Cosmonious High just received new accessibility features to support visually impaired players, available today on Quest 2, PSVR 2 & PC VR.
Arriving in a free update for existing owners, Owlchemy Labs detailed the Vision Accessibility Update (VAU) for Cosmonious High in a new blog post. Once activated through a new assist button, tutorials, teleportation locations, environments and objects being held or pointed will now have detailed audio descriptions. An audio confirmation plays when items are grabbed or released, while key objects use high-contrast outlines to illustrate themselves clearly.
“We believe that VR gaming should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their abilities,” said Jazmin Cano, Accessibility Product Manager for Owlchemy Labs. “The Vision Accessibility Update is the first of its kind, not just at Owlchemy Labs but for VR gaming as a whole. We want to tear down barriers for all gamers, and this is another great step in that direction.”
Owlchemy claims this was made possible by collaborating with accessibility consultants, which includes renowned accessibility advocate Steve Saylor. In a prepared statement, Saylor confirmed that he’s “often felt excluded from the world of VR gaming” as someone with low vision, but believes “that’s starting to change” with the VAU update:
The combination of visual descriptions, contrasting colors, and other tools make it possible for me to experience VR in a way I never thought possible. This update is a game-changer for low-vision gamers everywhere, and I am proud to have been a part of its development.
This isn’t the first time Owlchemy’s given Cosmonious High an accessibility update. Last June saw the team addressing physical and cognitive disabilities, adding a one-handed mode that only requires a single controller. More seated play options were added, items became easier to grab, and iconography was adjusted for better readability. Further localization and inclusivity improvements were also included.
Cosmonious High is available now on Quest 2, Quest Pro, PSVR 2 and PC VR via Steam. Accessibility features can be turned on and adjusted via your in-game backpack, which you can grab by reaching over your shoulder.
Cosmonious High contains 18 characters across six species all created by a team with zero dedicated animators. That means lots and lots of code to create realistic behaviors and Owlchemy-quality interactivity! The ‘character system’ in Cosmonious High is a group of around 150 scripts that together answer many design and animation problems related to characters. Whether it’s how they move around, look at things, interact with objects, or react to the player, it’s all highly modular and almost completely procedural.
This modularity enabled a team of content designers to create and animate every single line of dialogue in the game, and for the characters to feel alive and engaging even when they weren’t in the middle of a conversation. Here’s how it works.
Guest Article by Sean Flanagan & Emma Atkinson
Cosmonious High is a game from veteran VR studio Owlchemy Labs about attending an alien high school that’s definitely completely free of malfunctions! Sean Flanagan, one of Owlchemy’s Technical Artists, created Cosmonious High’s core character system amongst many other endeavors. Emma Atkinson is part of the Content Engineering team, collectively responsible for implementing every narrative sequence you see and hear throughout the game.
The Code Side
Almost all code in the character system is reusable and shared between all the species. The characters in Cosmonious High are a bit like modular puppets—built with many of the same parts underneath, but with unique art and content on top that individualizes them.
From the very top, the character system code can be broken down into modules and drivers.
Modules
Every character in Cosmonious High gets its behavior from its set of character modules. Each character module is responsible for a specific domain of problems, like moving or talking. In code, this means that each type of Character is defined by the modules we assign to it. Characters are not required to implement each module in the same way, or at all (e.g. the Intercom can’t wave.)
Some of our most frequently used modules were:
CharacterLocomotion – Responsible for locomotion. It specifies the high-level locomotion behavior common to all characters. The actual movement comes from each implementation. All of the ‘grounded’ characters—the Bipid and Flan—use CharacterNavLocomotion, which moves them around on the scene Nav Mesh.
CharacterPersonality – Responsible for how characters react to the player. This module has one foot in content design—its main responsibility is housing the responses characters have when players wave at them, along with any conversation options. It also houses a few ‘auto’ responses common across the cast, like auto receive (catching anything you throw) and auto gaze (returning eye contact).
CharacterEmotion – Keeps track of the character’s current emotion. Other components can add and remove emotion requests from an internal stack.
CharacterVision – Keeps track of the character’s current vision target(s). Other components can add and remove vision requests from an internal stack.
CharacterSpeech – How characters talk. This module interfaces with Seret, our internal dialogue tool, directly to queue and play VO audio clips, including any associated captions. It exposes a few events for VO playback, interruption, completion, etc.
It’s important to note that animation is a separate concern. The Emotion module doesn’t make a character smile, and the Vision module doesn’t turn a character’s head—they just store the character’s current emotion and vision targets. Animation scripts reference these modules and are responsible for transforming their data into a visible performance.
Drivers
The modules that a character uses collectively outline what that character can do, and can even implement that behavior if it is universal enough (such as Speech and Personality.) However, the majority of character behavior is not capturable at such a high level. The dirty work gets handed off to other scripts—collectively known as drivers—which form the real ‘meat’ of the character system.
Despite their more limited focus, drivers are still written to be as reusable as possible. Some of the most important drivers—like CharacterHead and CharacterLimb—invisibly represent some part of a character in a way that is separate from any specific character type. When you grab a character’s head with Telekinesis, have a character throw something, or tell a character to play a mocap clip, those two scripts are doing the actual work of moving and rotating every frame as needed.
Drivers can be loosely divided into logic drivers and animation drivers.
Logic drivers are like head and limb—they don’t do anything visible themselves, but they capture and perform some reusable part of character behavior and expose any important info. Animation drivers reference logic drivers and use their data to create character animation—moving bones, swapping meshes, solving IK, etc.
Animation drivers also tend to be more specific to each character type. For instance, everyone with eyes uses a few instances of CharacterEye (a logic driver), but a Bipid actually animates their eye shader with BipedAnimationEyes, a Flan with FlanAnimationEyes, etc. Splitting the job of ‘an eye’ into two parts like this allows for unique animation per species that is all backed by the same logic.
We chronicle a partial history of one of VR’s best-known developers: Owlchemy Lab.
I’m listening back through an interview with Andrew Eiche and Devin Reimer of Owlchemy Labs and we’re talking about the subtle genius of Half-Life: Alyx’s distance-grab mechanic. It’s part of a 90-minute chat that weaves through the recent history of VR and the wide range of attempts by developers to zero in on products with an audience. Our conversation takes a detour into how Crisis VRigade is secretly one of the purest expressions of the VR shooter and the conversation somehow winds back to their belief that hand-tracking is the next big frontier for VR mass adoption, and others just aren’t seeing it yet.
It’s a fascinating talk and equally insightful to listen back to, but it wasn’t exactly what I meant to discuss. Their studio works to make VR software as immersive, comfortable and accessible as possible at a time when VR hardware is often the opposite. It won them immense success with Job Simulator and their subsequent release have recieved positive reviews from critics and fans, as well as charting in top seller lists (though, notably not as highly as Job Sim). Is that a good showing four games on from the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive?
