I haven’t seen much written about Hemisphere Games’ Osmos, which won the D2D Vision Award at the 2009 Annual Independent Games Festival. In Osmos, you control a cell-like circle that floats around and absorbs and resorbs other similar circles to make yourself bigger. The aim: to be the biggest. As you go, you meet other circles (seemingly) as intelligent as you (read: good AI) and the levels get more challenging.

Sound familiar—flOw, Spore, anyone?

But there is a catch—in order to propel yourself around, you must sacrifice some of your size. This makes things tricky becaus you can only digest cells of equal or smaller size. That being said, though, this is really the only major discerning factor in terms of gameplay.

But I preferred this game to others like it. Basically for the sole reason that it has a wicked ambient electro soundtrack. Oh, and it’s freakin’ pretty. And I was amazed at how well these two things work together. I mean they work really, really, really well together.

Because only a demo is available—which you must check out—it’s hard to see where or what the “vision” is. But I’d say the award was based on the sensory and mechanical side of things as opposed to the gameplay.

But seriously. I’ve sunken a whole heap of time into this game. I think you should too.