Shapefarm’s debut is the most beautiful thing on Switch 2 and the easiest co-op game to get a second person into.
My standing problem with co-op-only games
I have a rule about games that refuse to let me play alone, and the rule is that they are a logistics genre pretending to be a design genre. Somebody has to be free. Somebody has to be in the same room, or at least awake at the same hour. Somebody has to still be enjoying it at 11pm on a Tuesday when the puzzle has stopped being clever and started being homework. I own It Takes Two and I have finished it exactly once, years after buying it, with a person I had to schedule like a dentist.
So when Orbitals was announced at The Game Awards in December 2025 with no solo mode and no plans for one, my first reaction was not about the art. It was about my calendar.
Then I played it, and Shapefarm did something I did not expect. They did not solve the problem of finding a second player by making the game easier to play alone. They solved it by making the second player cost nothing, and by making the whole thing short enough that nobody has to commit a month of their life to it. I finished the campaign, went back for the collectibles, and came out of it convinced this is the best-looking game on the console and one of the smartest arguments for co-op design since Hazelight built the template.
What Orbitals actually is
Orbitals is a two-player asymmetric puzzle-adventure, exclusive to Nintendo Switch 2, released worldwide on September 3, 2026. It is developed by Shapefarm, a Tokyo studio with an international team, and published by Kepler Interactive, the London outfit behind Sifu, Pacific Drive, Rematch, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Shapefarm is one of Kepler’s founding members and this is its first original project.
The pedigree matters. Game director Jakob Lundgren spent years at Hazelight Studios as a designer on A Way Out, It Takes Two, and Split Fiction. Marcos Ramos is creative director. Johannes Varmedal handles art direction. What arrives on screen is recognizably descended from Hazelight’s structure: two people, two sets of hands, one problem that neither can touch on their own.
You play Maki, a hot-headed young mechanic, and Omura, a quiet cartographer who drifts off mid-sentence. They grew up in the Settlement, a space station now sealed inside a supernatural cosmic storm and coming apart at the seams. The pair take a ship out past the Storm Wall to look for help. Eleven story episodes follow, plus a twelfth bonus episode that turns the ship into a minigame arcade. It’s rated PEGI 12 for violence, runs on Unreal Engine 5, and weighs 13.4GB on the European eShop.
There is no single-player mode. Not a reduced one, not an AI partner, nothing. That is the deal on the box and it is the correct place to start any honest conversation about this game.
Two tools, one problem
The asymmetry in Orbitals is in the tools, not in the characters. Maki and Omura have identical baseline abilities, so you pick whoever you like the look of and nobody gets stuck as the sidekick. What differs is what each of you is holding at any given moment, and the game keeps letting you swap.
The core pairing is the Beam Cannon and the Scrap Hook. One of you softens a steel beam with heat; the other grapples it and bends it into a bridge. That’s the tutorial version. By the fourth episode you are melting ice over a lava channel while your partner grapples a platform mid-fall, and by the eighth you are doing three things in a sequence that only works if both of you counted correctly. Each region layers in its own local tool, uses it hard for an episode, and drops it before it gets tired.
What makes this better than a checklist of gimmicks is that the tools are not assigned. You choose, mid-puzzle, who takes which. Two pairs of players will walk out of the same room having solved it in different ways. It also means you spend a lot of the game talking, which is the actual product here. The best moments in Orbitals are the ten seconds after one of you says “wait, what if I hold this” and the other says nothing at all because they are already moving.
The grapple works on your partner too, and you will use it on them for no reason at all.
Not all of it lands. The ship sections, where one of you flies through asteroid fields and the other works the guns, are the weak part of the game. They are pretty and they break up the pace, but the shooting is thin and by the third one you are waiting for it to end. Aiming gets fiddly whenever three grapple points sit close together and the puzzle wants fast alternation between them; you lose runs to the cursor rather than to the idea. And a late gauntlet that is meant to be the graduation exam, testing everything you have learned, has a couple of genuinely flat puzzles in it. Difficulty overall is gentle by design. Lundgren has been open that the game was never meant to be too difficult and that he wanted people to actually finish it. He got his wish, but anyone hoping for the late-game spikes of Split Fiction should know the ceiling here is lower.
