots with guns on the front and springs on top. Stomping on them causes you to jump up, like you jumped on a springpad. They'll only shoot at you if they're within light, as in a lit up lightbulb.
• Spike Bot, moving spikes. Jumping on them has fairly obvious results.
• Shadow Bot, a robot which, until you get close to it, is in shadow. Get close and it punches you away. Basically the only robot you can actually stomp on.
• Lightning bot, a set of wheels which shoots lightning up until it reaches the ceiling. Again, you can't stomp on them, so you need bombs.
• Cursed Cabbage, a green enemy which appears as a cabbage when not moving. Once you know what it is, it's not that difficult, it just has short, occasional jumps and dies in one hit.
• Flying Bullet, a bullet-like object that jumps between two points. So high that you can't jump on top of it in the middle of one.

• Spiked Demon, a big, jumping red foot with spikes all over. Has enough of an arc and a frequent enough jump that you can't easily just stomp it to death. Which is hard to even do because it takes so many hits.

The game quickly introduces most of the roster. It feels like they're just not pacing them out, instead just getting it over with as quickly as possible. Which is odd, because early on it seems to be imitating Sonic's level design choices. Two stages set in a certain environment. No bosses, just a bonus stage. The second odd bit, beyond the obvious Mario parallels, is how the theme seems to be creepy and bug-like. Wasn't this supposed to be a children's game?

Things start getting active at Episode 1 Level 4. Things were already ramping up, but I start dying a lot here. It's not necessarily the enemies, although being casual about enemies is likely going to get you slaughtered. The real threat is how many bottomless pits this level has. It's not so much that they're there, in that the game feels like it's a bit deceptive about them. Verticality comes into play more than your typical platformer, and unless you look down a lot, it's very easy to get blindsided with what seems to be just a drop slightly down but is actually a bottomless pit.

Level 5 starts off a bit off the rails before revealing it's straightforward, if annoying. It's an underground cave which is the worst kind of maze. You're not sure which direction you're supposed to go in and it's not quite clear if you're supposed to go back up. Once it's clear where you're supposed to be going, it just turns into a game of going down, each level in turn. It's actually getting awkward to have to stop to look down, the game is constantly hiding things just out of sight, so sometimes things within your sight are easy to ignore. Like say, spear traps in the wall or ceiling.

Level 6 is an ice level. Oddly, this avoids most of the usual annoyances in favor of making itself known in weird ways. Rather than sliding, slopes act as conveyor belts and hanging onto pockets of ice causes you to slip down. For the first time, you actually have to take advantage of this wall-crawling in a meaningful way to advance, by jumping between the sides of platforms. It makes sense, but at first it can feel like you're missing something else.

Level 8 throws in a completely new mechanic, a flying platform. As in, one the player controls. Naturally there are enough environmental hazards to make things tricky. It's actually quite hard to get around them, because pressing down goes down, it doesn't look down. The second is that there are a lot of electrical barriers blocking your path. Stopping this involves a switch, but unlike how this would normally work, you have to drop a bomb on it, then jump on it, because jumping on it causes Cosmo to get hit by spikes above. It doesn't help that the design goes against everything the levels have previously been, being extremely back and forth in how you're supposed to win.

Level 9 is weird. The game's been shifting between more themes in a single episode than most do across their entire running time and I'm left scratching my head at how we've got an oil field in bug-infested planet. The various oil spouts can be jumped on, but go through the stream and you get hurt. It's a very simple level, just one with some weird concepts.

Level 10 is another frustrating exercise. It's one thing to have a keyhunt. It's another thing to have a keyhunt when the keys are springs hidden in the walls. See, in this game there are colored springs and doors. Push the spring, the door opens. These are not the most obvious thing, since years of of side-scrollers have trained me to ignore random bits of wall standing out.

After a long and hard journey to get all the springs and not die by the unexpected, I meet the boss. Who looks like Robotik in his Egg Machine, just with a metal dome on top. You just stomp on top of it until it dies. It tries to stomp you from doing this by going back and forth and by having sliding tiles to prevent you from just hanging above it. It isn't very difficult, it just feels a bit tricky after such a long jaunt.

Episode 1 ends with Cosmo falling down a large shaft into the mouth of a monster. That is, your standard level, Cosmo falling down, then an image which flashes by and the usual, what will happen to our hero now cliffhanger that ends all shareware episodes. Episode 2 starts the same way, only revealing that Cosmo has entered inside the monster. I'm starting to doubt whether or not this is a children's game.

Level 2, the real first level is...charming. It really hammers home how you're inside some sort of creature. It's simple in theory, you're mostly just jumping across tiny pillars. The game enforces an inability to use the wall climbing ability by making most walls ones that Cosmo can't stick to. It's not necessarily difficult, just tedious doing dozens of these things.

