Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga review: Focus, Padawan
The massive galactic sandbox is fun to explore, but also lacks focus.
Moss: Book 2 Review – A Satisfying Sequel That Leaves More Room To Grow
Moss: Book 2 takes the logical steps to improve upon the first game, resulting in a stronger sequel. But there’s still much more room for Quill and friends to grow. Read on for our Moss: Book 2 review.
Moss: Book 2 moves the needle on for Quill and developer Polyarc. It’s a stronger, longer sequel that better explores the connection between our minuscule protagonist and the player, who returns as the ghostly ‘Reader’. It’s still not quite the sweeping epic this series seems capable of, but it’s another important chapter in that story.
If you played the first game in what’s quickly become a fan favorite VR series, you’ll likely remember it for its strong, Zelda-like gameplay, fantastic diorama worlds, and, above all, the unique ways in which the player could reach into levels to aid Quill on her quest and form a more personal bond with her. All of this remains intact right from the start with Moss: Book 2, which starts just moments after the end of the first game. Moreso than your usual sequel, Book 2 feels like the continuation of a larger journey rather than starting out fresh on a new adventure, and it shows as you slip right back into the familiar sword combat and puzzles.
In fact, for the opening hour or so you might worry it feels a little too familiar, with an abundance of returning enemy types and the same simplistic combat that sees Quill swinging her sword based on single-button combos. But the further you get into the game, the more ideas it throws at you. You get the power to make bridges out of vines, for example, but the biggest additions are the expansions to Quill’s arsenal. Throughout the course of the game, she gains the ability to dash over long distances and wields two new weapons in the form of a heavy-hitting hammer and a throwable glaive.
Whilst these additions help change up the combat, they’re also put to incredibly inventive use when it comes to the puzzles. Quill can stick the glaive into a wall, walk to another area of a level and then recall it to hit targets that are initially out of reach whilst the hammer can summon a mirror version that the player can reach in and drop down whilst Quill stands in another location. This results in some memorable brain teasers that initially left me stumped, making the satisfaction of solving them all the more rewarding.
At their best, these puzzles are even integrated into the action. One new enemy type rolls up into a ball, allowing you to reach in and grab it, then catapult it across the arena and knock out other foes. The hammer’s secondary ability, meanwhile, gets you physically involved in battles and adds a slight tactical element to encounters. They’ll come into play in late-game boss battles, too, which are a little long in the tooth and rely on some well-worn cliches but effectively mix in some weighty moments of human interaction, too.
That said, more could be done to smooth out some of the gameplay. Quill’s core animation set is the same as the first game, for example, and some of the platforming is still a little sluggish, including a jump that doesn’t cover much ground and is hard to judge, especially against environments that often leave gaps to accidentally slip through or objects you might clip into (one bug even let me hover Quill around the environment, stuck in a climbing animation).
My biggest takeaway, though, is that Book 2 still left me wanting much more from the world of Moss. It’s a longer game, yes, but not by an order of magnitude; I was able to clear the campaign in four and a half hours with roughly 75% of the collectibles, and going back to grab the last pieces would likely take an hour or so. It’s not that ‘length equals better game’ so much as the game ends just as its best ideas are starting to be put through their paces, with further potential left unexplored.
There’s also some ideas that could be pushed further. You can find new armor sets for Quill throughout the game, for example, but these are purely cosmetic and won’t buff her abilities or defenses in any way. It wasn’t until I discovered these costumes that I realized just how well suited the series might be to a deeper RPG experience.
Generally speaking, though, Book 2 is a very polished and logical expansion of what you saw in the first entry in the series. Even visually, the game goes beyond the original with a wider array of diverse environments filled with lush vegetation and visual easter eggs for those that lean in to explore. Special credit goes to the vistas; you’re almost always rewarded for leaning back to take in a view or poking through a nearby window to take in the castles and mountains in the distance.
But all of this is the box-ticking stuff, the things you’d expect from a sequel as it looked to flesh out the foundations. It’s all very welcome, if not entirely surprising. Where Moss: Book 2 did catch me off-guard was with its story. Or rather, certain story beats.
