Disney Animation Studios today released Myth: A Frozen Tale, its first publicly released VR short film, based on the Frozen franchise.
Myth: A Frozen Tale debuted with the release of Frozen 2 last year as Disney’s latest VR short film, but it’s just now becoming publicly available for the first time on Oculus Quest.
Myth is directed by Disney’s Jeff Gibson, who also directed Disney’s first VR short film, Cycles. In an Oculus blog post, Gibson explains what viewers can expect in Myth:
Audiences can expect to start in the world of Frozen with a family of Arendelle as they settle in for a bedtime story about the elemental spirits. You’re then transported into the enchanted forest where this particular Myth unfolds around you. This world is like a pop-up book, designed by Brittney Lee, who is well-versed in the design language of Frozen. You’ll see an intricate balance of CG, hand-drawn animation, and effects bring this unique world to life.
Myth is truly a short film, with a runtime of just eight minutes, and has an appropriately small price of $3. It includes the voicework of Evan Rachel Wood, who played Queen Iduna in Frozen 2 (and it’s recommend to have seen that film before you see Myth).
Image courtesy Disney
Though the film is only available on Quest today, it seems there might be hope for a Rift release too. Gibson revealed in the Oculus blog post that Myth debuted as a Rift experience, but the team crunched it down to work within the constraints of Quest’s lower power processing.
Myth is Disney Animation’s first publicly released VR short film, though not the company’s first foray into VR. Beyond the aforementioned Cycles, Disney released a handful of early 360 experiences bundled together in the Disney Movies VR app back in 2017, and the more ambitious Pixar Coco VR experience in 2018 (which even supported co-op with other players). In 2019 the company debuted another VR short film, A Kite’s Tale, directed by the studio’s Bruce Wright, though the latter hasn’t been publicly released.
Fast Travel Games, the studio behind Apex Construct (2018) and Budget Cuts 2 (2019), today announced its next VR project, a horror game based in the ‘World of Darkness’ universe called Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife.
Fans of the World of Darkness universe and its many tabletop role-playing games are no doubt familiar with Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife is said to follow in the footsteps of its 1994-era tabletop RPG namesake by placing you in the modern Barclay Mansion and putting you in the ghostly shoes of a Wraith who unravels the mysteries “that await beyond the Shroud.”
Erik Odeldahl, Creative Director at Fast Travel Games, says that horror games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation have influenced the studio to create a similar “narrative-driven, exploration-focused” horror title in the World of Darkness universe.
The game, which doesn’t have a release date yet, is slated to arrive on “all major VR platforms,” Fast Travel says.
A gameplay reveal and details are said to arrive during the Gamescom Now, which starts August 27th. Hopefully we’ll be getting a release date then too.
Schell Games, the studio behind I Expect You To Die (2016), today announced the critically-acclaimed VR spy game has generated over $2 million in revenue on the Oculus Quest platform alone.
This, the studio says, was earned through sales of nearly 100,000 copies on Quest, making it one of the 10+ VR games to break the $2 million revenue mark on the platform, joining games such as Pistol Whip and Moss.
I Expect You To Die takes players through Bond-style missions, all of which include the danger of immediate death when its puzzling contraptions kill you in fun and interesting ways. It’s a fun, well-built game, although that’s not the only reason for its on-going success.
Since its initial launch on PSVR and Rift in 2016, and later support for other SteamVR headsets and Quest, the game has benefited from a number of free updates that have added new missions and a subsequent continuation the story of your ongoing infiltration into the various lairs of the evil Dr. Zor. Itwas also one of the first to celebrate success as an early VR entrant, earning in 2018 over $3 million in revenue across all platforms.
“We are thrilled to have hit this milestone with I Expect You To Die, especially when in the company of other great games like Moss and Pistol Whip,” said Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games. “These numbers indicate we are right on the cusp of the Oculus Quest becoming the most popular VR system, and in fact, becoming a mass market phenomenon. I think the Quest will set the standard for consumer VR.”
