Cosmonious High review: sweet, kiddy, cartoonish

The gaudily designed Cosmonious High is pumped full of cartoonish elements and bubblegum colours, making it clear the experience is intended for younger players. Its narrative premise reflects this too: we play an alien pipsqueak attending our first day at a new school, where we encounter many non-player characters who natter away endlessly. You can barely walk a few metres without verbally activating some peppy moon-eyed little thing itching for a chit-chat.

The developers at Owlchemy Labs have expended considerable effort building a vibrant sense of community, evoked entirely through these NPCs. Dialogue exchanges are mostly one-sided, though we can choose what to say to them by selecting one of several emojis or icon-like pictures that appear in a bubble before us, visualising the conversational path.

Like Job Simulator, another VR experience from Owlchemy, the settings have an intergalactic twist, the school located in space. But the customs and conventions of our world have very much crossed over; we even arrive at the titular institution via a school bus. Whereas, in Job Simulator, gabbing robots come up to us, offering jokes and objectives, Cosmonious High is more like that production’s kiddish sequel, Vacation Simulator, in that we enter the space of the teachers and students, navigating through classrooms, hallways and communal areas.

The dialogue initially reiterates the basic premise (with exclamations such as “over here new kid!” and “hey, the new kid is here!”) or announces a challenge or task. “Maybe your power will let you grow a snack,” a new chums says, referencing a super-ability we have to spray water from our hands—like Spider-Man shooting web fluid from his wrists. When we water a bunch of plants, snacks indeed sprout up. Upon completion of objectives such as this, we obtain more powers, including the ability to freeze and burn things, and move objects telepathically. 

All of which sounds deliciously Carrie-esque—but an aura of utter good naturedness permeates everything. The core premise is very sweet: it’s not just our first day at school, but our first day at a broken down and disorderly school, where there’s many things to repair, making our repertoire of powers valuable. Whereas Job Simulator satirizes workplace culture, finding absurdity in the daily grind and inferring a pointlessness about it all, Cosmonious High is unerringly perky and optimistic.

I had some fun with it; if I was three decades younger I might have had a lot of fun—or at least wouldn’t have been exhausted by its infantilizing cheerfulness. The repetitive and task-orientated, “go there, do that” structure also tires, partly due to the absence of interesting characters and the circular nature of the narrative. After a while the devil in me wanted to grab one of those adorable squidgy characters—some looking like crude impressions of the Easter Bunny, others like globs of solidified jelly—and shove their heads down the toilet. I spent about four hours in the company of these yabbering cute things before calling it a day.

One thing I never tired of: the immersions triggered by the acquisition of a new power. In these moments your surroundings dissolve into empty black-ish blue space, as if the player has been removed from the space/time continuum and relegated to a distant outpost in the cosmos. White icons symbolizing the new power appear, trailed by rainbow-coloured flight, which flow into your hands satisfyingly, emulating—or imagining—the sensation of light and energy being pulled into your body by magnetic force. 

These occasions reminded me of similar moments from Paper Birds, a lovely 30 minute narrative diorama interspersed with splashes of trippy interaction, including the ability to brighten the darkness of the cosmos by projecting streaks of blue colour and matter from our hands. That experience, like all great family-oriented art, has broad appeal, evoking the child in the adult and the adult in the child. Cosmonious High, by design, is one for the kids.