Cosmic Top Secret

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Nakana Bundle #2 (Mythic Ocean + Journey of the Broken Circle + Cosmic Top Secret), along with Journey of the Broken Circle and Mythic Ocean. It is also included in Nakana Bundle #5, along with A Night at the Races, Eqqo, Infini, and Please Touch The Artwork. Additionally, this game is also in Nakana Bundle #6 (10 games), along with A Night at the Races, Eqqo, Infini, Journey of the Broken Circle, Lydia, Mythic Ocean, Please Touch The Artwork, Soul Searching, and Stilstand.)

Cosmic Top Secret, released on PC in 2018 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2021, is an extremely weird game. After playing it and sitting down to write this review, I wasn’t completely certain exactly how to describe it or what to say about it, but that word resonated to the point where I felt absolutely certain it would be repeated throughout this review. This is a very, very weird game about a young Danish woman trying to pry from her elderly parents the secrets about their Cold War intelligence past. If I had to pick a genre, I would say this is a Graphic Adventure, but there are minor 3D Platforming and Puzzle elements as well. But mostly this is just weird.

This game is absolutely fascinated with the trappings and paraphernalia of vintage Cold War spy tech and terminology, and the presentation for this game feels very much like a grade schooler’s class art project about her parents. The game’s scenes are characters appear to be made out of cardboard and clippings of photographs and repurposed intelligence documents – players move by crunching their paper-thin character into a wad of paper and rolling around, they travel along paths made of old-fashioned hole-punch computer tape, and usually looking at the opposite side of paper-thin scenery reveals it was made from some classified document cut or folded to size to fit whatever shape it was meant to be. Characters themselves are often depicted with gigantic googly eyes and are voiced by what seems to be unprofessional recordings of real conversations. And as players progress, they unlock supplemental materials ranging from photographs, secret documents, and even videos of interviews.

That brings me to another element of this game. As weird as this game is, and as fixated as it appears to be on all the secret spy stuff, so much about this game also seems to be deeply personal. The focal characters at the center of all of this, player character Trine Laier and her parents, are apparently at least semi-autobiographical in their depictions, and the scenarios they are depicted in and the interactions between them seem pulled straight from reality.

The thing is, that poses something of a problem the farther away you are from the people at the heart of this. I am not Danish, my parents were never in any military or intelligence-related government agencies, did nothing of great importance (that I know of) during the Cold War, and I never felt like either of them were hiding any monumental secrets from me. As such, it was difficult for me to identify with this game’s characters.

This is likely even more due to the cultural barrier present here – the characters’ dialogue here is often being translated from Danish, but not really localized. As a result it was often difficult to follow the conversations. In addition, the sort of things this game treats as normal (such as military hand grenade training for civilian families of government employees) is a completely foreign concept to me, and this juxtaposed with the childish presentation… yeah, like I said, very weird.

I suppose I should talk about the puzzles in this game. It does have puzzles, of a sort, but they are often either simply about looking around and finding things like a glorified Easter Egg hunt, or the game’s awkward presentation and localization seems to need to hold your hand for you so much that it’s essentially solving the puzzle for you. There is certainly potential for some fun stuff here, uncovering secret codes and getting into fun spy stuff… but mostly this game seems to err on the side of making everything accessible to compensate for the at times inscrutable linguistic and cultural disconnect that the game suffers from.

Finally, I need to address character movement, which is atrocious in this game. I don’t even know how to describe what’s going on here, but your actions to move your character and camera feel only loosely connected to what actually happens. The game does have optional touchscreen controls, but this only really helps with selecting items from the game’s clunky menu system, and doesn’t really make movement in the game any better. It’s only by the saving grace that these controls rarely factor into completing tasks in the game that this is even remotely acceptable.

All things considered, one might ask the question, “will I like Cosmic Top Secret?”. I really don’t know what to tell you there. I might say that if you have a fascination with Cold War spy stuff you’ll find this game fascinating, but then the amateurish, childish elements may also kill that interest. Likewise, if you’re interested in weird, experimental games, you may find this to your liking, but some of the topic matter is a bit dry for that. I suppose I can say that if you’re the sort of person who thinks you’ll appreciate something very personal, very steeped in history, and above all very, very weird… you may find this game to be charming enough that it clicks with you. But this is absolutely not a game for everyone.

tl;dr – Cosmic Top Secret is a game that loosely fits into the Graphic Adventure genre, focusing on a young Danish woman trying to pry answers out of her retired Cold War-era military parents about their past. This is absolutely not a game for everyone, but its weird, unique, weird, personal, superficially amateurish, and above all else weird presentation may strike your fancy… or it may not.

Grade: C

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