I Expect You To Die is available on Steam (Vive, Rift, Index), Viveport (Vive, Rift, Index), the Oculus Store (Rift, Quest), and the PlayStation Store (PSVR).
Gadgeteer, the physics-based VR puzzler inspired by the whimsical machines of Rube Goldberg, is slated to get the biggest update since its launch into Earl Access last year.
The update is said to include a number of new devices such as a new color toolhead with 60+ colors to choose from, and two new gadgets, the Start and End Cube, which lets you remotely start and stop your contraptions.
The update will be available starting June 11th on all supported platforms including Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, Valve Index, HTC Vive, and Windows VR headsets. Another update, slated for release in August, is said to let users upload and share puzzles in an online sharing feature.
Road to VR contributor Gabriel Moss got a chance to play Gadgeteer in our Early Access review, saying it’s both “a fantastic Rube Goldberg-style reaction machine builder and, at its most gripping moments, a true example of VR Presence—where the act of building and testing a machine becomes so engaging that you forget you’re playing with code instead of physical toy dominos.”
Developing studio Metanaut also released a new trailer highlighting a machine that wasn’t possible to build before, making use of tracks, rails, and catapults to create one of the hottest non-sport sports to come to 2020: marble racing.
To celebrate the one year anniversary of the release of Quest and Rift S, Oculus is hosting a sale on heap of games for both headsets, including some Quest bundles with top titles.
Oculus has kicked off its anniversary sale which runs through May 25th, 11:59 PM PT (your local time here).
Image courtesy Oculus
On the Quest side, the company is offering three bundles, a rotating daily deal, and discounts on 15 individual titles. Here’s the bundle breakdown and today’s daily deal (see everything on sale here):
Bundle prices are automatically adjusted to account for games that you already own.
Image courtesy Oculus
On the Rift side, the anniversary sale has brought discounts on 166 titles (and there may be more to come throughout the sale). Check out all the Rift games on sale; here’s a handful that caught our eye:
Supernatural (2020), the VR fitness app for Oculus Quest, kicked off its subscription service late last month, offering up a fun and engaging gameified fitness routine for $19 per month. Now the developers Within have included an annual subscription option to lower the cost of entry.
From now until May 31st, would-be subscribers will be able to plonk down $149 for 12 months of access to Supernatural, which effectively brings the price down to $12.42 per month.
Starting June 1st, the annual subscription price goes up to $199 (~$16.60 per month), although if you lock in before that date you’ll be able to keep the $149 price moving forward.
The $19 per-month tier will still exist, however if you’re looking to commit to the game long-term, you’ll be able to do it a bit cheaper overall.
In addition, Within is tossing out free sweat-proof silicone liners to new subscribers as long as supplies last.
We gave Supernaturala respectable [7.7/10] in our review for its highly polished visuals and engaging (if not well-tread) gameplay. Based on the same block-slashing concept as Beat Saber (2018), Supernatural differentiates itself by adding in extended workouts to popular music, which are guided by digitized personal trainers. Integrated fitness tracker support also allows you to include your heartbeat stats, making for a well-rounded way of tracking your fitness goals.
Supernatural offers a 30-day free trial, so whether you find its growing list of Beat Saber-style workouts an acceptable stand-in for the gym, or conversely not substantial enough, at least you have the freedom to try it out and find out for yourself.
Tetris Effect (2018) first released on PlayStation 4 and PSVR in late 2018, later coming to PC via the Epic Store, which included support for SteamVR headsets. Now the award-winning stacker puzzle game is available on Oculus Quest starting today.
Created by Tetsuya Mizuguchi and the team behind Rez Infinite and Lumines, Tetris Effect delivers some pretty familiar gameplay while at the same time surrounding the player with fully three-dimensional, reactive worlds.
Tetris Effect boasts 30+ stages and 10+ modes, where the so-called ‘Tetriminos’ pulse and dance to the beat, backgrounds change as you play, and a bevy of dynamic music molds around the player as you slip into a flow state.
With today’s release on Quest, a new feature is coming to the game as well, namely the all-new ‘Zone’ mechanic which lets players stop time (and Tetriminos) when you find yourself in a sticky situation.
