GDC 2017: First Hands-On Preview With The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone

GDC 2017: First Hands-On Preview With The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone

My demo for The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone ended the exact same way Episode 1 ended for me: with my mouth open, staring up at the sky. In the first episode, you’re ascending into what can only be described as a portal of some kind as The Watcher, a mysterious and ominous character, talks to you about what’s coming next just before the credits roll. The ending of my Episode 2 demo was much more visually arresting.

At GDC 2017, Cloudhead Games allowed me to have the first hands-on preview of the upcoming sequel to their 2016 hit VR adventure title, The Gallery: Episode 1 – The Call of the Starseed [Review: 9/10]. After over $1 million in revenue and winning our award for Best VR Game Narrative of 2016, Episode 2 is picking up right where it left off.

The demo began with me standing in front of a large, circular door. I reached out with my right hand, which was laden with an ornate, clearly alien gauntlet — the same one you receive at the end of Episode 1. A crystal reacts to the glowing part of the gauntlet, triggering a mechanism that allows me to unlock the door by moving my hand forward.

From there, I’m treated to a room that I am later told will serve as the hub of the adventure. The Gallery: Episode 2 is designed as a longer journey (around 6 hours) rife with exploration. Instead of following a mostly linear path like the first game, this time you’re free to roam between different areas, unlocking secrets as you go.

For starters, this room contained plenty of secrets. In front of me was a shining pad on the ground that, when stepped upon, created a cascading effect of stones around me to spawn what looked like a topographical map. My guess is that I can use this hub portal to fast travel in the future.

To my left and right were chests that had floating crystals that I could once again activate with my right hand. This time, each of them spawned a special puzzle that needed to be solved very carefully. My hands disappeared and my right hand movements were now represented by only the crystal, which I had to slowly move through a tube.

Inside the tube I saw red obstacles that were moving around to hinder my progress. I had to carefully move the crystals through the tubes without touching the insides of the tube themselves. It sounds confusing, but you can see a glimpse of them in the teaser above.

 

After my demo of The Gallery: Episode 2 I spoke with the team at Cloudhead and they emphasized how small of a slice this demo was of the full game. I didn’t get to explore the greater world, I only saw one other character — a hologram of a woman exploring the room (could it be your missing sister?) and poked around with a few puzzles.

But that being said, what I did see got me very excited. This strange new alien world of Ember is coming to life in wondrous detail and I’m aching to dive back into this universe. The biggest issue with Episode 1 was the linearity and brevity; both of those elements seem to be improved, if just a bit, this time around.

The demo ended with a giant stone-like creature emerging from the smoke and shadows, standing tall above the tower I was inside, and reaching down with his enormous hand towards me as I stood there, mouth agape, looking upwards just as last time.

We don’t have an exact release date for The Gallery: Episode 2, but it is slated for Spring 2017, which means within just a couple of months. Stay tuned at UploadVR for more coverage on the game as we get closer to release.

The Gallery Episode 2 will release simultaneously for both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with Touch this Spring. Cloudhead is also working on bringing both existing and all future episodes to PlayStation VR (PSVR) with no timeframe for release.

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Motion Capture Acting Within VR? Cloudhead Games Explains In Latest Dev Diary

Motion capture for TV, film and videogame projects is not a new technology, and by this point you will have no doubt seen many a person clad in black with what look like ping pong balls attached to them. In the same vein you’ll have likely seen people using facial recognition technology, and actors performing their roles with a face full of blue dots to record the facial movements.

The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone

For virtual reality (VR) it all becomes a little bit more tricky. However, unlike standard motion capture it also provides an additional and intriguing solution: What if the actor was able to perform their roles as a character within the digital space itself? It’s something that Cloudhead Games are already doing as they discuss the process in their latest behind the scenes video discussing work on the next title in their VR videogame series The Gallery.

In the video representatives from the studio discuss how the actors are able to react to the digital environment. How, thanks to what is essentially an in-VR teleprompter, they are able to make changes to the script “on the fly”. How it all affects VR audio and how it affects the composition and the way a scene is acted at all.