Owlchemy certainly isn’t out to make VR’s most explosive shooter or epic sword-swinging RPG, with the studio instead focusing its work carefully around existing constraints to craft experiences within current limits. Its been a bit of an experimental research and development lab even while, in recent years, the studio pursued this work operating under the umbrella of one of the world’s largest tech companies. Even today, Job Simulator sits on top sellers lists as one of VR’s most recognized and successful titles, not to mention being followed by multiple successors that each pushed VR design further down this very specific line of thinking.
“We’ve got to remember that today,” Eiche once said to me, “we’re getting more new players into VR than we are getting former players.”
While the studio’s leaders are famously practiced at smiling through questions aimed at uncovering their future plans, looking back at the unique studio’s path and focused design efforts, we can still find hints pointing to Owlchemy and VR’s future.
Owlchemy’s Origins
Owlchemy started in 2010 just when market fatigue and saturation were settling into the mobile gaming market.
“Mobile just kept going downhill and our games were continuously doing better, but we were following that trajectory down,” Reimer says.
They were working on titles like Jack Lumber which, as Reimer explained it, is all about being “a supernatural lumberjack out for vengeance on the forest because the evil tree killed his granny.” While the slapstick humor in their work continues today, gone are the days of keeping the lights on by developing for dozens of platforms fueld by hardware maker partnerships, like a specific port for a Blackberry phone that Eiche says “maybe a hundred humans ever bought” and an HP laptop with a Leap Motion hand-tracking sensor built into it.
“That’s how we survived,” Reimer says.”When people talk about like startup companies and stuff like that, they always like paint over it as this like perfect genesis…That’s always the way that it works, but that’s not the way that real companies ever start.”
The company attempted an approach where they would pursue a project under contract for someone else and then return to their own intellectual property. They even did a Kickstarter for a game called Dyscourse, to which Reimer says they learned to “never, ever” do crowdfunding again. They also started giving talks about surviving in the harsh wilderness that is indie development.
In retrospect, this period didn’t just help them survive, it also helped prepare for VR’s multi-platform consumer origins on console, PCs, and phones.
“It was like: ‘We’ve been training for this our whole lives,’” Reimer says.
Still, like any skeptical developer protecting their time, when the Oculus Rift’s Kickstarter launched in 2012 Reimer says he made a list – specifically, a list about why VR would fail. Or fail again, even. He blocked out a week of his time for the investigation and got started.
“It was like ‘headsets are too heavy on the head,'” he recalls. “Okay, mobile phones are starting to solve some of that. ‘The optics are bad.’ There are [now] advances in optics. And I went through that list and then I ended up calling Alex [Schwartz, Owlchemy co-founder] and I was like ‘This is going to happen. This is going to happen this time.'”
The studio started with a vehicle for its earliest tests being one of Owlchemy’s contract jobs, a superheroic jumping game called Aaaaa! for the Awesome!, in which you…jumped. You jumped very high, in fact. And then you fell.
“It was early days for VR,” Reimer recalls. “It’s first person. It’s just falling. I think this could work in VR.”
Owlchemy pitched a VR version, openly admitting it wouldn’t make money and that this was only for research purposes.
“It took us two days to get it up and running and then an entire month to make it not suck,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy had to figure out not only how to get a game running in VR for the first time but also some of the things we now take for granted, like VR menus and how to make it playable end-to-end without asking users to leave a headset. Owlchemy fumbled around just enough to release its work on Oculus Share, the now-extinct portal for early VR experiments and experiences.The reaction to the game was positive enough to get Owlchemy noticed. Not just by the VR enthusiasts checking for new experiences on a daily basis, but also by the companies busily plotting the next stages for consumer VR.
A Job Offer From Valve
By early 2014, VR was gaining steam.
Two years prior, the Oculus Rift had become one of the most talked-about Kickstarter projects of all time, raising nearly $2.5 million. ~$350 DK1 headsets were adding countless more loops of cables to developer studies and enthusiasts were sampling the first PC VR content via Oculus Share. But, slowly but surely, it was becoming clear Oculus wouldn’t be the only name in VR.
“Valve had been working on some of this early prototype stuff, and we knew a little bit of what they were working on and they decided to do the Steam Dev Days and they were gonna show a bunch of VR,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy was invited to host one of three talks on VR that February, the others being handled by Luckey and Michael Abrash, then of Valve and now heading research at Meta’s Reality Labs. From that, Reimer and colleagues were treated to Valve’s fabled VR room demo, which featured a crude VR headset that was positionally tracked using dozens of markers plastered all over a room. There were no controllers and the headset was incredibly bulky, but it represented the next step toward immersive consumer VR over the DK1, which could only track the direction of your gaze and not the position of your head.
You’ve probably heard at least one major VR figurehead describe that demo as a lightbulb moment for VR. Reimer isn’t one of them.
“I came out of that demo so depressed,” he says. “Because I realized that this is where VR was going and I could not see how in the short term we could bridge the gap on the technology side. We had this whole giant tracking problem that was like, how are we ever going to solve this in the short term? And then also what’s the input side of this equation? That is a whole other thing.”
Despite the reservations, Owlchemy pushed on with its next VR project. The Oculus Rift DK2 was on the horizon and would introduce its own positional tracking, albeit in a limited fashion with a camera facing you.
“We like sat down and started building all these pitches and we hated them all,” Reimer says. “Why don’t we like anything that we’re building? This should clearly be the future.”
Then the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Owlchemy was again treated to a new demo from Valve, this time for a device it was building with HTC. It represented yet another major step for VR, this time introducing fully-tracked controllers – and Valve wanted Owlchemy to build something for it.
“They were like: ‘We’ve made two. You can have one.'”
“We were like: ‘Cool.'”
And so the headset — along with the rest of Owlchemy — went to Reimer in Winnepeg, Canada. Or at at least most of it did; some parts of the setup they had to 3D print themselves.
“Valve at the time had the most 3D printers per capita or some crazy statistic,” Eiche points out. “And so they just sent us an STL file and it was like… what are we supposed to do with it?”
So they figured that bit out, and how to stitch it all together, and how to use the controllers with two USB wires. They then had a week to build a demo in what Reimer describes as the “most pivitol” seven days in the history of the company.
“The four of us just sat in my basement and programmed and drank and played video games for a week straight without sleeping. And Job Simulator is what popped up the other end of that thing,” he said. “The first thing we built was this little table with cubes on it.”
He put it low enough on the ground so he could sit on the floor and spent the next 20 minutes stacking cubes. He then removed the headset and made a proclamation about where VR was going:
“It’s physics!” he said.
