Manage your own interstellar gas station in Cosmo’s Quickstop

Listen to Ace of Space while you clean bathrooms

Cosmo’s Quickstop was certainly one of the more manic games I played on the PAX East floor, and in a good way. As the newest employee of an interstellar gas station, my job was to multi-task across customer needs includiꦰng pumping spaceship gas, refilling vending machines, cleaning green goop out of bathrooms, and even giving galactic directions.

I loved that each task required a different set of thinking — some were focused on button sequences, while others were purely manual (e.g., pressing a button quickly or moving to a particular area), but all of them required a quick attention to detail and timing to determine what to cover next. I particularly enjoyed the task of giving directions to the alien customers, which was presented as a small mini-game where I had to guide a ship to the moon using directionals. If I took too long with any particular task, the customer would leave unhappy and bow out on their bill.

I got to play the co-op level with our very own Jonathan Holmes, and boy was it something to behold. All I can say about our teamwork skills is that Jonathan is really great at cleaning up bathrooms, and I’m a good boss lady. The co-op portion included more activities like an animatronic Chuck-E-Cheese-esque band called Ace of Space, which we used quite often to distract the waiting customers.

Overall I’m happy to see another task management game, which is a weird thing to say when you already have an overwhelming full-time job in addition to life, but what are video games for if not to distract us from the ever-growing task list of our lives?

is slated to come out later this year on Steam.