Maki, Omura and the Reactor Cassettes
The story is the softest thing in the game, and I say that as someone who liked it.
The structure runs on Reactor Cassettes, and the shape of that structure is where the pacing wobbles. The first cassette arc covers seven of the eleven episodes. The remaining two are much shorter, so the back third of the game moves at a completely different speed to the front two thirds. Depending on your mood that reads as a brisk sprint to the finish or as a game that ran out of budget. I lean toward the first, but the seam is visible.
What holds it together is that everyone involved is playing it straight. Ramos has described the target tone as the right amount of cheese, and that is exactly what it is: earnest, occasionally silly, never once ironic about itself. Togen, the Settlement’s cautious leader, Kinakoko, a mechanic with a blunt kindness, and Jaga, a merchant who arrives like a guest star in a mid-season episode, are all written as archetypes and played without a wink. The Ghibli influence is in the shape of the thing rather than in any specific reference: two kids, a broken home, a big sky.
I will be honest about where it slips. There is no character in Orbitals who surprises you, and the ending is content to be sweet rather than to be anything. If you came for narrative weight this is not where you find it. If you came for two people you enjoy spending an evening with, it delivers completely.
Twelve frames, on purpose
We have to talk about the animation, because it is the thing everyone is arguing about and the thing that makes this game worth the price on its own.
Orbitals deliberately runs its characters at 24fps and its background detail at 12fps, with the whole thing capped at 30. Those are film numbers. Twenty-four frames is cinema; animating background elements on twos at 12 is how television anime was made when television anime was drawn by hand. Varmedal built a custom rendering backend on top of Unreal Engine 5 specifically to get there, because Unreal’s default pipeline is built to chase photorealism and this game wanted the opposite. On top of that sit film grain and a CRT-style filter, plus a set of strict internal rules on color and silhouette that give every object that slightly inflated, balloon-like anime volume.
For the first ten minutes it is jarring. Your eyes keep waiting for the smoothness a modern console has trained them to expect. Then it clicks, and by the end of the first episode you stop seeing frames and start seeing a show. I’ll say the unpopular half too: in the fastest moments, in the middle of the ship combat or a timed grapple chain, the low frame rate costs you a little precision, and no amount of artistic justification changes that. It is a trade Shapefarm made knowingly, and on balance they made it correctly.
The cutscenes are the payoff. Studio Massket, whose credits run through Lycoris Recoil, handled the animation, and Shapefarm brought in Tôru Yoshida as guest director, a veteran whose hand-drawn work runs from the original Mobile Suit Gundam through Cowboy Bebop and Bubblegum Crisis to Dandadan. He storyboarded the game by hand. The visual references are Cowboy Bebop, Dragon Ball, and Neon Genesis Evangelion; Maki and Omura come out of Sailor Moon and Ranma. Ramos has stated plainly that no generative AI was used anywhere in production, and the game looks like a thing people made with their hands because it is one. The transitions between animated cutscene and playable 3D are close to invisible, because the two teams shared assets in both directions: 3D gameplay environments appear in the anime, and Massket’s 2D paintings appear in the game world.
Two complaints, both fixable. Mission overlays eat a large chunk of both halves of the split screen and there is no way to hide them, which is a strange oversight in a game this careful about its own image. And Orbitals shipped with a handful of launch bugs, the worst being a camera that locks for one player after certain deaths and mission markers that occasionally vanish. Shapefarm was already on version 1.0.3 the day the game came out, and both issues were rare rather than routine, but check your update before you start.
Falk & Klou did the impossible thing
The soundtrack is by the composer duo Falk & Klou, and it is one of the best game scores of the year. Forty-one tracks of synth-driven 1980s sci-fi, released through Laced Records on streaming and on a 7in single.
The opening theme, “Accelerating Destiny” (加速する運命), is performed by Mami Ayukawa, who sang openings for Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. That is not a nostalgia stunt. It is the actual voice, doing the actual thing, forty years on, and the first time the opening plays in full you will sit through it instead of pressing skip. The credits theme, “Heart To Heart”, does the same trick at the other end. The rest of the score works because it commits: brass stabs where a modern game would put ambience, drum lines that belong on a VHS tape.
