It’s 4th May so you know what that means, Star Wars day! Not that fans of the sci-fi franchise need a day to celebrate but hey, it gives you all an extra excuse to travel to a galaxy far, far away. And virtual reality (VR) continues to play an ever-growing role with new titles adding to the canon material almost every year it seems. So today, VRFocus is celebrating all things Star Wars VR-related.
This is the deal you’re looking for…
So let’s start with the deals. Like any branded day there are offers to be had and Star Wars in VR is no different, so if you’ve been holding out for a particular title then now might be a good time to pick one up. Here’s what VRFocus has found:
Grab all three episodes at a 50% discount until 12th May 2021.
Star Wars Squadrons
Currently 50% off over on Steam, you can pick up Star Wars Squadrons for a limited time for £17.49, compatible with Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.
Star Wars Squadrons is also on sale via the Epic Games Store with a 40% discount of £20.99.
Now, none of these are VR-compatible videogames but there are over 30 titles with up to 75% off, so in the spirit of Star Wars they’ve been included.
The Star Wars VR games every fan should have
As mentioned, VR fans have an abundance of titles to choose from when its comes to Star Wars. Back when VR was emerging as a consumer technology with the launch of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive there were early experiments like Star Wars: Trials on Tatooineand Star Wars: Droid Repair Bay (both are still free). But the technology and gameplay has certainly moved on.
Previously location-based entertainment (LBE) solutions like Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire would’ve been worth a look but with The VOID now defunct that’s no longer a possibility. So here are VRFocus’ recommendations for enjoying Star Wars in VR at home.
Star Wars Pinball VR – Only just released for most VR headsets last week, Zen Studios’ latest pinball mashup features 8 themed tables, a customisable fan cave, and more unlockables than you could find in the hold of the Millenium Falcon.
Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge – The most recent title from ILMxLAB, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge takes you to the outskirts of the Black Spire Outpost on the planet of Batuu. With the storyline set between Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker you end up in Seezelslak’s Cantina where you listen to his stories and go on missions. Part one is available now with part two due to arrive later this year.
Star Wars Squadrons – An all-action videogame with single-player and multiplayer modes Star Wars Squadrons you take command of both Rebel and Imperial craft, flying X-Wing and Tie Fighters across a range of missions. In multiplayer team-based 5v5 battles take place across gameplay modes including Dogfight and Battle Fleet. If you’ve ever wanted to be in the heart of any Star Wars space battle then now’s your chance.
Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series – For pure cinematics where you actually get to face Vader and use Force powers then give Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series a try. Split across three episodes explore Vader’s base on Mustafar and learn about the history and secrets of the planet, as well as your own. Then head to the Lightsaber Dojo to practice your Force powers and lightsaber skills against waves of enemies.
Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge arrived back in November 2020 exclusively for Oculus Quest. While it provided an interesting experience for virtual reality (VR) fans it did evoke some mixed responses, mainly due to its short run time. That’s going to be improved in 2021 with part 2, so during the Oculus Gaming Showcase today ILMxLAB has teased the first details.
And by teased VRFocus means a very brief glance at what’s to come, with ILMxLAB unveiling the first character and a single piece of concept art. The first character you get to meet from Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge: Part 2 is a mysterious Ithorian called Dok-Ondar, a visitor from the Den of Antiquities. The artwork art features Dok-Ondar in Seezelslak’s Cantina with his translation droid.
Just as Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge is based on the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge themed area in Disneyland, California and Disney World, Florida, Dok-Ondar’s Den of Antiquities can be physically found at Disneyland where guests can purchase Star Wars memorabilia.
Quite what his role will be in Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge remains unclear. While he could offer trading possibilities that may not be the case as he’s not in his shop. The fact he’s in the cantina suggests he’ll probably have a mission or two for you, sending you off to some remote corner of Batuu to find a rare artefact.
The videogame takes place on the planet of Batuu just on the outskirts of the Black Spire Outpost with the storyline set between Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. You play a droid repair technician who crashlands on the planet, ending up in Seezelslak’s Cantina where you listen to his stories and go on missions, encountering some famous characters along the way.
“Continuing to hone its VR skills, ILMxLAB has created a rather mixed experience with Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge,” VRFocussaid in its review. “What it lacks in that initial wow factor and excitement that Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series had it makes up for by offering a more open adventure with a nice mixture of action, light puzzling as well as great voice acting and animation.