There are certain elements to the world that have a lot of potential, mostly surrounding the concept of the Reader character players embody. For starters, the warmth of the connection between you and Quill is alive and well in the sequel and pushed to new extremes. Again, some of these are the highs and lows you’d predict of a darker, deeper sequel, but more compelling are the playful moments where Quill pretends to surf as you taxi her across levels on platforms, or breakdances in celebration of taking down a boss. There are moments of celebration, admiration, and even those cold instances of awkwardness where you feel some sense of intrusion. Capturing these moments is no small feat and it’s a powerful reminder of how intimate and personal Polyarc’s VR storytelling can be.
That goes for the environmental storytelling too, where cinematic moments of boss foreshadowing remind you of the real power of VR. These instances are far stronger than any of the direct storytelling.
Truthfully I’m never been a big fan of the game’s overarching lore of warrior mice and squirrel steeds that wear leaf helmets. It’s like shipping Sylvanian Families off to war, and the storybook narrative structure can drag on when you’d rather be playing. There’s also hints of an MCU-style wider potential for the universe, which I’m not entirely convinced can work outside of VR, although I do have to award points for the appearance of a guinea pig character raising a stein of beer in one cutscene (there’s your protagonist for Book 3).
Moss: Book 2 Review – Final Impressions
For the most part, Moss: Book 2 is the satisfying sequel you’d expect. It adds brilliant new gameplay mechanics that make for some innovative combat encounters, whilst puzzles prove to be a surprise highlight. More impressive, though, are some of the ways the game catches you off-guard with both the story and that series-defining bond you establish with Quill reaching new heights. But, just as with the first entry, you’re left wanting more of just about everything; its a longer game but still on the lean side, ending just as its best ideas start to get fleshed out. Greedy as it may sound, this still isn’t the sweeping epic you know this series has in it, but instead another reassuring step towards getting there. I’m convinced Polyarc has that game in its future but, for now, Moss: Book 2 is another excellent chapter in a wider story for Quill that drives home that familiar feeling that the best is still to come.
UploadVR recently changed its review guidelines, and this is one of our new Recommended review labels. 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 Moss: Book 2 review? Let us know in the comments below!
Cosmonious High Review: A Rich World Intended VR Newcomers
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.
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!
‘Cosmonious High’ Review – Incredible Interactivity for Your Inner (or actual) Child
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
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
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 |
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| Artificial turning |  |
| Smooth-turn |  |
| Snap-turn | |
| Adjustable increments | |
Movement |
|
| Artificial movement | |
| Smooth-move | |
| Teleport-move | |
| Blinders | |
Posture |
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| Standing mode | |
| Seated mode | |
| Artificial crouch | |
| Real crouch | |
Accessibility |
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| Subtitles | |
| Languages | English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean |
| Alternate audio | |
| Adjustable difficulty | |
| Two hands required | |
| Real crouch required | |
| Hearing required | |
| Adjustable player height | |
The post ‘Cosmonious High’ Review – Incredible Interactivity for Your Inner (or actual) Child appeared first on Road to VR.
Weird West review: Turning the old West into a sandbox
Weird West tells its engrossing story in a unique way, giving players a front-row seat to the consequences of their actions.
Tentacular Review: A VR Kaiju Game With Heart, Hilarity And Substance
Easily dismissed at a glance, you’d be a sucker to miss Tentacular’s wonderful brand of intricate interaction and technicaly complexity. More in our Tentacular review!
Tentacular risks being pigeon-holed. It’s easy to look at this kaiju game and see flashes of Goat or Surgeon Simulator; fun for a fleeting few hours, perhaps, but ultimately a toybox that, once you shut, won’t be opened again anytime soon.
And you can furl your tentacles around that low-hanging fruit if you wish. Tentacular is an extremely amusing sandbox full of innocent citizens to fling across oceans and cars to catapult into Jenga towers made of shipping containers. Hand it to any first timer and they’ll quickly lose themselves in the delightful joys of diorama VR and the sinister satisfaction of bringing it all crashing down.
But there’s much more to Tentacular. It is, y’know, an actual game. One with a campaign that constantly reinvents your newfound superpowers and challenges that require intricate interaction to surpass. It’s also a pretty stunning technical achievement, especially on Quest where you fear your thinly-stitched constructions and Frakenstein sculptures might crumble both from a physical and performance standpoint.
In other words, Tentacular is really good.
