Oirbo: How to Explore a Seamless World

Summary
- A textless metroidvania experience.
- Unique world design.
- Get tips to help you succeed.
Oirbo is a textless metroidvania where you control our robotic friend Oirbo through a malfunctioning space ship filled with robotic friends, foes, and lasers!
Oirbo’s spacecraft has five distinct areas, created and designed to challenge you with different enemies, contraptions, challenges and puzzles as you progress.
While designing Oirbo, one of our main goals was to ensure you could explore as much as possible, minimizing obstacles that might deter exploration. Being a Metroidvania, Oirbo naturally has some initially unreachable areas until the necessary power-up or condition is met. Nevertheless, we decided to include alternative paths and tricky challenges that allow any player to reach further parts of the game than one might initially think. So, in Oirbo, after you defeat the first boss, you can explore all areas, even with some limitations.
With this decision in mind, we meticulously planned the game map and how much of each area was unlocked by each power-up, ensuring there wasn’t any section a player could enter but not exit. While allowing players to backtrack might seem trivial in a game, designing a Metroidvania like Oirbo, where players can explore freely with just one power-up while always having a way back, isn’t as easy as it sounds.
As you explore Oirbo, you’ll notice the complete absence of text; every message we want you to understand is conveyed either through the game’s art or via a visual language system we created, similar to the emojis we all typically use on a daily basis.
Being such an open Metroidvania, Oirbo rarely restricts your movement, so if you’re struggling with a puzzle or challenge, you can always try another route. Each area usually has more than one way to reach the Boss.
Oirbo‘s biggest platforming challenges might initially seem impossible to traverse with your current power-ups. However, more often than not, if you can reach a platforming challenge, you can overcome it. Naturally, the difficulty will decrease as you unlock more power-ups, so don’t worry too much; you can always conquer them later!
Finally, don’t forget to take advantage of the map! As you unlock map memories, pins will start to appear on your map, highlighting various unlockables you might have missed. As you progress, you can even unlock a second, golden pin that will reveal unlockables in sections you haven’t even visited yet! The map also allows you to add custom pins at any time. Furthermore, you can unlock the entire area layout, granting you the ability to fast travel to that location from anywhere at any time!
Oirbo was developed with a lot of love by a small team of two, and we sincerely hope you enjoy playing Oirbo as much as we enjoyed creating it!
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The post Oirbo: How to Explore a Seamless World appeared first on Xbox Wire.
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