Voice acting ships in eight languages: English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, French, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, German, and Brazilian Portuguese, with a separately cast ensemble for each. The English cast has Rebecca Wang as Maki, Stephen Fu as Omura, Jonathan Ha as Togen, Cassie Ewulu as Kinakoko, and Brent Mukai as Jaga, and it is good. The Japanese cast, with Risa Kageyama and Ryota Ōsaka in the leads alongside Masaaki Mizunaka, Mayumi Oda, and Tatsuya Kobayashi, is better, and it is better because the whole aesthetic is reaching backward toward Japanese television and the Japanese track is the one that lands where it is aiming. Play it in Japanese with subtitles on. It costs you nothing and it changes the register of the entire game.
One petty grievance: a game with a soundtrack and an art department this good has no jukebox and no gallery. The Deluxe Edition sells you an artbook rather than putting the art in the pause menu.
Getting a second person into the room
This is where Orbitals earns its score, and it is the part most people have not registered yet.
There are three ways in. Local split screen on one console, which is the best version of the game and the one I would push everyone toward. Online across two copies. Or the Orbitals Global Friend’s Pass, a free companion app on the Switch 2 eShop: the person who owns the game sends an invite, their partner downloads the app, and they play the entire campaign at no cost. One copy, two players, all the way to the credits. The Friend’s Pass also contains a free local co-op demo of the opening, so a pair of Switch 2 owners can try the game together before either of them pays anything.
There is also GameShare through GameChat, which needs a Nintendo Switch Online membership and a stable connection, and which puts borders on the invited player’s screen the way GameShare always does.
Weigh that properly. A €39.99 game that two people can finish together on one purchase is €20 a head, and the demo means neither of you buys blind. Nothing else on the console is doing this. The complaint that Orbitals has no solo mode is fair as a statement of fact and weak as a criticism, because Shapefarm has spent real effort making the second player the cheapest part of the whole proposition.
Two practical notes. Every player needs their own compatible controller, sold separately. And the game does not support Nintendo Switch Online cloud saves, so your progress lives on the console.
Length, saves, and the money
The campaign runs six to eight hours for most pairs. Explore properly and it stretches toward ten. Hunt down all ten of the ship’s minigame collectibles, which are off the path but not really hidden, and you are at fourteen or fifteen. Individual missions can be replayed from a chapter select at roughly 45 to 90 minutes each. There are no achievements, there is no alternate ending, and there is no meaningful reason to run it twice except to run it with somebody new.
Short, then. Shorter than It Takes Two, shorter than Split Fiction, and priced accordingly at €39.99 digital, with a physical release at launch and a Deluxe Edition adding a digital artbook, the soundtrack, two character outfits, and two ship skins. A Deluxe Upgrade Pack exists for anyone who starts with the standard version.
I think the length is right, and I think the price makes it right. A co-op-only game that demands two adults find twenty hours together is a game that mostly gets abandoned in episode five. This one fits into two evenings and finishes. That is a design decision, not a shortfall, and the counting-hours-per-euro crowd is measuring the wrong thing here.
What I will not defend is the save system. Checkpoints are frequent and forgiving, but full autosaves are spaced far apart, and up to an hour of play can sit between them. On a handheld console built for short sessions, that is the wrong shape. It gets worse online: if a GameShare or Friend’s Pass connection drops, and connections do drop, you lose everything back to the last autosave rather than to the last checkpoint. Shapefarm should turn every checkpoint into a save and should do it in the next patch. It is the one flaw in this game that can actively stop you playing.
Verdict
Orbitals is the most beautiful thing on Nintendo Switch 2 and I do not think that is a close call. Shapefarm set out to build a playable late-1980s anime, hired the people who made the real ones, and got it exactly right, down to the frame rate and the theme song. Around that they built a co-op adventure that is clever without being cruel, generous with its tools, and confident enough to end while you still want more of it. The ship sections drag, the last act is thinner than the first, the story is sweet rather than substantial, and the autosave gaps need fixing. None of that stopped me grinning.
Buy it if you have one specific person you like solving things with, and buy it knowing you only need one copy for the two of you. Buy the standard edition and skip the Deluxe unless you want the artbook, because the soundtrack is on streaming anyway. Skip it if the only controller in your house is yours, because there is no version of this game that will let you in alone, and no patch is coming to change that.
Then play it in Japanese, and let the opening run.