Tetris Effect launches today on the Oculus Store for Quest, priced at $30.
The premise of Phantom: Covert Ops almost sounds ridiculous at first blush: you’re a special forces dude in a tactical kayak who is slinking around the waterways of an old Russian base. But don’t let the silinees of a tactical kayak fool you, this is actually a fundamentally compelling and immersive approach to a VR stealth game, but with one unfortunate conceit.
Phantom: Covert Ops is a game that’s played entirely from inside a kayak. And while that might sound strange at first, let me tell you, the whole thing feels incredibly immersive. Covert Ops is a seated game, and something about being seated and feeling like you’re gliding just over the top of the water feels (perhaps ironically) very grounding.
Your tactical kayak has mounted on it several tools and weapons, and as you see it constantly stretched out in front of you, it almost starts to feel like an extension of yourself right there in VR, bringing a sense of embodiment which is a key element of immersion.
On the left side you’ve got your kayak paddle which works pretty much exactly like you’d expect: alternating paddling on the left and right propels you forward, while paddling more on one side or the other turns you in the opposite direction. If you’ve ever kayaked or canoed before, it’s entirely second nature.
When you aren’t paddling, you’ll find an ammo pouch and night vision goggles sitting in front of you, a sniper rifle mounted on the right side, as well as a pistol on your chest and an SMG on your back. This makes up your trusty tool kit with which you’ll use to do all the usual stealth game stuff like sneaking through dark areas to avoid enemies, shooting out lights, causing distractions, and sabotaging the bad guys from the shadows.
Building the whole game around the kayak as a means of embodying the player, acting as their inventory, and moving them around the virtual world is an absolutely cool concept not seen anywhere else in VR. But there’s one conceit to this design which may limit the game’s audience, and that’s comfort.
Because you’re in a kayak, Phantom: Covert Ops is inherently built for smooth locomotion. That’s not an issue, at least for me; gliding along the water in mostly straight lines feels just fine. Unfortunately the kayak-based locomotion also brings with it smooth turning.
Smooth turning is when the player’s virtual perspective is continuously rotated. Most VR games employ ‘snap turning’ instead, which rotates the player’s view in large increments to avoid the perception of continuous turning. In the games that even support smooth turning, the option is never enabled by default because it makes lots of people nauseous, including me.
Unfortunately, smooth turning foundational to Covert Ops, and the developers don’t have plans for a snap turning equivalent. To be fair, a snap turning solution that makes sense in the kayak context doesn’t seem obvious to me, but requirement of smooth turning is a conceit it seems the game and its players will need to live with.
You could make the case that—if a VR game had to include smooth turning—Covert Ops is a best-case scenario. Because players don’t have control over their rotation with a joystick, they won’t be rotating nearly as much as they would in a standard FPS. Instead, rotation happens only when you paddle enough on one side of your kayak to turn, and levels have been clearly designed to minimize excessive rotation. Even so, it might get to you.
Image courtesy nDreams
In my preview of Covert Ops, played on a Rift S, I was able to play for about an hour at a time before feeling like I was reaching that dreaded threshold of pushing the comfort limit too far and paying for it with an hour of post-headset nausea. For the most part, gliding along the water in relatively straight lines felt just fine, and a little bit of turning here and there felt ok too. But it was the ‘sharp turn’ mechanic where I could really feel my brain saying “nah man, this isn’t cool.”
The sharp turn mechanic allows you to turn extra sharp by holding a button on your controller and paddling at the same time, causing your kayak to turn much sharper than normal. You don’t need to do this constantly, but every few minutes you might find yourself at a bend in the waterway that requires a sharp turn, or a rapidly approaching guard boat that you need to quickly divert from.
It’s clear that Phantom: Covert Ops‘s developer, nDreams, is aware that sharp turns are a comfort issue. The game does its best to help maintain comfort by bringing heavy peripheral blinders into view during sharper turns. Even so, it wasn’t enough to avoid that slow buildup of discomfort that eventually made me take off the headset before I otherwise would have.