Back To Job
By “physics”, Reimer meant a sense of agency unlike anything else felt in a virtual world before.
With two motion controllers reaching into environments there were direct consequences for your physical actions. What’s one of the most common places where your physical actions can have interesting consequences? Jobs, of course. And so Owlchemy started prototyping different jobs.
Reimer notes it was often “extreme things” that the team expected to be incredibly fun in VR. But the extremes didn’t always work. Things like juggling weren’t as compelling as the team thought they might be, whilst ideas like window washing ended up being incredibly uncomfortable to experience.
“We ended up having this kitchen […] and it was interesting because immediately it was like: ‘I understand what I need to do,'” Reimer explains.
“And that was another big learning was that, early in VR, there was this tendency to be like ‘I can do anything, it’s all virtual, so just whatever.’ And what we learned was that by leveraging people’s previous experience, you can side hop so much of the tutorialization or learning or anything like that. And then let people just do what they want into the world.”
The more it honed in on this idea, the more Owlchemy started to see its work validated. Reimer recalls one player putting an egg down, noticing it start to roll off the side of the table and then instinctively catching it. “All of a sudden it clicked,” he says. “This is probably one of the most complex human computer interactions that has ever taken place. It was such low, low lizard brain of solving this entire complex loop. But it just happened because we could leverage so much of what humans are good at to begin with.”
It’s around now that Eiche came onboard, having worked on some VR for a consultancy firm (he recalls one demo to a senior partner who proclaimed: “I wouldn’t be caught dead with that s**t on my face.”)
Full development on Job Simulator took place in a rented house in Austin, Texas. Reimer and Eiche recall a house full of VR developers and equipment chipping away at what made the game tick. This was not exactly a safe process. Reimer wrote on Twitter recently about prototype controllers that would give him electric shocks and making the house sound a little like a testing field for VR crash dummies.
“I’ve never had a controller that made me bleed and gave me high voltage shocks as much as that one,” he says. “I winced when I went to grab it.”
For a developer obsessed with VR comfort and safety, its notable one particularly treacherous area at the office was the loft.
“At the time you could only make square [VR] spaces because it was so early,” Eiche explains. “You couldn’t do polygons or anything like we do now. And part of the loft extended out over an open balcony, like over the second floor. So it’d be like, ‘Hey, if you feel the banister hitting, just don’t lean too far. It’s a one story drop on two other developers.'”
Owlchemy’s leaders were starting to feel pretty confident about where they had gotten with Job Simulator. The game was shaping up to be one of the best examples of what separated VR from flastscreen media and it would appear in the launch window for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PSVR. But, come release, the developers realized even the most optimistic projections for their own work had been modest.
“In my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined the reach of that game,” Reimer says.
This, it turns out, was something of a paradox. Job Simualtor has indeed been fantastically successful, still topping charts today. But consumer VR — at the time — was not. It’s usually this point in a developer retrospective that I’d tell you how the studio in question weathered the coming storm as VR’s install base limped out of the gates in the face of high prices and complicated setups. But Job Simulator’s continued success — it still ranks in the top 10 selling PSVR games on a monthly basis six years on — makes Owlchemy an oddity in the VR space.
Owlchemy’s leaders attribute success only partially to those sales, but also to their pacing and refusal to undergo explosive growth as investment in VR reached dramatic highs. Should they have gone and made a flatscreen PC game after Job Simulator? A mobile phone game? Heck, the controller grips resemble the grip of a gun and its one of gaming’s most popular genres, they could’ve gone the route Stress Level Zero went down and honed first-person shooter mechanics in VR.
“Everything is risky, right?” Reimer explains. “[So] why not bet on the thing where we can see this trend line? We don’t know how long it’s gonna take for this trend line to find success. But PC is going to get harder. Mobile’s going to get harder. This one is on the other trajectory. And so we can build something where we’re scaling with it.”
As far as the prospect of a shooter game goes, Eiche has some thoughts.
“Aiming is actually incredibly difficult and most people don’t realize like shooting sports are an Olympic sport,” Eiche explains. “So it’s an actual difficult thing. And one of my favorite things to watch is people who are really good at first person shooters try to play shooting games in VR because they’re not good.”
Just because you’re good at something on a gamepad, doesn’t mean you’re good at it in VR and while shooters are a popular form of videogame, Owlchemy sees VR as reaching much wider than that.
“The two things that we like really focused on there was can we build something that works for anybody? Anybody can pick up and play and have a good time,” Eiche says. “And also an important point of that is to not make people sick. Because the VR of that era, damn near a hundred percent of the titles you play would make you sick…assuming your users have all this back knowledge [on sickness] is just not a good way to build human computer interactions.”
From Rick & Morty To Google
Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality was something of a continutation of Owlchemy’s alternating development cycle – something original followed by something under contract.
Early on, they had no idea if Job Simulator would take off, let alone the wider VR market, and the deal with Adult Swim Games to make Virtual Rick-ality gave them a security that, as it turns out, they wouldn’t end up needing.
“Essentially for us, it was the thing that was going to make sure that, if the previous game wasn’t successful, we can continue to make the next original thing,” Reimer says. “And so from a strictly business and financial standpoint, Job Simulator ended up being that thing. It gave us the confidence to be able to not worry about that success.”
That’s not to say there’s any regret about working on Rick & Morty. It’s an enormously popular property, for one thing, and it enabled Owlchemy to build out yet more tools and learn more lessons it could take into future projects.
“That was very in our minds with Rick & Morty,” Reimer says. “What cool stuff can we build that’s going to make this awesome game, but also will allow us to R&D and also build these things that we can utilize after?”
“It allowed us to break out of Job Sim for a little bit,” Eiche adds, “and do something fun. Originally we did bots [in Job Sim] because we didn’t want to have bipedal characters. So that helped. A lot of what you see in Cosmonious High today are lessons that we had learned in Rick & Morty, like we had to high five a character, and that was impossible back in the day. Now every character can be high-fived at any time in Cosmonious. I know that sounds like such a silly small thing, but you high-five Rick and that broke so many times. We had to put so many patches out to fix it.”
It also gave Owlchemy the opportunity to work on some more traditional game elements like implementing voice acting and performance work.
“We got to try a lot of different things in that IP that ended up being kind of case studies on how to, and how not to do things going forward,” Reimer adds.
Development for Rick & Morty also took place during that cold VR winter, years before the release of the Quest headset. But as the industry reckoned with what type of content was going to help VR take off and more shooters and traditional gaming genres started to enter the scene, Owlchemy noticed a curious lack of Job Simulator imitators.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, you build a word guessing game,” Eiche suggests. “Then a million clones appear. And there’s all sorts of reasons why our game is a little too complex to clone, but […] we actually assumed many times that ‘Okay, we’re going to release Job Sim — once we realized it was going to be big — we’re going to see a lot of bright and colorful games with hands and kind of adventure style-y and performative like our games are.’ And then we’re like ‘Hey, nobody’s doing that. Okay, we’ll release Rick & Morty.'”
