THE LONELIEST GLOBE IN THE UNIVERSE
You are forma.8: a stylized black sphere of metal with a hypnotic, unblinking stare. In the opening cinematic, a mothership arrives in orbit and fires you toward the planet’s surface alongside a swarm of identical formas. After crashing through the wall of an ancient structure, you lose all of your unique abilities. Until you reclaim them, progress is impossible. With no written language to guide you, understanding the world relies entirely on learning the visual iconography of the HUD and the environment itself.
The first abilities you recover—a short-range electric burst and a floating bomb that remains suspended wherever you drop it—quickly become your primary tools for survival. The electric discharge doubles as a weapon, shield, and propulsion aid, allowing you to launch the bomb toward distant targets. Given the floaty, delayed movement, aiming it requires almost divine coordination: you must steer in the opposite direction of where you want the bomb to go. Enemies take the form of hostile machines and insect-like creatures that emerge from burrows and plant life.
Exploration largely takes place within maze-like interiors packed with hazards, secrets, and environmental traps. Progress is frequently halted by devious puzzle sections, often centered around switches and physics interactions. Occasionally, the game opens up into outdoor areas, where layered parallax backgrounds create an oppressive sense of depth. At times, the camera pulls far back, reducing your forma to a tiny speck against an immense horizon.
This does more than make you feel lonely and insignificant—it instills unease. Distant silhouettes suggest that colossal creatures might inhabit this world, especially given its weak gravitational pull. While diving into the dark waters surrounding the jagged cliffs, I found no visible bottom. I descended for nearly a minute before turning back, unsettled by a creeping dread I could not fully articulate.
At regular intervals, forma.8 interrupts exploration with inspired boss encounters. These function less like traditional battles and more like high-pressure puzzles, demanding that you identify weak points or manipulate the environment. One particularly memorable boss pursued me through a narrow maze, forcing me to open hatches and escape by the narrowest of margins as it ricocheted violently off the walls. Another confrontation left me feeling genuine remorse, as the defeated creature’s corpse revealed its true form—which I shall not spoil.
While progression follows a largely fixed order, the game rarely discourages backtracking in search of secrets and upgrades. Certain collectible bolts seem insignificant at first, but they ultimately determine which ending you receive. Some are obtained through fast-paced maze challenges that require lighting up all dormant nodes before a timer expires.
I did not feel compelled to collect them all. Sluggish movement, a labyrinthine world layout, and an imprecise automap dampened my enthusiasm. Later abilities that allow faster traversal also strain the camera, which sometimes struggles to keep up. These shortcomings—along with a somewhat unsatisfying ending and a few overly tedious puzzle sections in the latter half—prevent me from awarding forma.8 as high a score as I would like.
Back in the days of the Amiga, I never expected Another World to become such a lasting influence on future developers, yet it is the comparison that feels most apt here. At the time, I considered its visuals plain and primitive compared to contemporary pixel art, assuming its minimalism was merely a result of technical limitations. Only later did I realize that those constraints gave rise to an art style that actively engaged the imagination.
Less is more. forma.8’s restrained color palette subtly guides the player toward puzzle solutions and highlights boss vulnerabilities. The crude murals of faces lining the corridors raise unsettling questions—their simplicity makes them appear only vaguely human. That enormous globe looming in the night sky: is it merely a celestial body, or could it awaken and return your gaze? In a world defined by weightlessness, such uncertainty and isolation provide all the gravity you need.
Perhaps forma.8 wears its old-school inspirations too openly. But that hardly matters. It represents a beautiful union of past and present: the mystery of limited visual storytelling combined with the freedom afforded by modern controls. It is simultaneously eerie and beautiful, primitive and advanced, traditional and inventive. Most importantly, it compels you to keep moving forward—to solve the next puzzle, defeat the next guardian, and ponder the lingering question at its core: why are we here, on this planet at all?
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