Right, any game that looks like you let the artisans from Studio Ghibli or Cowboy Bebop makers Sunrise make a Daft Punk video is immediately going to pique my curiosity. Layer on some puzzle-heavy, playful-looking co-op gameplay, and you’ve got my attention. Tell me I can play it with my partner, across two Switches, for the entry price of just the one game, and I’m sold. Day one with bells on.
I was already interested in Orbitals after its impressive showing at The Game Awards back in December 2025. There, we get the meat of the game: it’s from Kepler Interactive and Japanese indie dev Shapefarm, it’s an intergalactic puzzle adventure game, and it is coming exclusively to Switch 2 sometime in 2026 (as of today, we know it’s ‘summer’).
You play as Maki and Omura, a pair of friends that are trying to save their space station home from cosmic storms that have decimated their habitat once before. You can each use tools to affect the environment and solve puzzles, and in a pretty cool gimmick, it seems that individual players using tools alongside their co-op partner will be able to create new and unexpected effects.
The gameplay and art style are enough of a selling point, to be honest (it looks like something between Astro Boy and Evangelion, somehow) but then you add in the work from Studio Massket – an animation studio that’s worked on bits of Edgerunners, One Piece, and more – you’ve got a recipe for something really special. Studio Massket has done all the anime cutscenes that serve as connective tissue for the game, rounding out the world and giving it this very analogue, very lived-in feel that so much 80s and 90s anime had (here’s looking at you again, Cowboy Bebop).
So, the game itself looks great. Just take a look at the trailer if you need more convincing: it seems to be shooting for the same space Josef Fares and Hazelight have been playing around in over the past few generations: one where games are built explicitly “from the ground up”for co-op, telling stories that only work when multiple people are playing them together, bridging mental gaps to help players solve puzzles as one.
Fares and his team have already proved that the ‘Friend’s Pass’ mechanic is integral to the success of this co-op new-wave. “I felt that if you are playing together on a couch, you shouldn’t pay extra if you’re playing online with someone,” he told The Games Business earlier this year. “That didn’t make sense. So, we came up with the Friends Pass, and that in itself became good for business. It started from a creative decision and then became a business thing.”
The results speak for themselves: Split Fiction sold 2m copies in one week and broke three Guinness World Records within days of its launch. It Takes Two has sold way over 20m copies, at this point. Trusting people to play games like this with a friend (and knowing there’s enough appeal for that to work) rather than forcing them to buy two copies if they want to play on two machines? It’s a refreshing bit of consumer-friendly decision-making, in an industry that is otherwise feeling increasingly hostile to the average player.
So, back to Orbitals. I plan to play this game with one of my partners, wedged together on the sofa, me on my Switch 2 and them on their Switch Lite. Knowing that I can simply buy the game and invite them to play with me from a few meters away endears me to this game so much, and it’s not even out yet. Better yet, I travel with work a fair amount, and so knowing we can pick up where we left off with online play and still without having to shell out for a second copy is another big tick (as is the ability to just play it together on the big screen in a pinch).
I know GameShare is not a new feature – on the Switch 2 alone, Donkey Kong Bananza, Super Mario Odyssey, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, 51 Worldwide Games, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment and more make use of the gimmick – but it’s a good one. One that should be shouted about more, and one that feels like it exists at the core of Nintendo’s ‘family friendly’ focus. And good on Orbitals, for being a beacon of this sort of consumer-forward, co-op-first way of thinking – at least from how it looks here in theory. I can’t wait to see how it all works in practice.