“[The actors] actually end up acting more like theatre actors, because the player could be far away.” Producer and Audio Director Joel Green explains at one point. “Anybody, no matter where they are, is still going to get the empotional effect of the scene.”

The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone is due out 2017 and is the sequel to 2016’s The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed. You can read VRFocus‘ review of the latter here.

VRFocus will bring you more updates on The Gallery series as they are made available.

Latest Dev Diary for The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone Focuses on a Strange New Alien World

Latest Dev Diary for The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone Focuses on a Strange New Alien World

The Gallery: Episode 1 – Call of the Starseed [Review: 9/10] was one of our favorite VR games in 2016. In fact, it even took home the honors of being named the Best Narrative of the year. We know that Episode 2 will be called Heart of the Emberstone and the currently running series of developer diary videos are poised to divulge additional information over time. But as of now, we didn’t know much about the episode itself and what it’s all about — that is, until now.

Thanks to the second entry in the developer diary series, Cloudhead Games has peeled back a few of the layers on the strange new alien world that players are set to explore. At the end of Call of the Starseed, things end as players don a strange gauntlet on their hand and emerge through what appears to be a portal, or spaceship of some kind. It’s an epic cliffhanger. Watch the latest diary below:

We’ve spoken to Cloudhead previously about how they’re building The Gallery into an epic  sci-fi property remniscent of the IPs that inspired it and that tradition is continuing in Episode 2. Denny Unger, CEO and Creative Director at Cloudhead, specially cites The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth as heavy inspirations.

“When the player gets to Ember, that’s when they start to understand the mystery of The Starseed, what it’s function is, and what your part is playing in the story of The Starseed,” explains Mike Wilson, Narrative Director.

Then Jonathan Hackett, Art Lead on the project, continues by detailing that, “When the player gets to Ember, that’s when they start to understand the mystery of The Starseed, what it’s function is, and what your part is playing in the story of The Starseed.”

Unfortunately we still know only precious little about the world itself, but the art work shown in the video and the mentions of creatures such as the pesky Wizgogs are enough to sufficiently pique our interest.

“One of the things that sets Heart of the Emberstone apart is that we’ve designed a kind of open world game flow in VR,” says Unger. “It might be the first time in VR that anyone’s attacked it from this kind of perspective…it’s a completely different ‘game feel’ than Episode 1.”

We still don’t know a release date for Episode 2, but hopefully the ramp up of behind-the-scenes footage and dev diaries is pointing to sooner rather than later.

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Cloudhead Charts The Road To ‘The Gallery’ Episode 2 With Dev Diary Series

Cloudhead Charts The Road To ‘The Gallery’ Episode 2 With Dev Diary Series

Easily one of our most anticipated releases next year is the second episode of Cloudhead Games’ The Gallery series, Heart of the Emberstone.

Cloudhead hasn’t given us a window for the next installment’s release, sadly, but it looks like it’s ramping up to a bigger reveal with the launch of a new developer diary series. There’s no footage of the next entry in this first installment, but the studio does discuss its development and how they’re building upon the first episode. Apparently you can expect this episode to be closer to fantastical 80’s adventure movies like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal.

Expect to see much more about the direction Cloudhead is going in with Episode 2 in later entries into the series. Hopefully we’ll get a first look at gameplay, too.

The Gallery is a fully room-scale mystery series in which the protagonist searches for his missing sister. It takes advantage of the Vive’s position-tracked controls and was one of the first games to feature a teleportation system, now commonly used in room-scale VR experiences.

The first episode, Call of the Starseed [Review: 9/10], is one of the games you’ll get for free when you pick up the HTC Vive, and it recently came to Oculus Touch too, with a PlayStation VR version still expected. You can find deals for it on both Rift and Vive in ongoing winter sales.

We liked the initial episode a lot. In his review, David Jagneaux stated that the game was short, but “those precious 2 hours you spend inside the game are some of the best you’ll find in VR on any platform. With The Gallery, Cloudhead uses simple, old-fashioned, awe-inducing beauty and immersion that hooks you instead of any cheap tricks or gimmicks and I’m absolutely dying to dive back in.”