Not only is there part two to look forward to later this year, but Star Wars fans will also get their hands-on Star Wars Pinball VR, due to launch next week on 29th April for most VR headsets. As further updates for Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge are released, VRFocus will let you know.
ILMxLAB and Oculus today announced that Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge Part II is coming to Quest later this year.
Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge (2020)launched on Quest in November 2020, bringing with it an action-adventure experience that puts you in middle of a conflict between space pirates. You need to recover some very important (and very recognizable) stolen droids, blast away at enemy pirates, and scrounge for all manner of loot. You’re not a Jedi, but you do have a jet pack.
Although it’s only a drip of information for now, ILMxLab has revealed two new characters coming to the series. The first is ‘Dok-Ondar’, a visitor from the Den of Antiquities, seen on the right. On the left is his trusty translation droid, seen ostensibly helping his Ithorian pal hashing out a deal in Seezelslak’s Cantina.
Image courtesy ILMxLab, Oculus
If this installment is anything like the first, we’re likely to see a steady drip of information come out as we get closer to launch.
The series is said to conclude after its fourth installment. ILMXLab says to “[k]eep an eye out for more details as we prepare for launch later this year.”
When it comes to big virtual reality (VR) announcements – either on the hardware or software side – Facebook usually gears everything around its Connect event in September. 2021 is going to be a little different as the company will be hosting the very first Oculus Gaming Showcase dedicated to the latest upcoming content next week.
Teasing in a blog post that fans can: “expect new updates to fan-favorite titles, never-before-seen footage from some unreleased games, and a few surprises in store,” several titles were mentioned. Cloudhead Games’ Pistol Whip, Ready At Dawn’s Lone Echo II, and Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge by ILMxLAB . Three big titles which VRFocus has a good idea of what could be mentioned.
In regards to Pistol Whip Cloudhead Games has previously mentioned a new campaign is under development with a hint towards a Wild West theme. Hopefully, the “Concierge” update will also get a release date. As for Lone Echo II well that’s easy, everyone’s awaiting a release date. First shown back in 2018 followed by a playable demo during E3 2019, the last official news on the project came late last year when the studio said: “we are still diligently working to bring you Jack and Liv’s next adventure together.” A Lone Echo II date would be big news for the Oculus community.
When it comes to Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge, the Oculus exclusive arrived late in 2020 with mixed reviews, one criticism being the amount of content. Well, that could be fixed this year as ILMxLAB previously stated it was a two-parter, so expect those details to be released during the Oculus Gaming Showcase.
The showcase takes place on 21st April 2021 starting at 3pm PT (11pm GMT) over on Oculus’ Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube channels. Facebook hasn’t said how long the stream will last but it sounds similar to Sony’s State of Play series. As further details are released, VRFocus will let you know.
We’ve played through the latest Star Wars VR adventure from ILMxLAB and came away with a mixed bag of feelings. Read on for our full Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge review!
The amount of enjoyment you’ll get from Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge depends almost entirely on how big of a Star Wars fan you are. If you’re the kind of Star Wars fan that slurps up any bit of new information or new content, then this is sure to be an amazing thrill ride across the vistas of Batuu. But if you’re a more casual fan or simply interested in a new, fun VR game — it’s less of s sure bet.
In this latest Star Wars VR adventure you take on the role of a relatively run-of-the-mill person in the galaxy that gets all wrapped up in a shipment and delivery of some high-value cargo. What follows is a series of location-based missions across Batuu that feel and seem to be much grander than they really are.
It’s all smoke and mirrors though — a concept ILMxLAB is well-versed in — because the entire game is actually just a linear corridor shooter full of waist-high cover points, but instead of corridors it’s Batuu canyon alleyways. That doesn’t mean it’s not a fun corridor shooter, but it’s still pretty simple all the same. You go from point A to point B, find some credits here and there, maybe open a few crates with nice weapons inside, and shoot dozens of bad guys along the way. That’s the whole game more or less.
Some of the best pieces of Star Wars fiction are simple though and Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge gets a lot right in terms of both being a piece of Star Wars content and in terms of being an escapist fantasy for VR gamers. Things start off slowly enough with you aboard a starship traveling through space. You do some mundane things like scan cargo, open up control panels, and press a few buttons. Notably, it’s all very interactive and feels quite good. Then things go off the rails, as they usually do, and you’re gunning down raiders before you know it.