“I was starting to get to the point of paranoia right before launch,” Reimer adds. “Everyone’s loving this. Everyone’s going to want to do this. And at the time I just didn’t give us, being so inside that bubble, enough credit of the complexity of what we had pulled off.”
Job Simulator’s success had eliminated the anxiety of surviving from game to game. But it also made the developer a very lucrative target for acquisitions, and that’s exactly what happened. In May 2017, a month after the launch of Rick & Morty, Google announced its intention to acquire Owlchemy, long before Meta had started buying up VR development teams.
“We had this unique situation where our worlds were aligning,” Reimer says of the move. “We had kept pushing on VR for everyone and Google was like ‘Yes, that’s how we’re successful, when VR can be for everyone.'”
Interestingly, Owlchemy never did the things you’d expect a content studio to do when it gets bought by a giant corporation. It hasn’t made exclusive titles for Google platforms, for example, and it hasn’t avoided other platforms as a result. In fact, even if the team did want to do something exclusive to Google it’d be tough. After all, the company pulled out of VR hardware and services years ago after failing to get the Daydream mobile platform to take off.
Isn’t it a bit strange for a company that doesn’t make games and doesn’t provide any VR services or hardware to own a VR game developer? Reimer says the continued success of Owlchemy’s titles means that relationship hasn’t felt under threat.
“They wanted to set things up was to be this wholly-owned subsidiary,” he explains. “At Google, we don’t make games internally, this is not something we’re good at.”
Google’s leadership recognized, instead, that Owlchemy is good at releasing VR games to platforms with tracked hands.
“Let’s let you do that,” Reimer explained of Google’s direction to them.
The Quest In Lieu Of A Daydream
It’s at this point my coversation with Reimer and Eiche stopped being so much documentative as it was philosophical. A hit title under your belt and an acquisition by one of the world’s biggest technology companies sort of takes the wind out of the scrappy indie narrative, and both Vacation Simulator and Cosmonious High are still fresh in everyone’s memory.
Vacation Sim was the studio’s first shot at a sequel, and looked to further expand Owlchemy’s understanding of interaction and exploration. Last month’s release of Cosmonious High, meanwhile, returned to a lot of the character work first established in Rick & Morty, and was also Owlchemy’s first game to allow for free teleportation to explore any part of a map.
Perhaps what was most interesting about the development of each, however, was that Owlchemy had to work out how to get them — along with Job Simulator — on standalone hardware.
“Oculus runs a lot of experiments,” Eiche recalls of learning about the Quest for the first time. “So to be perfectly honest, we were like ‘Oh, this is another experiment. That’s going to be very expensive. It’s great. We’re really happy that they’re pushing in this direction because we think that’s what [VR] is going to be.’ But I think Devin even said we’re still five years out, this is just them monkeying around with some experiment.”
Reimer specifically believed 6DOF tracking on a mobile headset within this timeframe was a pretty unrealistic expectation. But, once Owlchemy had a clearer view of where Meta (then Facebook) was heading with Quest, it knew it had to change gear. The pair wanted Job Simulator on Quest as soon as possible and at the same level of fidelity you could experience on other platforms. No small order, as any Quest developer will tell you, but the developer’s work porting to PSVR in the past helped them cram it in, with Vacation Simulator following soon after.
Cosmonious, as I learned in an interview last month, was another tricky task. In fact, the team nearly cut the paint system it had implemented into the game. Nonetheless, all three of Owlchemy’s original games are now running on Quest and ready to introduce new players to VR.
So, where does Owlchemy go from here?
The Future
“The next thing that we’re seeing going forward is hand tracking,” Reimer says with confidence. “We are all-in on that. I’m treating it very much like the early days when we were like, ‘No, Job Simulator is going to be two tracked controllers’ and some platforms that I will not name said, ‘No, that’s got to work with a [gamepad] controller.'”
This is a bullish perspective on a method of input that’s still finding its, well, hands. Still, big advances in hand tracking are being made seemingly by the month; Meta just updated its hand tracking solution on Quest 2 and its Project Cambria headset could stand to improve things further still. Reimer and Eiche, meanwhile, aren’t ready to confirm that their next game will be hand tracking-only just yet (the pair say they’re still in R&D for what’s next), but the Owlchemy team already uses the technology in its own workflows. If it does go in that direction then they’ll be figuring out what’s best for the control scheme all over again.
“We’re not going to do karate Beat Saber,” Eiche jokes.
But what about the haptics of physical controller buttons?
“There’s always going to be a place for controls, right?” Reimer replies. “Because just there’s always a place for kind of the flat games, there’s always going to be a group. We still use a mouse. We have touch screens and I’m sitting in front of two monitors and still typing on a keyboard and a mouse. So that’s not going away, but I think what we’re trying to focus on is like the extreme mainstream adoption area.”
“We need to continue to engage the mass [market]. To make sure this stuff is working for everyone. Because we are all going to be using VR at some point here in the not too distant future.”
Job Simulator, Rick and Morty: Virtual-Rickality, Vacation Simulator, what do all these virtual reality (VR) videogames have in common? Well, Owlchemy Labs for one but the other is the child-like gameplay that each one has. Like a five-year-old trying to lend a hand when you’re baking, all they want to do is get their hands in the bowl and squidge batter through their fingers (or fling flour around the place). That’s the essence of Cosmonious High, hands-on fun-filled VR with all sorts of hidden delights.
To say that Cosmonious High is aesthetically in your face is an understatement, it’s visually the most striking VR title Owlchemy Labs has ever created. Apart from the very odd black item here and there, the pallet range is entirely in the vivid spectrum with lashings of light blues, oranges, reds, yellows and so many more. This flamboyant colour range makes even more sense as you get further into the videogame mixing up all sorts of liquids to create new concoctions as well as unleashing your inner painter.
Cosmonious High is built around the premise that you’re the new kid, who’s crash-landed into the school on your first day. This being an interstellar school you’re a very special alien, one who can gain abilities as required at a critical time. So when things start to go a little haywire in class (and they will) you’ll suddenly gain a new skill that can be shot from your hands. Unleash a fountain of water, for example, set things on fire, freeze them if you so please or why not make an item tiny or huge. There are eight abilities to discover all of which have their practical uses around the school.
This being an Owlchemy Lab’s title there’s plenty to do. Not only do you have classes to attend – where those new abilities are unlocked – but there are extra credit challenges to complete, students to help, random blobs to find and a school to fix. Yes, the school is falling apart so you need to put out fires, plug leaks and fix electrical systems to get things back in order; essentially busywork.
