

Later levels introduce intelligent motes and special ones that attract or deflect mass. The other motes simply float about the game's zone guided by their own momentum, waiting to be absorbed, or happening to collide with and absorb one another, growing larger through inaction. The other mote happily collects your ejaculated mass and becomes even larger, while you shrivel away having wasted your mass in pointless movements, a panicking and dejected dust particle. In a panic you fire off mass to your right to reverse your direction. You might, for example, poop out a few smaller motes to your left to move yourself towards and collect a blue mote to your right, but in doing so, you could lose just enough mass that the mote you're trying to collect becomes larger than you.

Absorb a mote and its mass is added to yours turning red motes to a vulnerable blue hue, but to move at all you must propel yourself by expelling mass in the opposite direction. Smaller, absorbable motes are blue while the larger motes are a fiery red. In Osmos You control a mote, a tiny microbe whose sole ability, besides absorbing its peers, is to eject part of itself in one direction in order to move in the other.
