As the middle child in my family, I think I have a special sort of soft spot for co-op games. My brother is five years older than me, and was already a pretty experienced gamer once I was ready to hold a controller too. But once that age hit, we were off and running, playing anything and everything together on the NES, SNES, Genesis, and N64 we grew up with.
Related
10 Best Co-Op Puzzle Games
These are the best and most puzzling games for best buds to play around in.
And even when my brother perhaps started to age out of our co-op sessions, now too bogged down with actual homework, after-school activities, and teenage responsibilities, I was able to partner up with my younger sister, who was now ready to step in as my gaming protégé as I’d ascended the ranks to master.
Of course, we all kind of know the story that eventually followed after. Couch co-op titles mostly died out with the rise of online and massively multiplayer games. A once vibrant subgenre of gaming largely fell by the wayside despite couch co-op really being one of the biggest reasons why the hobby has reached the heights of the modern day.
Thankfully, some teams have stepped in to carry the torch, with the obvious example being Hazelight Studio, purveyors of the top-tier of narrative/action couch co-op titles these days. And now, following in these footsteps and looking to add to the storied history of co-op gaming a lot of us grew up with, we have Orbitals on the Switch 2, which is more than worth sitting down with a buddy to blast through over a weekend if you’ve got a spare six or seven hours.
Childhood Anime Reimagined
The first thing you’ll notice about Orbitals is obviously the artwork, and it deserves every single ounce of praise in the world. Shapefarm, the devs behind the title, seem like some of the most passionate anime nerds you’ll ever come across, which shows up in Orbitals feeling like a full-blown love letter to the genre’s era of the ‘80s/‘90s.
Partnered with Studio Massket for collaboration with the animation, characters are actually running at either 24 or 12 frames per second, not due to any sort of bad technical performance, but to closely emulate the feeling of retro anime we grew up with. To be super clear here, the game itself runs extremely well on the Switch 2, so this is straight up, 100% a style choice for this lower character framerate, and it looks really cool.
Upon booting the game up, you’ll also be greeted by the absolutely incredible Orbitals theme song, which also features Mami Ayukawa on vocals, the Japanese singer who has also lent her talents to things like Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and a handful of other ‘80s anime. I cannot stress how much of a banger this title track is, and the musical excellence carries over to the entire experience of the game.
Our heroes, Omura and Maki, along with the rest of the vibrant cast of characters, have absolutely incredible designs that feel extremely nostalgic despite being unfamiliar in actuality. Each playable character also has an adorable emote wheel, which you can use independently whenever you want to dance around, cheer, wait impatiently, and more. This may seem like a silly thing to mention, but the animations are just so fun that I can’t help but point them out.
The only downside I also feel like I should note with this artwork, however, is that my partner and I both agreed that at times, it made things in the game a little hard to see. Since everything has this hyper-specific style and coloring, things you need to notice can somewhat blend into the background, which can be a little confusing/frustrating at times. The style-appropriate quest marker also often completely covers things you’re looking for, which just looks a tad odd.
A Fun Story that Goes Places By the End
Orbitals opens strongly enough with our heroic duo, Maki and Omura, needing to be rescued from a sudden space storm by their mentor, Togen, in a pretty thrilling and interesting series of events that I’ll leave for you to discover.
After that, we have a time jump, as Omura and Maki have now become pivotal members of their space station’s society, which has been essentially rendered marooned on an asteroid in the wake of the intro’s space storm, which is also creating very concerning rifts all around the immediate area of this patch of outer space.
From here, and for a while after, Orbitals is a fairly standard retro sci-fi anime adventure. Maki and Omura work with Togen to occasionally explore the surrounding area in their personal spacecraft, looking for either new places to live, or some way to repair/strengthen their current space station before the next wave of space storms comes back to wipe everyone out for good.
All of this is periodically shown in absolutely gorgeous cutscenes that truly do make you feel like you’re sitting down and watching cartoons on a Saturday morning. Everything is also wonderfully voiced acted to sound like your favorite anime of the time period as well. These scenes and performances quickly got me 100% invested, even if it did seem like it took the story a healthy chunk of time to get particularly noteworthy overall.
More than worth sitting down with a buddy to blast through over a weekend if you’ve got a spare six or seven hours.
But the good news is that Orbitals definitely gets to some awesome places eventually. I can only talk about things to a certain point (and wouldn’t want to spoil them anyway), but just know that even if things feel somewhat standard and uninteresting in a couple of stretches, it is all worth it by the end of the game, which wraps in beautiful and emotional ways that’ll stick with you.
It’s here where I’ll also shout out all of the extra work here to localize Orbitals for a very large group of players overall, with fully voiced language options for English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, French, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, German, and Brazilian Portuguese. I think it’s a super nice step that the team has taken to make sure their game can be properly experienced and loved by players all over the world.
Predominately Good Gameplay and Design With an Occasional Frustration or Two
The hook of Orbitals in the gameplay department is probably pretty obvious. It’s that third-person, split-screen flavor of action that any genre fans are very familiar with by now after Split Fiction, It Takes Two, etc. You’ll platform around, use a collection of gadgets, do some puzzle-solving, figure out how to work together to progress, talk things out and test ideas in real time, and perhaps find some other surprising things along the way.