Those credits are how you unlock more of Cosmonious High, where you’ll find chemistry labs, the art school, astronomy, the sports hall and more; all your usual school stuff. If you’ve played any of the aforementioned videogames then you’ll know almost everything is interactive in some way. Even down to the smallest of details where particular substances interact with one another showcases the level of technical achievement that’s gone into this seemingly childish game.
Take water for example. This is the very first ability you can use, firing jets out your palms to extinguish flames. Find the paint pot and dip your hands in, you can now literally paint any surface in a multitude of colours that’ll blend on their own. Want rid, switch back to water and you can clean up, watching the liquid run down the walls is such an impressive feat considering this is all on Quest 2.
I was also happy to see Owlchemy Labs improve the ability selection function from my initial preview. Previously it was really fiddly to press the back of my hand to activate the selection wheel. Now, no such issue, easily being able to alternate powers on each hand without worrying about smacking the controllers together.
There are a lot of other good ideas employed in Cosmonious High that aid user interaction. Simple things from waving at characters to draw their attention and start a conversation. You can’t talk but you can pull a speech bubble from your mouth with a bunch of what are essentially emojis, where you can encourage a talking point or express how you feel about a particular question posed. This extends to accessibility as well, you can play seated or standing, flicking a switch in your backpack to activate the shorter mode. Or the fact that the only locomotion system is teleportation and snap rotation, making for a very comfortable experience that’s very light on options.
And that’s kind of where Cosmonious High begins to lose its sparkle, particularly if you’re a more experienced player. I’m all for as many accessibility and comfort options as a developer can squeeze in, however, I’ve got to a point – as I’m sure many of you have – in my VR gaming experience where I find teleportation immersion-breaking and just too damn finicky when all I want is to walk around. It feels antiquated to only have this option and gives the impression that the aim is to cater for new players only.
This also seems to be the case in the fact that Cosmonious High offers no challenge whatsoever. Without breaking a sweat you’ll probably be through the main campaign in around five hours, and as mentioned, there’s plenty to keep your hands busy solving little puzzles here and there. Yet it gives the impression of a puzzle game without any truly solid puzzles. Almost as if Owlchemy wants to cater to the pre-teen market when Meta itself doesn’t advise children under 13 using the headset.
Cosmonious High is Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory in VR, with a myriad assortment of sounds, colours and stuff to stick your finger in. It’s technically solid as I’d expect from a developer so well versed in VR with diverse characters and a deep, organic sandbox world to be entertained by. But it sticks to a very well-oiled system of simple task completion with the complexity never raising high enough to satisfy mature VR players. Cosmonious High provides just the right flavour of gameplay for younger players or those new to the VR scene looking to learn how interactive these titles can be. If you played Job Simulator at the original launch then you may want to look elsewhere.
Lots to cover on this week’s VR Gamescast: competing city building games get competing release dates, plus reviews of Moss: Book II & Cosmonious High!
Jamie and I are back on the headset mics again for another episode of the VR Gamescast, with a bunch of news to cover this week. First off, we talked about the second annual Meta Quest Gaming Showcase, which is set to take place on April 20. A few games are confirmed already, but what else are we hoping to see?
Plus, two upcoming games — which were already competing in the same genre on Quest — now have competing release dates! City building titles Little Cities and Cities VR both announced release dates this week, and they’ll launch within a week of each other. Jamie and I break down why this might be, and how we hope either game will differentiate itself from the other.
Last but not least on the news front, Pistol Whip developers Cloudhead Games confirm they’re working on a new AAA VR game. Jamie has a few ideas on what to expect and what he’d like to see.
In terms of hands-on and impressions, it was a big week for Jamie who played through both Cosmonious High and Moss: Book II. There’s some good things about both titles, but not without some caveats — tune in to the full episode to learn more.
The VR Gamescast goes live every Thursday. Got any questions for next week’s show? Playing something that you’re dying to tell us about? Let us know in the comments below!
Cosmonious High is another excellent adventure for VR newcomers with a rich, playful world. But those looking for a deeper experience will be left wanting. Read on for our Cosmonious High review.
Cosmonious High would be an amazing pack-in game for a VR headset. Like Job and Vacation Simulator before it, it’s a wonderfully vibrant experience filled with rewarding interactions, complex systems and lovable characters that efficiently showcases the strengths of the medium.
But, if you’ve already graduated from one of developer Owlchemy Labs’ older games and are looking for a deeper gameplay experience, then Cosmonious High might not be for you.
Like Vacation Simulator before it, Cosmonious High sees you completing missions and side-objectives, swapping the sunny island locations for the titular sci-fi school where you play as a new student on their first day. As you arrive the overruling AI system goes haywire and, with the teachers either too busy or outright unwilling to save the day, you and your newfound friends — a cast of plucky misfits and dramatics — step in to fix things up.
To do this, you’ll utilize some newfound superpowers and earn credits, which are your rewards that unlock more areas of the school. They’re given out for completing tasks set by teachers and classmates, as well as taking part in other activities around the school. These objectives often boil down to minigames, some of which borrow heavily from past Owlchemy titles.
Cosmonious High Review – The Facts
Platforms: Quest 2, SteamVR Release Date: March 31 Price: TBA
There’s another set of cooking objectives like those in Job Simulator, for example, and some of Vacation Simulator’s artistic tools find a new home here too. If you’re new to VR, then these refined versions of past hits will be a joy to discover, but anyone that’s already played through Job and Vacation Simulator will likely find this to be a case of diminishing returns.
On the one hand, this isn’t a big problem. Owlchemy’s mission is to make games that are as welcoming as possible to new VR users and, at a time where Quest 2 is selling so strongly, there’s never been more people to welcome. You could easily swap Job Simulator or Vacation Simulator out of a ‘VR 101’ pack and replace it with this latest beginner’s course.
But, on the flipside, Cosmonious is missing the challenge and gameplay design that would really satisfy those that have been with VR since the days of Job Simulator. And that’s a shame, because it doesn’t have to be a case of catering to one or the other. Cosmonious has more than enough ingredients for an innovative and exciting adventure, but it never pushes them as far as they can go. Super Mario games are universal in their appeal because they expertly onboard people new to games, whilst also engaging and challenging experienced players with later levels that unlock coveted rewards, like Green Stars. Cosmonious feels like it’s missing its own Green Stars.
Take the new superpowers, for example. On the surface, they’re mostly self-explanatory; the resize powers lets you supersize anything from coffee mugs to cafeteria snacks, whilst fire can melt away ice and water can in turn drown out fire. But you’ll soon discover a set of systems all playing together at once. Take water in one hand, fire it through a stream of ice from the other and you’ll create ice cubes that land and convincingly scatter about the floor. In one class you can create liquids that change the fundamental properties of objects and characters, then combine them with the water power to shoot jets of helium that make teachers talk in squeaky voices. Every area in the game (give or take about 15 separate rooms you’ll revisit time and again) is filled with new items to discover and characters to meet, which often means new ways to apply your powers, too.