You can tell ILMxLAB has spent a lot of time in VR development over the last few years between Vader Immortal, The VOID projects, and even Trials on Tatooine down to how the UI is represented. Your left wrist has a datapad on it with buttons to pull up things like objective markers and the cargo scanner and your chest pouch acts as the inventory. There are hip holsters for two guns and your multi-tool is placed on your chest with an electric pulse tool, screwdriver, and soldering burner.
One thing about the inventory that irked me is that it only displays the last four or five most recently accessed items (like heals or collectibles) unless you to press a floating arrow to scroll down to the rest. Usually what I need is below the fold of most recent items, so I ended up needing to press the button 80% of the time. It should just automatically unfurl the entire inventory for ease of access.
There are lots of items at your disposal, but they’re all fairly simplistic. There’s only a handful of guns, such as single-shot blasters, rapid fire blasters, rifle blasters, and a shotgun blaster. You never get the chance to upgrade anything or build an arsenal of any kind. Instead of storing weapons and looting ammo every gun just runs out of blaster shots inexplicably after a couple minutes so you constantly just drop weapons and pick up new ones. It keeps you on the hunt for guns, but doesn’t really feel lore-friendly — it would make more sense to search for fuel cells or something to recharge a blaster.
There are a few different colors of sentry droids you can deploy that hover around you while shooting back at enemies, but they’ll typically get destroyed so quickly it’s not worth the time investment to repair them.
Enemies are pretty basic too. They’ll appear in the level, stand up straight for a second, then run over to cover, wait a bit, then pop up and let you shoot them. Sometimes they won’t even make it that far and will just sort of stand there. If you rush them, they don’t really have any idea how to react. There doesn’t appeare to be much logic in the way of maneuvering combat or responding to you as anything other than a target for blaster shots every now and then.
Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge Review – Comfort
There are a wide range of comfort options in Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge. When you first launch the game you can pick between either seated or standing and teleport or free movement as your core options and then in the settings you can further tweak things like whether or not it’s snap or smooth turning as well as adding an FOV dimmer to help curb motion sickness. You can even adjust movement speed, turn on or off strafing, switch to ‘Southpaw’ mode to put the right stick as your movement, and so on. It’s one of the best VR games out there in terms of the sheer breadth of comfort settings.
If you make yourself visible for long, they will hit you though. Even on Normal difficulty they’re great shots — unlike your typical Stormtrooper — and if you crank it up to Hard then you go down pretty fast. Luckily you’ve got a jetpack that zooms you up in the air or down to the ground quickly and it inexplicably makes you a tougher target if you’re hovering in the air for some reason despite the fact that you’re exposed and should actually be easier to hit.
Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge is around 3-4 hours long for a typical playthrough, which isn’t terribly short given what this is supposed to be, but it just ends up feeling like a preview of a much larger game that doesn’t exist. I didn’t look and search every single nook and cranny and I did die a fair handful of times, but I wouldn’t say I rushed things either. It’s just a very linear game without much room to explore.
It’s like walking through a new region at Disneyland only to be told you have to stay in a single file line with your tour group and can’t explore at all or go on any of the bigger rides. Speaking of which — this literally takes place on Batuu, the planet that Disney established in the fiction specifically for Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland. When you’re at the cantina you can look out the window and see the Millennium Falcon parked outside in the exact courtyard that you walk through in the literal theme park at Disneyland. That alone may make it worth the price of admission for big Star Wars fans.
The most complicated part of this whole offering is the painfully brief short story in which you take on the role of a Jedi-in-training in the Temple of Darkness story at the actual Jedi temple as you interact with the one and only Yoda, voiced by Frank Oz himself. I’m not even the biggest Star Wars fan but I still got chills. Most of the bits from Vader Immortal I loved returned for this 15-minute segment as I got a lightsaber back in my hand, force throwing ability, force push and pull, and more.
Compared to the linear corridors of Batuu, this was about as thrilling of a departure as you could hope for. It just ends so very quickly you hardly have time to embrace it. The ending for this segment is rife with emotion and tension, which is particularly impressive given how short it all is, but it just made me wish the entire game focused on this story because it’s far more interesting and compelling from a narrative perspective and from a gameplay perspective. I desperately want a full VR adventure from the perspective of a powerful Jedi. Yet again, it’s a tease for a game that doesn’t exist. Thankfully, more side stories like this are planned for the future.
Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge Review Final Verdict
For Star Wars fans, Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge is an exciting and thrilling adventure across the canyons of Batuu. As a shooter campaign it’s pretty basic with straightforward levels, uninspired gameplay, and simple enemies. But as a piece of Star Wars content, it absolutely sells you on the immersion of it all. It’s a bit brief at just around 4 hours long with a painfully short side story about a Jedi training under Yoda, but it has a great foundation to build from. This is the kind of VR game you buy for the source material and end up spending time with for, well, the source material. Ultimately it’s a fun, simple proof of concept that feels like a preview for a larger game that doesn’t exist (yet).
For today’s livestream we’re playing Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge in VR using an Oculus Quest 2 natively! If you’re curious about how we livestream the way we do then look no further than this handy guide for general tips and this guide specific to our Oculus Quest setup.
Today, we’re playing the brand new Star Wars VR game, Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge. It just launched today exclusively for the Oculus Quest platform and we’ll be showing it off on the Quest 2. This will be our LIVE unscripted first impressions of the latest VR game from ILMxLAB.
We’re going live with our Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge livestream at about 12:15 PM PT today and will last for around an hour or so, give or take. We’ll be hitting just our YouTubeand we’ll be streaming from an Oculus Quest 2 while we try and check chat every now and then to stay up to date with Ian helping on Discord with chat.
Livestream: Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge On Quest 2
You can see lots of our past archived streams over in our YouTube playlist or even all livestreams here on UploadVR and various other gameplay highlights. There’s lots of good stuff there so make sure and subscribe to us on YouTube to stay up-to-date on gameplay videos, video reviews, live talk shows, interviews, and more original content!
And please let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next! We have lots of VR games in the queue that we would love to show off more completely. Let’s get ready to go!
Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge marks a clear departure from ILMxLAB’s Vader Immortal series, bringing gameplay to the forefront and using its campaign as a platform for further narrative-driven experiences, which will be available on a rolling basis in successive paid DLC packs. Galaxy’s Edge does an admirable job of approaching the sort of visual richness we tend to see in PC VR games, and the surrounding story is well orchestrated, but the meat of the game’s VR shooter campaign was a bit too basic to truly fall in love with.
Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge Details:
Available On: Oculus Quest Release Date: November 19th, 2020 Price: $25 Developer: ILMxLAB Reviewed On: Quest 2
Gameplay
Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge puts you in the shoes of a droid technician whose ship is boarded by a band of Guavian Death Gang pirates while in orbit above the desert planet Batuu. The First Order is offering up serious cash for some mysterious cargo in your ship’s hold, but under the threat of death you jettison the precious cargo and flee the ship, finding yourself back at Batuu’s Black Spire Outpost where you battle the pirates in your search of the cargo.
Image courtesy ILMxLAB
Unlike Vader Immortal, Galaxy’s Edge pushes its theme park-style smorgasbord of adventure experiences to its ‘Tales’ DLC, instead offering up a shooter-based campaign the game’s main course. At launch, it’s a significant chunk of the game, with post-campaign DLC designed to serve up more of that diverse mix of Jedi thrills seen in Vader Immortal. I’ll talk more about DLC below, but first the main campaign.
Galaxy’s Edge’s campaign is fairly basic shooter fare. Moving through a few of the pirates bases on the edge of the Outpost—making for a half dozen standalone levels—you’ll find a mix of bipedal baddies, flying droids, and wild creatures abound to blast away at.
Image courtesy ILMxLAB
Having that mix of flying and ground enemies is good, but all of them are essentially bullet sponges, which unfortunately dumbs down gameplay overall. That’s not to say there aren’t some high points to the campaign—you get to meet some familiar characters and wield iconic Star Wars weapons—but I can’t say I was ever wowed by a single encounter, the sole boss fight at the end included. Basically you blast until everything falls over, and walk to the next section of the map with little variation.
As unexciting as enemy encounters felt, I enjoyed the overall shooting experience. In Galaxy’s Edge, weapons include a variety of single-handed blasters that you either scavenge from downed enemies or find in unlockable weapons crates.
Image courtesy ILMxLAB
All weapons are consumable, with some depleting their batteries more rapidly than others. Instead of fumbling for a mag and reloading, each gun comes with a charging slider on the top rail, which also acts as the gun’s rear iron sight. Each shot from the gun moves the slider a bit further away until you need to pull it back again to reload. A handy color-coded display near the grip tells you how much juice is left until you need to throw it away and look for a new one. It’s a nice VR-native reload style I haven’t seen before, and although arcadey, it’s a sci-fi world of magic and talking robots, so it fits pretty well considering.