Bring on Episode 2.

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The Gallery – Call of the Starseed Review: Awe Inspiring Mystery

The Gallery – Call of the Starseed Review: Awe Inspiring Mystery

After you’ve been playing and critiquing games for a while, you start to get a bit jaded. You start to recognize a lot of the little tropes and tricks that developers use to try and catch an audience by surprise. Plot twists, good guys turning bad, and the whole slew of other seemingly “unexpected” devices all start to taste the same when you’re force fed them all enough.

The same goes for being shocked and awed by pretty visuals – we’re reaching that uncanny valley level of realism in traditional TV-based gaming on standard PCs and consoles, so the bar is raised higher than ever for something to really impress me anymore. Then I played The Gallery: Episode 1 – The Call of the Starseed and watched the credits roll with my mouth wide open.

First, let’s back up a bit. The Gallery: The Call of the Starseed is a slow-paced, narrative-driven, adventure/puzzle game for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with Touch. You’ll take on the role of Alex, a young person searching an island for what happened to his/her sister. In The Call of the Starseed, Alex is whatever gender you want. While the first episode of this journey only lasted approximately 2 hours for me, by the end I was literally awe struck standing in the middle of my living room, mouth agape, desperately wishing for more.

What Cloudhead Games have accomplished here is such a rare and delightful balance between a mysterious narrative and a world ripe for discovery and exploration that it’s truly difficult to really describe. I have no qualms with saying that The Gallery: Call of Starseed may very well be one of the, if not the, most polished VR game I’ve ever played.

The episode’s final act is punctuated with some of the most spine-tingling moments I’ve ever had in VR.

Part of that is surely due to the fact that it’s a short piece of an otherwise much larger puzzle, but it’s also been in development for quite some time specifically with VR in mind. From the opening moments of the game – where you’re immediately thrust into an intuitive and incredibly well-made tutorial – to the game’s final moments that have you staring at the sky in sheer awe, Call of the Starseed is full of surprises.

One of the most delightful discoveries is the utter brilliance of the voice acting on display here. The female voice that guides you through the opening moments and narrates several of the cassette tapes you find scattered about is simply entrancing to listen to without moving or doing anything else. The episode’s final act is punctuated with some of the most spine-tingling moments I’ve ever had in VR due to the expertly voiced lines and reverberating 3D spacial audio. Whipping your head around in terror as someone descends upon you from what can only be described as a terrifying doorway to what looks like hell is an incredibly tense way to spend an evening.

One great but often overlooked feature of the HTC Vive and Oculus Touch motion controllers is how sensitive the triggers are. If I squeeze my finger down slowly on either, my fingers in the game will slowly move down as well. Once I reach the bottom of the trigger, I can click it down one notch further, which defines my hand in the game into a fully-clenched fist. The Vive wands felt more natural in my hand for holding objects, such as bottles or signal flares, given their shape and weight, while the Touch controllers felt like a natural extension of my hand, granting a more believable sense of hand presence. Either platform plays great when you have an optimal 360-degree tracking setup.

It’s all of the small touches like that with VR experiences that really make this game stand above the rest.

There is a tactful balance between puzzle-solving and exploration.

There was also not a single moment of combat throughout the entire episode. The closest I came to a violent confrontation with someone or something is when I was mistaken for someone else and shot at, but I wasn’t ever in any actual danger.

Movement is handled via Cloudhead’s much-touted “Blink” system. It works by you holding down the track pad in your left hand, then aiming the icon on the ground using head-tracking. You can swipe your thumb to re-position which direction you’re facing, then release to teleport to that spot. If you’re watching someone play, it can look a little jarring since there is so much blinking and switching happening on-screen, but when you’re in VR, it actually feels very natural and easy.

The Gallery: The Call of Starseed may very well be one of the, if not the, most polished VR game I’ve ever played.