But, while the story missions certainly have moments of ingenuity, it’s almost always up to you to dig for Cosmonious High’s most surprising and impressive features. Most of the core progression in the game only requires you to utilize its powers in the most rudimentary and familiar of ways: scale down obstacles to reveal hidden passages, put out fires with water or master telekinesis to grab items from afar. But each ability has the potential to be used in far more innovative ways. You have the ability to resize your hands to hilarious effect or even expand your classmate’s heads, but there’s never any actual application for it in the game. The property-altering liquids have literal gallons of possibilities, from flattening objects to slip them through cracks or covering everything in sticky paste so they root to the spot, but you’ll forget they even exist once you’ve left that classroom.
It’s not just the powers that go underutilized. There’s an entire working organ piano in the back of the music class, but having finished the story and gained 85 of the 100 credits up for grabs, I’ve never once had to properly interact with it. A lot of the game’s credits are also locked behind designing posters using a stamp machine, serving up ‘mystery meals’ to hungry students, or drawing and painting with the water and crystal tools. In these instances, you can put in as much or as little work as you want and the end result is the same, whether you fire a single splat of paint and submit your creation or spend hours playing Picasso, you get the same point at the end. You could chop, fry and smother a bunch of ingredients in sauce before sandwiching them between two pieces of bread and handing them to an unfortunate teacher for lunch, but you’ll get the exact same reward if you simply grab an apple from the fridge and pass it to them.
There is the potential to be inventive with your solutions. I found myself unashamedly proud when, before obtaining the fire power, I discovered an item I needed had been frozen in ice. I backtracked to the laboratory, fired up a beaker of hot water and then poured it over. Rather than waiting to do what you might think is the “correct” thing, I was able to sequence break the game in some small way because the world reacts as you’d expect, and not in service to the game’s mechanics.
Another task, meanwhile, has you waving a conductor baton in the air as the school choir harps their way through the tune. The first time I did this I thought my role was entirely superficial and that the song was progressing regardless of my arm-waving. It wasn’t until later that I realized the choir was holding every note until a sudden change in direction of the baton signaled them to move on to the next. Suddenly I had a reason to unearth the expressive beauty that’s at the heart of so many of the game’s activities.
Not everything gets a consistent reaction (and it’s a little weird that encasing a teacher in fire doesn’t raise so much as an “ouch”), but you’ll be constantly impressed by the sheer amount of these happy accidents and easter eggs awaiting you in Cosmonious if you get your hands dirty with its systems. I just wish the game made that exploration an essential element of progression. Again, if you’re discovering VR for the first time, then this astonishing level of interaction is going to feel revelatory, and you definitely shouldn’t skip on Cosmonious High as an incredible means of familiarizing yourself with the platform. But there’s a missed opportunity to expand on these foundations; why not implement objectives that require you to bounce items between walls with the appropriate liquid or craft icy racecourses to slip and slide across?
And that stings, because no one builds worlds like Owlchemy. Almost every inch of Cosmonious High is a testament to its immersive, comfort-first design philosophy, with impeccably slick interactions like swiping through instructions on tablet-style notepads. The game is virtually free of awkward VR jank and nausea (although, ironically, one mission in which you move a planetarium projector around nearly saw me completely lose my balance as the world shifted around me) and it’s an almost unbelievable technical achievement on Quest, where fluids convincingly slosh from one side of a beaker to the other and objects have their properties altered right before your eyes. Your classmates are a real achievement, too, ready to react to your every interaction from chucking them items from across the room to spraying them with water. The emoji-based dialogue system isn’t quite the same success story, as it often left me confused as to if I was communicating even just a message of encouragement or actually disagreeing with someone.
Cosmonious High Review – Final Impressions
Cosmonious High is a tricky one. It’s a game for those still finding their feet in VR; Owlchemy’s latest — and greatest — iteration on how best to introduce newcomers to the medium. There’s a vibrant and diverse cast of characters to talk to, entertaining, if familiar, superpowers to experiment with, and a richly-detailed world that hides a huge amount of secrets and easter eggs. It’s so good, in fact, that you wish there was more here for the people that have long since graduated from introductory VR experiences – those that played Job Simulator six years ago and have stuck with VR ever since.
Instead there’s another run through the Owlchemy staples, from cooking to painting, with a some of new ideas thrown in. And, for all the complexity of its emergent systems, Cosmonious never really challenges or pushes you with its core story, instead hoping you’ll discover its deeper interactions as if by chance. Take the time to dive into that sandbox and you’ll be amazed by just how far you can push its mechanics and frustrated that they don’t take center stage in the core campaign.
In other words, Cosmonious High is another fantastic place to start for VR newcomers but, four games in, maybe it’s time Owlchemy started to think about loosening those training wheels a little.
UploadVR recently changed its review guidelines, and this is one of our new unlabelled review categories. You can read more about our review guidelines here.
This review was conducted on the Meta Quest 2 version of the game. What did you make of our Cosmonious High review? Let us know in the comments below!
Google’s VR studio Owlchemy Labs is back with its signature ‘play with everything’ approach to VR in Cosmonious High. As a student in an alien high school you’ll discover a bevy of fun powers and objects to play with. After graduating from Vacation Simulator, does the studio’s next game get a perfect grade? Find out in our full review of Cosmonious High.
Cosmonious High Details:
Available On: Quest 2 (not on Quest 1), SteamVR Release Date: March 31st, 2022 Developer: Owlchemy Labs Reviewed On: Quest 2
Gameplay
Although the game diverges in setting and structure from Owlchemy Labs’ prior games—Job Simulator (2016) & Vacation Simulator (2019)—Cosmonious High shares lots in common with the Simulator series. In particular, Cosmonious High is densely packed with all kinds of interactive items that cohesively respond to the rules laid out in the world, creating a canvas for experimentation.
In Cosmonious High you take on the role of a Prismi, a novel alien creature which can manifest various powers—like the ability to shoot water, wind, or fire from you hands. The entire game takes place on your first day of school where things go a bit awry and it’s up to you to fix them.
Beyond just fixing what’s broken, you’ll step into unique classrooms where you’ll learn how the world works, complete assignments, and acquire new powers as you go. Throughout, you’ll be prompted to experiment with the rules of the world and the items around you.
Through ‘assignments’ in each classroom you’ll interact with the game’s tight-knit cast of alien characters and complete various tasks to the satisfaction of your teachers.
