On the surface, it seems simple enough: tiny naked spaceman plants seeds in space while fighting off aliens. But my god, I have never seen something so simple hide such depth before.

In the vein classic arcade titles, COSMOCHORIA is simple in every way. Its visuals are cute, but simple, it's gameplay is simple, and its entire premise is adorable...yet simple. But, once you get further enough in, you start to realize just how much there actually is to the game that cannot be seen when first starting out. You're given the crappiest little pea shooter and everything is scary and hard, you have zero defense and no chance of surviving. It's only once you realize you can start to use your currency to get powerups to help yourself out with better weapons, faster plant grow rates or just buying more blocks to help build gun towers, that you really start to grasp how this game works.

One of the interesting aspects are the little hologram beacons you come across on certain planets. Much like the Left 4 Dead franchise, there IS a plot here, it just isn't in your face. It's been relegated to the background, at least from the get go, and you can search it out if you're that interested. This leaves the game open to just being entertaining for the sake of playing it, which, really, is all that ultimately matters in gaming to begin with. It plays well, it looks good, it has a cute soundtrack, so how does it work? Well, let me run down how the game works:

You are a tiny naked astronaut, and you start out on a planet with a gun and a jetpack and a seed. You plant the seed, then wait for it to grow, all while defending yourself from oncoming alien invaders who seek to do you harm. Once the seed grows, it unleashes a handful of new seeds, which you collect to then grow more plants to get more seeds. Once you've planted enough plants, the planet will become healthy again, and you can use the health the planet has to regain your own health if you were injured during a fight. Then, you collect all your stuff and jettison yourself into the cold, dark vacuum of space to do it all over again.

Sounds tedious, right? And it is. It is, as near as I can tell with 5 hours logged so far and 3 worlds unlocked now, the most tedious thing in existence. So why, then, is it SO. MUCH. FUN? Well, I can't really explain that.

Perhaps its enjoyment lays in its simplicity. Everything these days is so in depth, so deep and dark and you're given engaging stories with hollywood level screenplays with action sequences and characters and just...god, man, sometimes it's nice to just play something so absolutely simple. I think we took it for granted. With the introduction of full fledged story and character driven triple A titles came the death of the simple "video game". Now we weren't playing video games. We were playing interactive movies. And that's great, some of my favorite games are those. I loved Alan Wake. I loved the new Wolfensteins. I loved Bioshock Infinite and the first new Tomb Raider. These are awesome games, and without the change in the gaming industry, we wouldn't have had them. But I think gaming suffered a bit for it too, because it certainly squashed something that was extremely precious. Playing for the sake of playing.

And that's where games like Cosmochoria come in. Lately, I've found myself drawn to indie titles like Gonner and Downwell, because, well...to put it simply, they're FUN. They're just fun for the sake of being fun, and it's great. It's so great to play something that exists solely for the sake of you enjoying it. There's no incoherent mess of a script to follow, there's no ridiculously drawn out drama between characters and their poorly written motivations, no. It's just you and a controller and a dude on a screen fighting against the world, and man have I missed that. I think there's something to be said about simplicity. Obviously in art, simplicity is important. Look at any great medium and simplicity is always a major part of it. It exists in the painting world, it exists in the literary world, it exists in the music world and the film world, and these mediums are better because of it. I'm not saying it's all that matters, but it does help.

So, if video games are an art form, a medium, as many gamers like to tell you it is, then why can't we have our simplicity as well? And I'm not talking simplicity in the form of games on our phones, like Doodlejump or Angry Birds. Yes, these are also acts of simplicity, and yes they succeed because of that, because simplicity invites casual gaming in that sense (let's be honest, it's a hell of a lot easier to pick something up knowing you don't have to sit there and play it for hours at a time and can stop when its convenient for you), but I'm talking simplicity in the sense of real gaming. Indie games, triple A games, I don't care. Give it to me. I think that's part of what helped the Portal games. Yes, underneath were all these mechanics and whatnot, but in the end, you had a gun that made holes and you figured out fun ways to use it to progress. Simple. Successful.

I think that's where Cosmochoria truly gets its greatness from. It's not trying to be something it's not, it's not even trying to be something amazing. It's just you, a naked little astronaut and a buncha plants against the oncoming alien horde, and if I can find any fault with Cosmochoria, it's that there's nothing else like it.