There is a tactful balance between puzzle-solving and exploration. That balance is so perfect, in fact, that it’s at the core of what makes Call of the Starseed work so well. The beauty of shorter narrative games like this is that they’re devoid of any unnecessary padding or frustrating portions that expand the game for unnecessary reasons. Just as a puzzles was starting to wear on my patience enough to be frustrating, I’d figure it out and move on to the next area, albeit often very slowly.

The Gallery is a world that doesn’t force you to poke around and take your time, instead it begs you to. I never felt like hints or clues were too difficult to discover or that puzzles were designed in weird and obtuse ways, but rather, that I found solutions organically in my environment while playing and never felt like I was going too far out of my way to do so. All too often the answer to a problem in others games will be in a bookshelf on a forgotten floor behind a hidden candlestick or something equally as ridiculous, but not here. Everything feels natural and expertly paced.

I’m absolutely dying to dive back in.

Unfortunately I’m not able to go into any more specifics about what happens or what you’ll be doing exactly at the risk of spoiling things for you. Not because there are any revolutionary or profound moments or because there are huge plot twists that you won’t see coming. No, there’s no cheap tricks here. Once you’ve finished playing The Gallery: Call of the Starseed, you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Update: Since its original HTC Vive release, Call of the Starseed has also launched on the Oculus Rift with Touch controllers. Since the game does encourage movement and exploration, we recommend playing it with one of the experimental 360-degree sensor setup configurations, preferably three cameras. Playing with two front-facing cameras will not result in a comparable experience and using the full compliment of at least three is greatly preferable over even just two in a 360-degree arrangement. With the proper setup, it works great. This is still one of the best adventures found in a VR headset.


Final Score: 9/10 – Amazing

The Gallery: Call of the Starseed is a short game, there’s no denying that. And just as things really start to pick up the pace, after the incredibly immersive and engaging cutscene that really opens the door for a whole galaxy of possible plot developments, it’s over. But those precious 2 hours you spend inside the game are some of the best you’ll find in VR on any platform. With The Gallery, Cloudhead uses simple, old-fashioned, awe-inducing beauty and immersion that hooks you instead of any cheap tricks or gimmicks and I’m absolutely dying to dive back in.

Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.

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Impressions on Valve’s New VR Controller Prototype from Cloudhead’s Denny Unger

denny_headshot-200x200Valve premiered a prototype of a new type of VR input controller at Steam Dev Days in order to get some preliminary feedback from developers. They’ve created a capacitive-touch controller that is attached to your hand so that you can open and close your hands to mimic the feeling of grabbing a tangible object. They used a modified scene from The Gallery, Episode 1 demo to show off this new controller, and I had a chance to Cloudhead Games President & Creative Director Denny Unger about it at the VR on the Lot conference. We talked about the Valve’s new input controller prototype, the growing ecosystem of lighthouse-tracked peripherals, his thoughts on the future of non-linear narrative, and an update about The Gallery, which recently won best narrative VR experience at the Proto Awards and has surpassed $1 million in sales.

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The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed Review. A Point and Blink Adventure.

Cloudhead Games -The Gallery is an episodic first person adventure puzzle narrative driven, VR game available on the HTC Vive. The first episode “Call of the Starseed” is available to purchase on Steam right now. There will be four episodes in total.

The setting of Call of the Starseed is similar to an 80’s style action fantasy movie and takes place as you’d imagine in a coastal American town. It’s the kind of story where you wouldn’t be surprised if you came across the Goonies or even the Lost Boys when you’re exploring underground. Taking the role of Alex, who is either a girl or a boy as the game never gives you this information, so it depends on how you imagine yourself, you have come to look for your missing twin sister.

The game starts with a brief but handy (no pun intended) tutorial section where you are taught how to use your hands (Vive Controllers) to pick up and smash bottles. Then you are introduced to the blink system which you will probably become very familiar with this type of movement feature as you play more VR games. Blink works when you hold down a button on the controller and an aiming sight appears on the ground tracked by your head movement. When you look left and right it moves left and right then as you look up and down it moves closer and further away from you. When you let go of the button you are then teleported to that position.

