Releasing to “Overwhelmingly Positive” reception on Steam in August last year, Öoo is a puzzle platformer developed by Japanese indie creator NamaTakahashi. After being nominated in the D.I.C.E Awards’s game design category and getting picked up by publisher AMATA Games for expansion to consoles, the developer still hasn’t decided how the game’s title is officially supposed to be pronounced, albeit on purpose.
Unusual for a Japanese game, Öoo uses a German o-umlaut in its title, which has generated much mystery about how it’s supposed to be pronounced ever since the game’s launch. Furthermore, since the string of letters was simply designed to resemble the form of a cartoonish caterpillar (referencing the game’s playable character), it’s not exactly a word in the first place. For Japanese players, the name has even made the game tricky to look up on the Nintendo eShop, which the developer has suggested workarounds for.
But when it comes to the correct pronunciation of Öoo, NamaTakahashi recently told Denfaminicogamer that he hasn’t decided on one in the first place. Like Takahashi’s previous game ElecHead, Öoo draws influence from Terry Cavanagh’s puzzle-platformer VVVVVV. As you may have noticed, this game too has a title that’s hard to pronounce, so players have taken to nicknaming it various variations of “Six Vs,” “The Letter V Six Times” and the like (though according to Cavanagh himself, the “official” pronunciation is simply “vee”). Likewise, NamaTakahashi wishes for Öoo to also earn a nickname from its fanbase. At the moment, the most common ones are a long “oo” like in “pool,” or simply “Bomb Caterpillar.”
Funnily, since the developer is adamant about not providing an official pronunciation for Öoo, this means that during presentations and events where they talk about their game, they have to resort to vague replacements like “The Bomb Caterpillar game” themselves.
Öoo is available for PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch and PS5. An Xbox Series X❘S release is scheduled for late March 2026.