The Hazelight comparison ultimately becomes unfortunate for Orbitals in a way, because it’s 100% unavoidable, and as nice, adorable, and charming as this game is, it’s still not on par with Josef Fares and the squad in terms of actual, wickedly creative couch co-op action. The good news here is that everything is still more than enjoyable, but there are certainly fewer moments overall of “Wow, I can’t believe we’re doing this right now!”
Related
10 PS2 Games That Made Couch Co-Op Feel Like an Event
If you were going to buy a multitap, it was probably for one of these games.
That said, you’ll still have fun with this one. Maki and Omura have things like a laser cannon, grappling hook, and water gun that each have a main ability and an alt-fire to get through each level of the game. I also appreciate that Orbitals lets the players choose between their gadgets before each level, whereas the Hazelight games kind of just say “This is what you use this time, hope you like it.”
The puzzles are typically rewarding and engaging, but also mostly things we’ve seen in other games, perhaps with some sort of sci-fi thematic element thrown on top of it in order to make it fit the vibe of Orbitals. Maki and Omura are also often much too quick with their little quips like “I wonder if we can do X to make Y and Z happen,” to the point that it can feel much too hand-holdy instead of just letting us do our thing. I don’t mind hints, but there are many here that are just immediately doled out to you (and then other times when you’ll perhaps want a hint, and it never comes no matter how long you’re stuck).
The game is split perhaps 35/65 between traveling in the spaceship with one character driving and the other manning the guns, and then the actual boots-on-the-ground levels. Typically, both gameplay variations are fun, but the ship flying sections are often pretty frivolous feeling, too. Orbitals has several moments where one player can fly the ship from Point A to Point B, and the other player quite literally has nothing to do. In a co-op game, this, of course, feels weird.
The whole gameplay loop does also become a little too repetitive in ways that are avoidable. It’s “Get on your ship, go to your control stations, fly to a level, pick up your gadget, go out of the airlock, fly across to another airlock, beat a level, repeat.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but after about the sixth or seventh instance you see the “Sit in the pilot seat” quest prompt pop up, it’ll start to wear on you a little bit.
What I will say, however, is that the game ramps up very nicely, with the last 25% or so of the title really feeling super creative, challenging, and just downright fun and cool for the entire conclusion. I didn’t have these same feelings all the time during the rest of the game, but I still had a predominantly good time, which was then highlighted at the end with Orbital’s best gameplay content, easily.
Plenty of Charming Extras and Signs of Life
Something genre players understand by now is that these games really benefit from there being little additional things thrown into the world for you and your partner to discover. These come in various forms, like tiny side activities, easter eggs, world-building details, etc. Orbitals does a really nice job in this area.
While out exploring the game’s levels, there are multiple hidden paths and optional areas that reward you and your partner greatly by adding a mini-game room to your ship. Once back home after a mission, you can engage in little competitions, like laser beam jump rope, laser tag, competitive Asteroids, and a few more. There’s even a lovely leaderboard on the ship to keep track of bragging rights along the way.
Both your ship and the community’s space station also have immediately available interactive things, like a timing-based shooting range, a target you can try to hit harder than your partner like those arcade punching bag machines, and more.
But it’s not just these little mini-games either; there’s also such a deep layer of extra detail poured into the ships themselves, which end up feeling truly alive with all the NPCs you can interact with in adorable little animations, or rooms of the space station you can run around and explore.
Each level of the game has a new, specific alien creature you’ll meet that is cool to discover. But what’s even better is that at the end of each level, these creatures will also start showing up on your spaceship, making home feel even more alive and adorable the further you get into Orbitals.
It’s hilarious when Maki draws a mustache on a sleeping citizen, or when Omura picks up and talks to the super cute cat that wanders around the game that you can interact with. It all just adds one more level of charm and clear love and passion for this game from the developers that feels infectious the more you experience it.
My partner and I had a really nice time with Orbitals, and while it doesn’t quite reach the couch co-op excellence tier that Hazelight has set for the rest of the genre, it’s still a journey worth embarking on. The incredible ‘80s/‘90s anime artwork and music are the clear standouts, with so much love and charm drawn into every inch of this experience. It is pretty brisk, and there is an occasional feeling of repetition in the gameplay that isn’t always the most interesting action in the world. Even so, Switch 2 owners have another very nice exclusive on their hands. Orbitals is a lovely game to spend with your playing partner over a weekend.
Released
September 3, 2026
ESRB
Everyone 10+ / Animated Blood, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language
Developer(s)
Shapefarm KK
Publisher(s)
Kepler Interactive
Pros & Cons
- Incredible ?80s/?90s-style anime artwork and music
- Absolutely jam-packed with obviously love and passion for the genre
- Lots of charming details drawn into the world, and several little mini-games to compete in
- A story that starts fairly standard, but gets more memorable and heartwarming by the end
- Solid enough co-op gameplay design that?s fun to figure out together
- Some tiny sections that get repeated often and feel like a waste of time after a while
- Many instances of almost immediate hints/handholding instead of letting you figure something out yourselves
- As amazing as the artwork is, it also makes certain things in the world and specific objectives a little hard to see
Next
10 Great Co-Op Games That Are Fun From the Start
If you have friends who like video games and free time, this list is exactly what you need to keep yourselves entertained for hours.