In addition to guns and a single thermal grenade type, there’s also three types of flying droids that you can deploy to help you automatically take down enemies. Oftentimes I would toss out three seeker types that would bomb out a level before going in, or toss out either shielded and unshielded shooter types to act as support fire. You can only use three of any type at a time, but you can also repair damaged shooter droids with your multitool, which I thought was a nice touch.
The multitool was another pleasant surprise. The pistol-like device has three interchangeable tips you can cycle through: a screwdriver, a flame torch, and an electric spark. It’s most useful in opening weapons lockers, which require multiple steps. Oftentimes you’ll need to unweld an access panel, unlock a mechanism with your screwdriver, and bridge two circuits with your spark tip just to open one locker.
Image courtesy ILMxLAB
Levels are one-way journeys with discrete entry and end points, however they offer up secret areas to explore too. Because there aren’t any key items or one-off weapons to search for in the game, more often than not secret areas are momentary detours housing crates with health packs, grenades, basic guns, and target droids, and plenty of junk to salvage. You may also find one of 12 mini-droids, the main collectible item.
Only approaching the very end are you given a chance to spend your credits in a shop, which feels like a missed opportunity. The only merchandise available includes standard items and an assortment of different glove skins. Still, it was nice to have tons of droids and health packs for the final boss fight, but I still would have liked to see the shop better integrated into the game from the very beginning, which would have brought some sense to all of the trash and credit collecting you’ll do throughout the majority.
The campaign mission took me a little under three hours to complete on normal difficulty (easy and hard are available), which included the main objectives and most of the additional side objectives. In the end, the campaign felt like the first level in a much grander game, which hypothetically might have given it more room to tease out more diverse enemy types, larger and more interesting levels, and grander, more clever boss fights.
Temple of Darkness DLC (included)
One of those side objective during the campaign is to gather ingredients for a special drink, which Seezelslak prepares back at the cantina so he can recount his first tale, the only extra DLC at launch.
Called ‘Temple of Darkness’, Seezelslak’s story transports you to the past, hundreds of years before the events of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. There you take on the role of Padawan Ady Sun’Zee to work alongside Jedi Master Yoda. Like Luke Skywalker on Dagobah, you have to overcome both the literal and metaphorical darkness along your quest to become a Jedi master.
In ‘Temple of Darkness’, you’re finally handed a lightsaber, and given the ability to cinematically slash down baddies from the very moment you approach the temple.
I won’t spoil the inside of the temple, however you’ll make use of the powers you learned in Vader Immortal, including force powers and the ability to sling your light saber through the air like a boomerang. It’s well done (also, there’s Yoda, which is cool) but it was surprisingly short at only 15 minutes. I was honestly expecting a Vader Immortal-size experience, but maybe that will be something for future DLC to beef out.
Immersion
ILMxLAB astounds me with its ability to bring high-quality visuals to the Quest platform, and it doesn’t disappoint with Galaxy’s Edge. Characters are well animated, textures are high quality, and although environmental visual quality could be more consistent throughout—some popping occurs and background vistas appear flat—it leaves you in a rich and solid environment that feels much more like a PC VR game than one built for Quest.
Image courtesy ILMxLAB
Audio quality is second to none too. The game’s music was fantastic, featuring Emmy-award winner Bear McCreary (campaign), Danny Piccione (cantina music), and Joseph Trapanese (‘Temple of Darkness’). Voice acting was also great, with C-3P0 voiced by original actor Anthony Daniels and Yoda voiced by the series’ puppeteer and voice actor Frank Oz.
Object interaction is fairly good too, giving the user force grab and the ability to easily switch objects between hands if need be, which is something developers tend to forget. You can pick up nearly everything, but the game’s good object interaction is hampered somewhat by its inventory, which is a mixed bag.
I liked having two slots for guns on both sides, two slots for heath packs on my gloves, and an expandable inventory pack on my chest holding everything else—but that chest pack is so strangely organized that it becomes virtually useless during combat. Items automatically fill up in the first slots, which is fine if you could reorganize them easily to make a sort of hotbar of most used items. Because you can’t move stacks of items, instead being forced to move one of the items one at a time, it becomes a real chore in setting up the inventory that’s actually useable. I really wish there were a better holster system to hold all important items, including droids, doing away with the inventory pack completely.
