Elden Ring might be out tomorrow but who cares when you got all these virtual reality (VR) videogames on Steam Next Fest to play! Next to catch gmw3’s eye was Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures by Stardust Collective, a title mixing roomscale sci-fi management with some space-based combat.
Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures takes place entirely inside a very snug cockpit that’s very light on luxuries – there’s not even a seat for those long intergalactic journeys – but heavy on buttons, switches and levers. Excellent then for some immersive VR gameplay, where you have to main your little ship to keep yourself alive by managing power levels to systems including life support and flight control.
The demo treats you to the first level and one crucial component of Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures, a strange green alien with unquantifiable power – no not Mooncake. This little guy quite literally powers your ship, although doing so seems to kill the poor little guy so you have to eject the corpse into space. So there are some dark undertones to what initially seemed like a fairly colourful adventure.
The demo doesn’t give you much time to play with all the bells and whistles the cockpit has to offer but there are certainly plenty of them. You can 3D print your little green pal Ziggy, swap batteries between stations and then blast off to your next destination. The cockpit is very compact but not claustrophobic, with everything nicely within reach, with the studio claiming you only need a 2m x 1.5m area.
After feeling like a kid in a candy store thanks to all those buttons it was time to try the space combat. Depending on your flying preference, I found it useful popping into the settings to tweak the invert options as you can swap them all for pitch, yaw and roll. With HOTAS-like controls you’ve got to make it through an asteroid field, shooting any that get too close followed by a few enemy ships that want Ziggy for themselves.
All the mechanics were easy to grasp with the combat section being the trickiest purely because you have to stand up – it is roomscale after all – so spinning around could get a bit jarring for less experienced players.
Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures looks awesome and offers another great example of VR gameplay during the Steam Next Fest, well worth a download. For more updates keep reading gmw3.