One of Nintendo’s most interesting exclusives of the year is a precision orbital strike (heh) directly at the heart of elder millennials. Orbitals is a two-player co-op puzzle game with a retro anime artstyle that harkens to the days of watching Toonami’s Midnight Run.
One of my fondest memories as a human is staying up past my bedtime to watch anime on Cartoon Network. That feeling is exactly what the developers at Shapefarm intended to capture with Orbitals. The developers cited anime shows from the ‘80s and ‘90s as inspiration for the game’s stylistic, hand-animated aesthetic. Judging from the trailers, the team nailed their visual thesis perfectly. With its soft pastels and film-grain filter, Orbitals reminds me of watching Yu Yu Hakusho on VHS tapes bought at the local Suncoast.
One thing to take away from Orbitals is that the developers intend this to be a love letter to anime, rather than their take on a Japanese anime game. To achieve that iconic retro anime look, the developers at Shapefarm did their research. In an interview with Spanish-language game media website Meristation, the developers said that they interviewed “the great masters” of Japanese animation companies, though they didn’t share specifics. The team also mentioned that they took visual inspiration from shows including Evangelion, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, and Cowboy Bebop—the Mount Rushmore of foundational anime shows for the Western Weeb.
Looking at Orbitals, you can definitely see characters that look like they could have been pulled from the background of a Studio Ghibli movie. One of the main characters, Omura, is a blue-skinned, devil-horned guy you would swear is an Akira Toriyama original character. I’m also a big fan of Orbitals’ chunky and junky space setting. Instead of clean, sleek space ships, the characters putter about in awkward, jittery vehicles that look and move like they’re barely holding together—a definite callback to Cowboy Bebop’s futuristic but filthy aesthetic. Even the game’s sound design has taken beats from old-school anime soundtracks, including poppy synthesizer sounds and the voice of Mami Ayukawa, who sang Gundam theme songs in the ‘80s.
Other than inflicting players with the psychological damage that the shows of their youth are now considered “classic” or “retro,” Orbitals’ gameplay is mercifully taken from more-recent examples. In Orbitals, players work together as Maki and Omura to complete various tasks as they try to save their space-station home from destruction. Throughout the game, Maki and Omura have to use a various array of tools in tandem to accomplish their objectives. In one mission, a character escorting a robot uses a grappling hook to open doors so their partner on the other side of the doors can use their energy beam to keep the little robot running.
That kind of split-screen, cooperative puzzle-solving and platforming will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s played a Hazelight Studio game in the last five years. Jakob Lundgren, Orbitals’ game director, worked at Hazelight on It Takes Two and Split Fiction before coming to Shapefarm. According to the interview, Lundgren still talks with Hazelight founder Josef Fares, but he doesn’t consider the infamously potty-mouthed developer as competition. Or at least not yet. But I hope Hazelight’s influence was kept strictly to gameplay. Though I enjoyed playing both It Takes Two and Split Fiction, their stories left a little much to be desired.
Co-op games have been coming back in style, aided partly by the success of Hazelight’s games and the explosion of the so-called “friendslop” genre. It Takes Two won Game of the Year at the Game Awards in 2021 and Split Fiction got a GOTY nomination in 2025, while Aggro Crab’s Peak was one of the chaotic co-op hits of last summer. There’s been a lot of anticipation surrounding Orbitals since its reveal last year, specifically due to its unique artstyle, and the game has the potential to rack up some of its own accolades when it launches exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 sometime later this year.