Level 3 and 4, a mushroom forest. The thing about the Croc Heads, the not Goombas, is that getting hurt by them is usually a dumb move on the player's part. Unfortunately, the game conspires to make this not the case here. Instead, you're constantly going up and down slopes, and hitboxes are square, not cut to an enemy. So you constantly have to give enemies a wide berth just to avoid getting hit because you didn't jump at the right angle to kill them.

Some very tedious but otherwise unnotable levels pass by. Most of the tricks the game has seem to have been used by now. Look at all the tiny bits of platform we make you jump on. Or the ice level where you have to climb up a slippery wall above a pit. Then the game gets nasty in the forest section. Rather than the polite jumping on stationary enemies, we get the Muscle Ghosts, you have to jump across a pit on them. Which is possible, but man, I do not want to see what fan mods do with that.

Level 10 is an exercise in frustration. It's a long tedious level in which you basically have to just grind out the correct path. Even when I was getting it right, sometimes I would get it wrong, the game going off in such a way that my previously correct path messed up in some way. The balls going in a direction I didn't expect, or a shooting enemy going in a direction I would have rathered it didn't. That's not even getting into how health pickups are placed so that when they fall or fly out of a barrel, you have to chase them across the map. Then there are the enemies placed in such a way so Cosmo jumps off them, to another platform. To get to the end, you literally have to rush and hope that you don't get killed by either a Blue Ball or a Spiked Demon.

For this, Cosmo gets out of the cave he was in. (He was in a cave?) Then he assumes his family are in a distant city and we get the lead-in to Episode 3.

Episode 3 starts off with basically no indication of this, instead being set in another forest. And with no sign that it's the start of an Episode, because this first level is already pulling all the tricks and annoyances that the last level of Episode 2 did. Followed by another level set inside a creature. Most of this feels like repeats of earlier levels but with more of the annoying parts.

Level 6 shifts it up in an annoying way. You get a starting section where you have to navigate across a series of platforms which are step-through for a moment after you land on them. Only, this is the only area around and you need to avoid the Spiked Demons and get a spring activated. Then the level reveals just what the game can do with Spiked Demons, regular spikes and fire tubes. I'm not really caring for it.

I gave up on Level 8. It's another spring hunt in a game that's full of spring hunts. This might be the 15th or so. After a while they blur together. The problem is that the spring in question is very tedious to find. I didn't find it. There are just so many traps you can easily get hurt by forgetting to pay attention for one second and the level is just so long. There are so many places it could be hiding that I feel like I can never actually find it, and so I didn't.

Fortunately, if I were to make it to the end, I would discover that Cosmo's parents were safe all along, he was worried for nothing, and he gets to go to Disney World, which is on Earth. Apparently nobody notices that an alien with suction cup hands is around. With that, the rating.

Weapons:
The bombs were very cleverly utilized weapons, feeling like they had limitations and required thought in their use. Even in a game with a dozen more weapons, they'd be the star. 2/10

Enemies:
There's a good variety even if there are certain enemies the game gravitates towards. I do dislike how many enemies are naked copies of Mario enemies, but other times it does make up for it. 4/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Cosmo seems to rely on most of Apogee's worst traits, switching between confusing maze levels and the occasional, get past that you little crap. There was very little that made me go, aha, that was clever, just mostly grateful on the more forgettable ones. 3/10

Player Agency:
In of himself, Cosmo moves okay. Wall hugging takes some getting used to and there's always a bit of jank to it, but the camera is something you'll be fighting against all the time. Moreso than enemies, what's stopping you from winning is the camera. 4/10

Interactivity:
There is a lot you can blow up with a bomb. Maybe it isn't dramatic level changing stuff, but you can screw around quite a bit. 2/10

Atmosphere:
This is certainly a weird, alien planet, even when your lead is a naked alien with suction cup hands. If nothing else, this game manages to keep throwing weird stuff at you even when it's doing something as mundane as a robot city. 5/10

Graphics:
Probably Apogee's best in-house effort yet. Tons of effects, excellent backgrounds and animation. 7/10

Story:
I feel like the story is unnecessarily nasty towards Cosmo. Every episode start begins with Cosmo in some pickle he needs to get out of, and then it all turns out to have been pointless. Try selling that one on TV. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Bobby Prince made some nice tunes, but little sticks out and I had the music off most of the time. Sound effects are solid and are PC speaker. 3/10

That's 31. Which seems unreasonably high, so let's bring that down to 30. It's amazing what having some decent graphics can do for an otherwise mixed bag.

There are good ideas, but it's hurt by just how frustrating it is getting around the harder levels. Though I must admit, from a practical, we need to provide value for money factor, I nearly beat it in under 5 hours. That's not exactly a good chunk of time. Considering that the commercial part is even less, I can understand why they made the choices they did even if I don't like them.

Next time, we'll see something from 1984.