I'm loving the Indie game scene - decent people doing decent games without any of this wishy washy hype and marketing to get in the way. Aces. It's been even better now everyone's started to really jump on the downloadable content bandwagon, opening up the idea that we can grab demos and buy games from a handful of decent places and enjoy the luxury of not having to leave our Lazy Boy 3000's to get the latest title or other.

In step the otherwise unheard-of Independent Developers who's ideas have been squashed by “The Man” to offer up said ideas to the public anywhere from reasonably low prices to free. So I heartily join those developers in giving “The Man” “The Digit” and giving Osmos a shot – for without the likes of Steam or indeed Matt prodding me with a very large crispy chilli beef baguette – I never would've heard of the game... or at least until I was one of those people facing a crowd of greasy-haired, beardy, crisp-eating slop badgers shouting in disgruntled disbelief “What ya mean you haven't played the game? *scoff* *scoff* Harr Harr” - and no one wants to be one of those people.

So in playing Osmos I can stick my fingers up to both “The Man” and “The Great Unwashed” today – very productive.

Osmos was in the Independent Games Festival Finalist in three categories. Out of these three, Design and Technical Excellence were among them, which I can believe after playing the game as it's a nice little idea if perhaps an amalgamation of a few features from other titles all rolled into one. Personally I can't help but think of what would've happened if we'd replaced the Cell Phase from Spore with a bunch of Metroids. Anyway, the game is simple – you are a blob floating around some sort of imaginary cosmic pool. You can absorb blobs smaller than you, while ironically be absorbed by things larger than you. Thus, in a sweeping and basic summary of evolution, the game takes you back to the simple principle of Survival of the Fittest – Darwin would be chuffed.

Each time you eat something smaller than you you'll grown in size, which is all well and good but your only way to move around the plane is to putt-putt your way forward by expelling a little part of you out the back and in turn shrinking your size again. In short, a balance of eating enough to stay ahead of the game and only using as much propulsion as is necessary is the aim of the game.

While the game might occasionally play with around with gravity like Einstein with his first physics set or throw a couple of more intelligent blobs with their own agenda, it's basically about trying to complete each challenge by either becoming the biggest thing in the map or absorbing a specified target (usually one that particularly doesn't want to get eaten – strange that). Your weapon being yourself, armed with a few karmic compositions and the ability to slow down or speed up time.

The game contains 47 varied levels that can all be randomised for replayability or if a particular combination of events in the level makes it harder for you to complete and it's probably worth mentioning that this is a bonus for such a simplistic title. At the end of the day it's £6.99 on Steam and offers players a chance to unwind (if you don't play it like me cranking up the speed with the painful realisation that gravity hates us all) with some really easy going gameplay and lush atmospheric music (kudos to the developers for making the music speed adjust with the gameplay – nice touch).

Well worth picking up for the price it's certainly got gameplay to offer and will probably be one of the better indie titles you'll see floating around for some time... see what I did there? ...never mind.