Comfort
You’re given the choice between smooth locomotion and teleportation, although it’s clear Galaxy’s Edge was designed around teleportation first. Most levels require you to teleport to get across gaps and reach high places, even if you’ve chosen smooth locomotion as an option. This was done to accommodate for the lack of jumping, which is a good thing from a comfort standpoint. You’re also given a hover pack, but this only lets you move up a notch vertically in the air, so you won’t be flying around and making yourself potentially uncomfortable.
The game offers both seated and standing modes, however the game’s holster system is placed in such a way that you’d be better off standing, or sitting in a chair without armrests, since you’ll need free access to your holsters.
ILMxLAB revealed a new trailer for its upcoming Quest game Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge, which shows one of the titular tales called ‘Temple of Darkness’, set to release next month.
Temple of Darkness is described as an ‘interactive VR short’ that features Yoda and takes place during the High Republic era, which is hundreds of years before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. A week ago, ILMxLAB also confirmed that Frank Oz, the original puppeteer and voice of Yoda, will be reprising his role in the game.
The game’s title may have suggested it already, but this new Temple of Darkness trailer seems to confirm that Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge won’t be one long continuous story, but several smaller interactive stories that might link into each other somehow.
Given that Temple of Darkness is set long before The Phantom Menace and we know that C-3PO and R2DR are also in the game, each tale will probably be set in a different era of the Star Wars universe. We know that it will be an episodic release, with the first part releasing next month on Quest.
Here’s a full description of Temple of Darkness, taken from the Oculus blog:
In Temple of Darkness, players will step into the shoes of Ady Sun’Zee (voiced by Ellie Araiza), a Jedi Padawan studying at a remote Jedi research facility on Batuu. The sole survivor after a mysterious relic unleashes a torrent of evil, she must work alongside Jedi Master Yoda to confront the darkness that now lurks within the temple walls—and within herself.
The game’s Oculus Store page also features some amazing new key art, which you can see below:
ILMxLAB revealed a new trailer for its upcoming Quest game Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge, which shows one of the titular tales called ‘Temple of Darkness’, set to release next month.
Temple of Darkness is described as an ‘interactive VR short’ that features Yoda and takes place during the High Republic era, which is hundreds of years before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. A week ago, ILMxLAB also confirmed that Frank Oz, the original puppeteer and voice of Yoda, will be reprising his role in the game.
The game’s title may have suggested it already, but this new Temple of Darkness trailer seems to confirm that Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge won’t be one long continuous story, but several smaller interactive stories that might link into each other somehow.
Given that Temple of Darkness is set long before The Phantom Menace and we know that C-3PO and R2DR are also in the game, each tale will probably be set in a different era of the Star Wars universe. We know that it will be an episodic release, with the first part releasing next month on Quest.
Here’s a full description of Temple of Darkness, taken from the Oculus blog:
In Temple of Darkness, players will step into the shoes of Ady Sun’Zee (voiced by Ellie Araiza), a Jedi Padawan studying at a remote Jedi research facility on Batuu. The sole survivor after a mysterious relic unleashes a torrent of evil, she must work alongside Jedi Master Yoda to confront the darkness that now lurks within the temple walls—and within herself.
The game’s Oculus Store page also features some amazing new key art, which you can see below:
ILMxLAB is bringing it’s next VR experience, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge, exclusively to Quest on November 19th. Now the studio has given us another look at a standalone story in the game that focuses on the exploits of none other than Master Yoda himself.
Dubbed ‘Temple of Darkness’, the story in Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge is set “hundreds of years before the events of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,” the studio says in an Oculus blog post.
In the Quest-exclusive experience, you take on the role of a droid repair technician who’s crash landed on Batuu as a result of a pirate attack. Transported by the many tales woven by the bartender Seezelslak (played by SNL’s Bobby Moynihan), you step into the role of Jedi Padawan Ady Sun’Zee (voiced by Ellie Araiza) during the High Republic era to work alongside Master Yoda. Yes, that’s actually the original series voice actor and puppeteer Frank Oz you’re hearing in the trailer.
Like all good Padawans, you must confront the darkness that lies within—both literally inside the temple and yourself.
Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge is headed to the Oculus Store for Quest on November 19th. If you haven’t checked out the official trailer, you can see that here.