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From the tutorial, you are brought to the start menu but as this is Vive and VR, you find yourself standing in front of a table where you need to pick up a tape and place it into a tape player to load up the level. From here you are then transported inside a cave near a beach and are set loose to explore. You immediately just want to pick up every object you come across. This is where VR turns me from a nice guy into a bit of a jackass because I just picked up everything I interacted with and whenever I was done with it I would toss it away like some spoiled child. You can have lots of fun just picking up objects and interacting with them, like putting a candle out under water or cooking popcorn you find over the fire.

I was fully immersed in this world even if I constantly had the room limit appearing around me as I played, but it never really detached me from where I was. The only time I did get pulled out was getting up close with any of the NPCs as the graphics in the game were a little outdated but that didn’t really make any difference exploring around, you could believe that there was a kettle or a bottle in front of you waiting to be picked up. Unfortunately, you could never believe it was a real person talking to you.

TheGallery4

As immersive as the world was the story never did draw me in.  No real back story was given from the start and it’s mostly told through tape recordings you find and are played on your “tony talkman” as well as notes to read and talking with characters that the whole story unravels and even though the voice acting was top notch I was left feeling disappointed. It wasn’t until the second chapter, by not paying attention or missing it in the story, that I actually found out the girl who was talking to me through the tapes and who I was looking for was actually my twin sister. As the story is based on finding her and following her path further into danger I would have liked to have been more emotionally connected with her and with what was going on. I always felt a bit detached from the story. With the game being very narrative driven and besides a couple of puzzles and exploring there isn’t really a lot to do in the game so by the end I was starting to find myself getting a little bored.

 

The game’s strongest point is that at times you really feel you are in an adventure.  It would be very hard to get that feeling of real excitement and adventure in another game, like the time when I was wandering around underground and I’d use the light in one hand to illuminate the map I was holding in my other hand. It wasn’t some computer character or movie actor it was me who was lost in the sewers. Even for a short game, about 2-2 ½ hours long each chapter brought a different setting to the game. The first chapter made me feel like I was involved in a mystery searching the beach and caves for clues on what to do next. Wading through the underground levels gave me the feeling as if I was in a horror game; VR me was waiting for someone or something to jump out at me while the real me was hoping I wouldn’t fall over when it happened and pull out every cable from the computer. Without giving too much away the later levels were more science fiction based.

TheGallery2

The Gallery’s in-game inventory menu is lots of fun and a well-worked idea. You are carrying a backpack and when you need it you just reach over your shoulder and pull it out in front of you. It floats there as you select which item you need to remove and then when you are done you take it by the handle and put it over your back again. Any item that you are allowed to keep can easily be put in your inventory by moving your hand over your shoulder and when you release it will then drop into storage. The few puzzles are also enjoyable. You really get up close with them and using your hands as well as your head makes it feel more of a practical challenge then a puzzle. I did come across a few glitches where I had to restart a chapter-once when doing a puzzle and the other when I lost sound. Also some objects would flicker and be jerking when I interacted with them. I never had any issue with the comfort level and felt no disorientation or feeling woozy during my experience.

 

Reviewing a game in VR can be tricky as especially now when we are only just starting to play VR games, you don’t want to just get caught up enjoying the VR more than the game. This was my first real game on the Vive and it was nice to experience something other than a tech demo. When I first started playing I was giddy with the excitement of walking around and interacting with the world around me. But that excitement was perhaps caused more by the new experience of playing VR rather than for this specific game. From the start I did really want to enjoy my time in The Gallery but the story didn’t really help to bring me along with it and I even started to lose interest in listening to what the characters on tapes had to say and became more interested in throwing bottles against a wall.  This is the first episode of the series and near the end it gave me flashbacks to some of the duller parts of the Assassin Creed games which I didn’t enjoy. I did feel like I was in that coastal area and now when I close my eyes I have my own memories of being inside of a sewer looking at strange markings on a wall. Getting that from a game is more than enough of a reason to slip on that helmet, load up The Gallery and head back to the 80’s.

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