But I’m with nDreams here—I can see why they have continued to pursue this design. The kayak concept is so cool and the execution seems really quite good. Players who know they can handle smooth turning with no problem should be excited for Phantom: Covert Ops. Those who struggle with smooth turning should be careful not to push themselves too far with the game. And for those who are very sensitive to smooth turning, this game simply may not be for you.
To nDreams’ credit… the primary issue here for someone like me (who is in the middle camp of ‘struggles with smooth turning’), is that I wanted to play the game in long stretches. If it was a 15 minute session here or there, the extent of the smooth turning might not be much to tolerate. But so far Phantom: Covert Ops has been a really unique and interesting VR game that I want to dive into and stay immersed in for meaningful stretches of time.
I’m still looking forward to Phantom: Covert Ops because of all the stuff it’s doing right so far, and I hope nDreams might able to find some solutions to improving smooth turning comfort ahead of the game’s June 25th release date on Rift and Quest.
There’s no better moment than now to find a reason to get up and moving, which is probably why acclaimed AR/VR studio Within launched its at-home VR fitness app Supernatural (2020). The gameified fitness app will get your heart pumping to the beat of a list of songs from popular artists, all while you have a digital personal trainer piped into your ears for encouragement. Is it worth the monthly $19 subscription price though? The short answer: not for me, but it could be for you.
Supernatural Details:
Developer: Within Available On:Oculus Quest Reviewed On: Quest Release Date: April 23rd, 2020 Price: $19 per month subscription, free 30-day trial
Gameplay
I didn’t realize at first why Within decided to release Supernatural only on Quest, but after the first few moments of going through setup phase, which recorded my height and taught me the basic moves, it became apparent to me that wire-free was the only way to go with Supernatural’s frenetic workouts.
Much like Beat Saber (2018), you’re tasked with hitting directional-based objects, which in the case of Supernatural are black and white orbs with a translucent cone to indicate which side of the orb you need to smash through, using with your matching black and white bats of course.
To get you moving around, you also have to fit through incoming glowing white triangles, forcing you to lunge left or right, or assume a standard squat position. Little tails coming from some orbs lead you to spin your whole body to a new position, giving you a gradual 360 spin around the room on a central axis. That last part, combined with the lunging and striking at the same time, would be super frustrating with a cable in the way, so the Quest-only approach makes a lot of sense here.
Since my gym has been closed for months now, and I’ve completely neglected my workout routine as a result, Supernatural proved to be a great all-around heart-pumping exercise to get me moving again, offering about the same level of activity that you might get from a step class. Although my Fitbit Charge HR2 couldn’t pair with the smartphone app (many fitness trackers do), recording it separately showed I was consistently hitting the ‘Fat Burning’ stage, and only sometimes dipping into ‘Cardio’ stage for my weight, height and age.
There are a handful of workouts right now (more are added every day), all of which are based on that orb-smashing, triangle-squatting concept. They do however vary in duration, difficulty, and coach. Workouts span anywhere from 12 to 26 minutes, and include several high-profile songs—almost too many to name. Suffice it to say that it’s not your mishmash of hip EDM titles like you’ll find outside of the DLC music packs on Beat Saber, but rather recognizable singles from across many musical genres.
In addition to workouts with set difficulties, there’s also a number of them with an automatic difficulty adjuster based on your ability, which at times kept me at the point of utter confusion with the amount of orbs to smash and triangles to fit inside. I would have liked to manually choose difficulty for these auto-difficulty workouts, but the studio has been adamant about throwing out a new workout every day since launch, making for a pretty wide selection for any level user.
Getting the high score isn’t just about the accuracy points either, not entirely. You’re also graded on power, which is combined in a composite power/accuracy score. Besides keeping track of your growing muscle memory of a track, this also keeps you from taking any shortcuts by wrist-waggling the controller, as you need good, smooth, powerful follow-through to get the highest power points.