Take Chemosophy class, for instance, where players mix and heat various liquids to discover new compounds which do interesting things. Bouncium, for example, can be poured on pretty much any object in the game to make it bouncy. Same goes for Stickium, which causes items to clump together into a big sticky ball. And from there the game encourages you to continue experimenting and exploring by combining different compounds to see what else you can come up with.
And that’s the essence of Cosmonious High—experimenting with the rules of the world to see what what happens. You’ll need some natural curiosity to get the most out of the game.
And the fun part is that something almost always happens. The depth of interactions on display between the player and the world (including the characters), goes far beyond what’s seen anywhere else in VR.
Your powers, for instance, seem to interact with nearly everything. You can use your water spray to push items around or wash them off after painting them. You can use your ice power to freeze objects and then use your fire power to melt them. At one point you’ll get a ‘thought reading’ power which allows you to target pretty much anyone or anything in the entire game and you’ll get a thought bubble which tells you what it’s thinking.
The world of Cosmonious High is very good about letting the player do things that seem logical given the established rules. For instance, I came across a small puzzle which required that I light a fuse on fire. At this point in the game I hadn’t acquired the fire power, however I had smuggled a Bunsen burner out of Chemosophy (by stashing it in my backpack); to my delight, the game let me use the Bunsen burner to light the fuse and complete the power, rather than making me wait to get the fire power later in the game.
But Cosmonious High’s gameplay almost never rises above ‘guided sandbox’. You’re given a world full of interesting items and logical mechanics, but what you’re asked to do with them is really never that fun or challenging. There’s rarely a satisfying climax where you put everything you’ve learned to the test—a strange choice for a game designed around a ‘school’—or where all the mechanics come together in ways that make them feel especially synergistic. For the most part you’re just listening to simple instructions and interacting with the game’s characters.
While the game’s characters are well designed, differentiated, and as interactive as the rest of the environment, their overtly chipper attitude and banal conflicts really feel like the kind of thing you’d find in a kids show.
In fact, Cosmonious High overall feels like a game designed for children. The world as portrayed feels like a pre-teen’s notion of what a fantasy high school could be like. And while there’s no problem with games for kids, it’s an odd audience to target considering the game’s key platform, Quest 2, is explicitly for kids 13 and older. When I imagine an actual high-schooler playing Cosmonious High I envision a lot of eye rolling.
And I think it’s important to here to make the distinction between ‘family friendly’ and ‘made for children’. I’d call a movie like Finding Nemo ‘family friendly’; while it’s appropriate for kids, adults can enjoy it just as well. Cosmonious High, on the other hand, feels more ‘made for children’ than not—more so than the ‘family friendly’ Job Simulator & Vacation Simulator.
For me (since I’m not… ya know, 13) this is a shame because Cosmonious High is a brilliant game from a technical standpoint. It’s visually sharp with excellent art direction, voice acting, character designs, interactivity, affordances, and ridiculous attention to detail. And it runs great on Quest 2, even with a heavy emphasis on heaps of physics items. It’s really just missing more solid gameplay to support the sandbox and task-completion elements, while being relatable to a more general audience.
It took me around six hours to complete Cosmonious High, having done about 80% of the game’s optional content. Optional content comes largely in the form of collectibles and optional tasks. There’s trading cards to find, broken lights & pipes to fix, stamps to collect, and Blebs to discover.
Blebs are downright adorable spherical critters that you can find throughout the school. For as damn cute as they are, I was sad to find they didn’t really serve any purpose other than being unbearably endearing.
Immersion
Image courtesy Owlchemy Labs
Cosmonious High is full of rich interactivity the likes of which is rarely seen elsewhere in VR. Rather than traveling across distant but sparse lands, the game packs a smaller area to the brim with things to touch, see, and play with. Food can be eaten, containers can be filled with liquid, paint can coat surfaces, instruments can be played… in multiple ways.
At one point in Chemosophy class, I learned how to make the game’s version of coffee, which then allowed me to dispense it from a machine that could dispense any of the compounds I’d discovered so far. After filling a beaker with it I wondered if I could simply lean down and drink it straight from the spout. Sure enough I could! Just one of a thousand little interactive details the folks at Owlchemy had the foresight to include.
Interactivity really is the name of the game; if it looks like you can touch it, you almost certainly can.
And it isn’t just the items. Characters are charmingly reactive too. Spray water at them and they’ll spit it back at you. Try to freeze them and they’ll react physically and with dialogue. Throw something to them and they’ll catch it. You can even give them a first bump or a high-five.
You can also talk to characters in a simple but effective way. When you approach one, reach for your mouth and you’ll pull out a bubble filled with icons representing your dialogue choices.
And what school is complete without a backpack? Reach behind you and pull out your backpack which conveniently stores your inventory, lists of collectibles, and even a camera which you can use to take in-game pictures (which also enter into gameplay). The backpack also lets you store items to take them between locations.
Cosmonious High uses a Half-Life: Alyx-like force pull system where you can target distant objects with your outstretched hand, grip to select, then pull to launch the object into your hand. It doesn’t feel quite as refined as the Alyx implementation, but it works pretty darn well and it remains my favorite variation of force-pull to date.
Comfort
Image courtesy Owlchemy Labs
Cosmonious High supports only teleport movement and snap-turning and is exceptionally considerate of comfort throughout. I can’t recall a single moment during gameplay where the game itself did anything that made me feel dizzy or disoriented. While this is a bummer for the ‘only smooth movement’ crowd, moving itself isn’t a huge part of the gameplay (most of the time you’re at a station doing things with your hands), so this might not be as detrimental to the experience as you might think.
The game has no qualms about letting you push things beyond the performance limit on Quest 2 which can seriously tank the framerate to unplayable (and uncomfortable levels).
While nothing in the game that I was ever prompted to do would reach that point, those with some patience can easily spawn more objects than the game can reasonably handle.
Luckily there’s plenty of trash cans spread throughout which you can use to demolish any performance-hogging creations and get right back up to speed.
Cosmonious High’ Comfort Settings – March 31st, 2022
Turning
Artificial turning
Smooth-turn
Snap-turn
Adjustable increments
Movement
Artificial movement
Smooth-move
Teleport-move
Blinders
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages
English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean
Cosmonious High sees you travel back to school to re-educate yourself in the realm of VR. But what’s a school without classmates?
Today on Upload Access we’re meeting the cast of Owlchemy’s newest VR game. We’ve got detailed rundowns of all the new friends you can expect to work with during class and hang out with as you move between the halls. Read on for exclusive character bios for your new classmates.
Fren
Fren hails from the Bipid homeworld, Boptune. The chaos at Cosmonious High might be intense, but so is a homeship packed with a dozen or so siblings. She can handle the heat of the hottest sauces and is the Fren-liest kid in school!
