Cosmic Collapse Is a $5 Brain Massage - TheGamer

[Mike Drucker]

If your game looks remotely interesting and costs $5 or less, I will probably buy it. This isn’t a super smart philosophy on my part but at least it is a terrible way to decide on what to purchase. Sometimes, this leads to weird and pointless games. Other times it leads to very weird and pointless games.

But once in a while - when the stars are aligned and I’m not the biggest idiot on Earth - I end up buying something like Cosmic Collapse. It’s the price of a cup of coffee and makes my brain feel like it’s going to the spa.

I’ve been on a bit of a puzzle game kick lately. Part of this is because the fun history lessons in Tetris Forever hooked me back into the genre. Part of this is because the world is currently a boiling Hell and sometimes I need an abstract game that doesn’t remind me of everything I’ve lost. So when I saw both the screenshots of Cosmic Collapse and the price, it was kind of an easy buy.

A puzzle game with planets as the pieces? Sure! For $5 a space-themed game could’ve sucked and I probably would’ve been satisfied like the pig I am.

Cosmic Collapse Is Nothing Like It Sounds Like​

But despite having a name that sounds like what happens to me whenever I face even the slightest adversity, Cosmic Collapse is a smooth, simple puzzle game. I will be honest: The game is a lot like Suika Game. Then again, the idea of a puzzler in which you push multiple objects together to make a bigger object wasn’t invented by that game either (Money Puzzle Exchanger knows what I’m talking about!).

But in terms of physics and dropping things and timing, Cosmic Collapse is less like Tetris and more like Suika Game. And the many, many Suika clones. You got me there. I do not care one bit. This is just $5, folks. I want to keep hitting that point.










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If you haven’t played Suika Game, here’s how Cosmic Collapse works: you drop a series of round objects. In Cosmic Collapse, these are all based on bodies in the solar system: Starting with an asteroid, then the moon, then Mars, then Venus, then Earth, and so on and so forth. Each time you combine two of the same size, you upgrade to one of the next size.

Eventually, when you combine two Jupiters, you get a sun which is always satisfying. Every few thousand points or so, you also get a ‘bullet’ that lets you Alderaan one of the planets out of existence to make the others drop. If one of the planets (or asteroid or moon or sun) rises more than halfway above the line at the top of the screen, that’s the game!

Like Suika, there’s also some physics involved. Planets bounce off each other. Combos pop up objects, leading to other combos. Or, as happened to me, sometimes causing a planet to rebound to the top of a stack and suddenly get a Game Over. Beyond combining planets, you’re also trying to strategize how to move the pieces around without wasting one of your bullets.

And, of course, the larger the objects get, the more they’re worth - but also, the more space they eat up while you struggle to make more big ones.

For $5, Who Can Say No?​

Again, none of this is particularly new, but Cosmic Collapse ties it together with a nice, chill vibe. The graphics and 4:3 screen format would feel right at home on a 16-bit console. The planets look like photos that were converted into super low-res pixel images. Suika and most of its clones look like they were made in Flash in 2003.

Somehow Cosmic Collapse looks older than even that makes it also feel more modern. I dunno. Or I just like planets more than watermelons with smiles. Of the Suika-likes, this is the one that I likes. Man, I’m sorry I wrote that pun but my delete key doesn’t work anymore.

While playing it, I kept thinking how it felt like a Sega Genesis game that was lost and re-found. There’s something about the style of the game reminiscent of when Columns and early Tetris ruled the Earth. Unlike a lot of modern puzzle games, there aren’t ten different modes. Starting Cosmic Collapse feels like those: no tutorial. No cartoon avatars leading the way. You just start the game and go.



Need some help? Good news: the one sentence instruction manual is on the side of the screen. The style extends to the music, too. I think we just get one song, but God is it soothing. Do I wish there were more songs? Sure! Is this a five dollar game in which I get to feel good while thinking about nothing? Yes!

I know we’ve all got big games to play. There are huge games coming that will swallow hundreds and even thousands of hours of my time. Not to mention that there’s still so much from 2024 that I need to finish. But between all those big games, I feel like Cosmic Collapse will keep getting playtime on my Steam Deck. It’s meditative. It’s beautiful. It’s fun. And, most importantly, it’s only $5 at full price.










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