Image courtesy Within
To be frank, I was expecting a lot more variety from the onset, maybe even some muscle specialization, stretching routines, and different style games to chew on. That, I feel, may be what makes or breaks Supernatural in the long run if it wants to keep subscribers on board. The game itself is very fun, and it nestles very easily into my Beat Saber skill set—you might call it the number one Beat Saber competitor based on its stark similarities to the genre-defying forebear.
Image courtesy Within
That said, I’ve been happily coasting on the free 30-day trial, and while I’ve been genuinely enjoying it so far, I just don’t know if now is the right time to commit to making Supernatural a core part of my fitness program. For $19 a month, which is a little under the price of a monthly subscription at the YMCA, I would expect a buffet of different fitness activities to keep me coming back for more.
I say this with the knowledge that most of humanity is locked in their houses right now, so I can see people signing up for Supernatural for a few months and forking over that monthly Andrew Jackson as a means of self-motivation to continue working out—and having a lot more fun doing it than spending 30 minutes on the elliptical while they’re at it. This leaves me a bit conflicted personally. You may find the value to price proposition enough to keep you returning every week, but I simply can’t when I already use my standard mix of Beat Saber, Knockout League, and Space Pirate Trainer to keep the blood from pooling in my butt cheeks.
The game’s developer Within is one of the best in the field when it comes to polish, and I expected no less going into Supernatural. Here, you’re treated to amazing 360 landscapes paired with near-photorealistic rendered foregrounds, making for a convincing illusion that you’re working out in a rice paddy at sunset, on the Icelandic tundra, or in the Scottish Highlands.
Everything in Supernatural looks like it sprung out of a science fiction film, as if it were some sort of fitness program you’d use while stuck on a deep space transport mission to Omicron Persei 8. That alone is a charming little slice of weirdness that you can only have in VR.
As far as immersion is concerned, hitting black and white orbs while you’re floating over an ocean is pretty abstract. One of the most immersive bits though is the individual coaches, who help ground the workout with a pre-workout chat, and then continue with disembodied suggestions, motivation, and most everything you’d expect from a personal trainer.
I say most everything because the coach’s dynamic dialogue doesn’t cover all aspects of what you might expect from a live instructor, who can actively correct your form, and make truly individual suggestions to your behavior. I have an old tennis elbow injury from overextending my arm too much in karate, so I know not to extend my arm too much now, or risk the aching pain returning. I wonder whether the virtual coach might actually encourage ‘bad form’, the enemy of all fitness instructors, with their implicit silence.
Comfort
Since fitness is the name of the game, and you’ll be making fast and powerful arm and leg movements, you really have to crank the Quest down on your head to make sure it’s stable enough on your noggin and not flopping around. If it isn’t tight, you may feel a bit woozy after having the virtual world move independently from your eyes at such regular and frenetic intervals.
Otherwise, besides the not-so-awesome ergonomics of the Quest and discomfort associated with getting sweat on the facial interface, Supernatural is a very comfortable experience overall.
Make sure to dress the part, use a washable VR cover, and move the couch and cat away from you, and you’ll be sweating to the oldies, beginner or advanced VR user alike.
The Under Presents is a genre-defying VR experience with a curious secret: from time to time some of its characters are puppeteered by real people, and if you’re lucky, you could be part of the show.
Created by Tender Claws, The Under Presents is a unique VR experience that mixes game and performance in mind-bending ways. Aside from interacting with past versions of yourself and the ability to control time, you’ll also come across a roster of mysterious characters which are at times live acted remotely by real people. Tender Claws recently revealed how this works in practice and its quite fascinating.
There’s a whole side of the game which is only seen by hand-picked actors. When donning their headset, a special interface allows them to select and customize a unique avatar. They also have the ability to move themselves and players, spawn items as props, and control the scale of objects. With these tools the actors jump into the game world and find players who get to experience a slice of immersive theater.
But how to find these moments as a player? Tender Claws says that through the month of May, players can jump into The Under Presents every Friday for two hours starting at 5PM (your local time here) for a chance to catch one of these fleeting performances.
The Under Presents is available on Oculus Rift & Quest and Steam.