Blort
Blort’s a fun-loving flan who will happily help you through Cosmonious High: from still lifes in Visualetics to singing in Auditoriology. But their true love is the Sports Dome… or at least, that’s where he hangs out…
Speks
Blipping into Cosmonious High, we have Speks, a pandimensional Trisk! Speks is hyper, friendly, forgetful, fun-loving, fated to save the world, and did I say ‘friendly’ already? When she’s not doing homework or fending off the Doomfather, she’s happy to help!
Honk
Meet the Captain of the Cosmo Comets! Sprinting into our hearts, we have Honk: Cosmonious High’s star planetballer! Don’t let his great arms and stunning flame-like hair intimidate you. Honk is the sweetest jock that ever chucked a planetball through a hoop.
Gleg
Meet Gleg, our resident lovable nihilist. There’s no one better for a haigoo or an existential crisis. Gleg doesn’t really like anything, but if it means you’ll leave him alone then he likes dronecore and solitude…
Li Tahn
Here’s Li Tahn, bringing us artistic chill vibes… If you’re looking for her, check the Visualetics classroom. Grab a cup of coffeen and settle in for a chat about the blop art movement. It’s hard to phase Li Tahn, which makes her a calm center in the chaos at Cosmo High.
Penk
Your class president is present to make sure your first day is perfect! Penk is a model student with strong color coordination skills, and the biggest UltraViolett stan at Cosmo High.
Zanesha
Zanesha enjoys making up stories, not being in class, leading the occasional student revolution and pretending she’s a detective. She may or may not have a lair. With her around, it’s never just an ordinary day at alien space school.
Xip
If you want to know about blebs, then Xip is your Trisk! They know everything there is to know about these little cuties – from blebanas to blebbles to blattés! Annnnd they know how to get out of playing planetball without Coach Leti noticing.
Oog
This flan without a plan is running for class president. Known for a flatulent sense of humor, they are the main purveyor of pranks at Cosmo High. Just don’t ask anyone about the Oogcident…
Prax
Prax is the obvious choice for Cosmonious High’s next class president. He’s organized, detail-oriented, and disapproves of chaos in all forms. You’ll find him in class or running a bake sale, stocked with cookies made by his dads.
Jalam
Last, but certainly not least, is Jalam! Jalam’s a diamond ranked Pirates of the Gooniverse player, looking for a nemesis to make her life at Cosmo High remotely interesting. Her sarcastic exterior hides a heart of gold, but… don’t tell her we said so.
Cosmonious High is out on Quest 2 and PC VR on March 31. We’ve got plenty of coverage of the upcoming VR game as part of Upload Access, and check back next week when we discuss the history of Owlchemy Labs.
March has been a great month for virtual reality (VR) gaming and this final week is no different, with highly anticipated sequels and big IPs making an appearance. So if you’re looking for videogames to spend that hard-earned money on, look no further.
Now There Be Goblins – Shocktopus Games
First up is the Early Access tower defense videogame Now There Be Goblins, where you have to, unsurprisingly, deal with a few rampaging goblins. Build up your defenses with a selection of powerful structures, place traps and utilise the interactive environment to your advantage. Then there’s always your hammer, allowing you to unleash some melee carnage upon your enemies. Developer Shocktopus Games expects Now There Be Goblins to be in EA for up to a year, adding more levels, enemies and more in that time.
The big IP of the week comes from Meta4 Interactive in the form of Transformers Beyond Reality, letting PS VR and PlayStation VR players jump into the Hasbro universe. An arcade-style first-person shooter (FPS), in Transformers Beyond Reality you play an Autobot fighting the Decepticons to help save both Earth and Cybertron. And in a nod to the franchise’s history, the character designs are in keeping with the original toy and cartoon aesthetics.
Supported platform(s): PlayStation VR and SteamVR
Launch date: 31st March
Cosmonious High – Owlchemy Lab
Owlchemy Labs, the studio behind some of the most well known VR titles including Job Simulator, returns with another outrageous experience, Cosmonious High. With all the hands-on, zany gameplay you’d expect from the team,this time around you’re the new kid at a colourful intergalactic high school. Here you can learn, paint, make new friends and cause a little chaos, whilst unlocking new abilities such as firing water from your hands to help fix and clean the school.
If most PlayStation VR owners don’t buy this next week gmw3 will be surprised, as the eagerly awaited sequel to 2018’s Moss arrives as a platform exclusive. The little mouse that can, Quill, is back out on another adventure aided by you, her ghostly companion. This time around she’s got new puzzles to solve, enemies to fight and tricks up her sleeve including a new hammer. There are also new mechanics to get you more involved in the world, grabbing vines to create new paths for example. You don’t even need to have played the original, the story does continue but it’s all recapped for players new to the series.
Supported platform(s): PlayStation VR
Launch date: 31st March
Mythic Defender – Hexware Studio
It’s been a while since gmw3 featured a VR tower defense game on The VR Drop and this week there are two! The second is from Hexware Studio with Mythic Defender – it does arrive on the worst date possible – where you battle mythological creatures by placing those all-important towers and then grabbing your trusty bow to ensure your kingdom remains safe.
This week on the VR Gamescast we’re talking about Moss: Book 2, Virtual Virtual Reality 2 and more.
After a short break, Jamie and Harry are back to round up the latest VR news and reviews. Headlining this week is the reveal that Moss: Book 2 is coming to PSVR 2 on March 31! Jamie’s seen an extended demo of the game – what does he make of it? And why are so many VR games announcing their release dates just weeks before they arrive?
Elsewhere, Harry returns to Virtual Virtual Reality 2, a game we’d previously only reviewed in part due to bugs. Now that there’s been a few patches, is the experience much better? And what’s up with VR storytelling? Why is it so much harder to do than traditional gaming and films? We ponder those questions as we also look over what went wrong with Hitchhiker VR.
There’s much more where that came from. We talk about our hands-on experience with Owlchemy Labs’ Cosmonious High and if the developer’s strict approach to immersion is the right way to go. We also dive into the PlayStation Store charts where Beat Saber remains king, outselling even new titles like Zenith. With PSVR nearing the end of its life, is Beat Saber’s position at the top truly cemented?
And, finally, we take a trip back to Bad Metaverse Watch. In this edition: Snoop Dogg NFTs. Need we say more?
The VR Gamescast goes live every Thursday. Got any questions for next week’s show? Let us know in the comments below!
Sprinting into our hearts, we have Honk: Cosmonious High’s star planetballer! Don’t let his great arms and stunning flame-like hair intimidate you. Honk is the sweetest jock that ever chucked a planetball through a hoop.
If you’re looking for her, check the Visualetics classroom. Grab a cup of coffeen and settle in for a chat about the blop art movement. It’s hard to phase Li Tahn, which makes her a calm center in the chaos at Cosmo High.
