Couch co-op games are rare beasts. Even rarer when they look this good. Kepler Interactive is betting everything on Orbitals and I get it. It launches September 3rd and looks like something plucked directly from 1987.
I sat in a beanbag at the Nintendo preview area for SGF 2025. Wait, it was SGF 2025, not 2026, but time moves weirdly when you are trapped in a plastic chair. I played the Orbitals demo on Switch 2 with another journalist. Our ship was broken. We needed to fix it. Together.
Kepler decorated their booth like a teenager’s bedroom. Bunk beds. Toys scattered everywhere. It felt like a sleepover. That was the point. Jack Kennedy, PR director for Kepler, told me they wanted to recreate the feeling of crashing at a friend’s house while Gundam Wing played on VHS.
“It is one of the most authentic recreations of Japanese anime from that era brought to life as a cooperative adventure game.”
Kennedy calls it an “anime you can play.” He says it is for people who miss Dragon Ball Z or Sailor Moon. Also for fans of Split Fiction or It Takes Two. It worked on me.
My partner and I moved through the starship hallways. We grabbed backpacks. We solved problems that required two bodies. I held a hatch open with a remote claw. They sprayed water on a panel. Coordination mattered.
Like other Hazelight titles the tasks got harder. They never became frustrating though. We were close together on those bean bags. At one point we stood at a computer terminal taking turns pressing buttons. We yelled the rhythm out loud.
Me. You. Me. You.
It was thrilling. Dumb but thrilling.
The visuals save this game from being just another puzzle box. Everything looks chunky. Analog tech. Baggy space suits. It feels like a warm memory of the future people imagined thirty years ago. Art director Marcos Ramos grew up watching anime in Argentina. He painted those memories onto digital backgrounds.
Foreground objects have thick outlines so they stand out against hand-painted backgrounds. Most animations run at 12 frames per second. Some at 24. This mimics the limited animation technique of the late eighties and early nineties where studios drew only half the frames to save money.
You see it in Spider-Verse. You see it in old Toei animations. It is charming here. Other games with this style are fast-paced fighters. Players count frames for precise combos. They need consistency. Orbitals is an adventure game. It moves slower. The devs can play with the visual limitations instead of fighting them.
“It makes that hyperauthentic feel,” Kennedy said.
My demo lasted twenty minutes. Just enough time to move a ship and ramble through puzzles. I learned nothing about the broader plot. Kennedy kept secrets. He did call the tone “family-friendly.” Like a Saturday morning cartoon.
Think of those episodes with huge stakes followed by a beach episode where nothing matters. That is the vibe. Serious. Silly. Back to serious.
“The real experience is people playing it on the couch together laughing and pointing at things.”
That interaction is part of the story. Maybe the best part. I want to see where they take the ship. The art promises wonder. The gameplay promises connection. I just hope they keep that relaxed pace going. Who knows?