First things first: you’re not a squid. Or I don’t think you are, at least. You’re not an octopus, either, and you’re certainly not a released kraken. What you are is a citizen of the island town of La Kalma that’s just turned 16. That means it’s time to start giving back to the community and getting a job. You’ll quickly find yourself embroiled in the island’s remarkably bleeding edge science scene, testing wacky new inventions like magnets or rockets.
This means lots of heavy lifting, often as an enormous bull in a tiny china shop. Central to Tentacular’s success is its truly tactile sense of touch. Grab a container with the far end of a tentacle and it’ll stretch and wobble with surprising authenticity. Pick it up with a thicker part of a tentacle and you’ll have a much more stable connection. There’s no magically phasing through objects or long-distance grabbing; your tentacles have a definitive and, when used recklessly, destructive presence in the world.
It’s a delicate balance, but one that developer Firepunchd strikes well. So much of Tentacular’s fun is in its happy accidents, like bringing one hand up above a wall, only for the tentacle to snap forward as it comes over the edge, flicking an unsuspecting citizen into the distance. But such instances are almost always your own fault, occuring because you weren’t aware of your own physical space within the game and not simply because you’re wrestling with a complicated control scheme.
And the world mines this for all it’s worth. Tentacular is brimming with deliciously satisfying interactions, from the swing of a lever that appears when you’re ready to progress to the next level (complete with an equally rewarding soundbyte) to the tiny kick the controller gives when tapping citizens on the head to speak to them. There’s always convincing elasticity, feedback and heft to everything you do, and it fully embodies you in the role.
Most of Tentacular’s levels — single puzzles often grouped into acts you can replay — drip feed you new concepts to tinker with. You’ll start off stacking crates to build towers before fixing them with magnets, and eventually get the ability to change the size and strength of them, for example.
The game’s best challenges are summer camp-style impossible missions, only instead of building a raft with a few logs and a bit of twine, you’re redecorating the mayor’s dining room, taking care not to knock over chairs and vases as you tack paintings onto walls and steady flailing chandeliers.
Not every concept works. Trying to lob missiles through rings is tedious given the lack of weight and sense of direction you have when throwing in VR, not to mention the game gives you only a limited number of tries. That said, it recognizes this with an almost essential help system that adds in a power line you can use as an aim-assisted catapult instead.
It also clearly recognizes the frustrations of overly-talky VR too, with brilliantly bold word bubbles that are quick to take in as characters nonsensically natter away. But the balance isn’t quite right in this bit; there’s a fun story at the heart of Tentacular but it requires a lot of dialogue and skipping through lengthy story sequences slows the pace to a crawl, as does cyclying through instructions when you need to find out what your next objective is.
It’s a minor annoyance in an otherwise wonderfully crafted little world. Tentacular’s islands are thriving with personality in a way that 2017’s Giant Cop (which I’ll admit is a real deep cut in the VR back catalogue) never matched. Buildings are peered into by lifting roofs on hinges or swinging front walls open, options menus fly in on zepplins you can poke and prod, and you can reset any level by turning around to an isolated hermit that mans a lone tower holding the reload switch. Throw an important character into the horizon, and they’ll suddenly parachute back into view, any mishaps automatically forgiven.
It’s a tiny miracle of a creation that reminds you VR doesn’t have to be life-sized to be convincing or compelling. If anything, Tentacular joins Moss and Astro Bot in proving that you can do more with this setup than you can trying to replicate the full-scale experience right now.
Tentacular Review – Final Impressions
It’s tempting to dismiss Tentacular at first sight, but that would be a mistake. What may seem like a simple, shallow VR playpen actually houses a remarkable showcase of tactile interaction and physical complexity, wrapped up in an endlessly playful world with first-rate user interfaces. Yes, it’s silly but it’s also a genuinely different gameplay experience that has you calculating even the slightest inch of micro-movement, revelling your hard-fought, precariously balanced victories and lamenting the many, many wince-enducing tower topples and accidental disasters along the way.
This is a full-hearted marvel with the capacity for laughter and amazement, paired with the mechanical intricacy with substance. In short, you’d be a sucker to miss Tentacular.
UploadVR recently changed its review guidelines, and this is one of our new Recommended review labels. 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 Tentacular review? Let us know in the comments below!
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Tunic review: Not-so-fantastic Mr. Fox
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