Popular city-builder Cities: Skylines (2015) doesn’t offer native VR support, however the franchise is getting its first official made-for-VR game soon called Cities: VR, which will let you go hands-on as you take the reigns of your city from a new perspective. First unveiled back in December, now developers Fast Travel Games say the Quest 2 native is slated to arrive April 28th.
Update (March 31st, 2022): Cities: VR is coming to Quest 2 (re: not original Quest) on April 28th. The studio is offering a 10% discount on pre-orders, which you can find over at the Quest Store starting today.
Fast Travel Games also tossed out a new gameplay walkthrough video, linked below. In it programmer Martin Larsson says the team has been creating the “definitive city-building experience of City: Skylines [in] VR.”
The video gives you a good overview of the basics behind the series, which explains the game’s various city management tools, ways to expand, gain citizens, and build a unique city. Check out the new walkthrough video below:
Original Article (December 2nd, 2021): Cities: VR is being developed and published by veteran VR studio Fast Travel Games, the Stockholm-based team behind Apex Construct, The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets, and Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife.
The city-building and management simulator is coming to Meta Quest 2 in Spring of 2022. It’s uncertain whether Cities: VR will be exclusive to Quest 2, however if any of the studio’s other titles are any indication it’s possible we may see a timed release on other major VR platforms.
Just like the original Cities: Skylines, you’ll be able to do all of the same urban-planning and city management, albeit with the ability to fully immerse yourself in the world by either towering over your city or zooming down to see the day-to-day action.
You can get a better look at gameplay in the video below, which shows that Cities: VR appears essentially City: Skylines translated directly into VR.
“Cities: Skylines is the ultimate modern city-builder, and it’s an honor to bring this franchise to VR,” said Erik Odeldahl, Creative Director at Fast Travel Games. “The city-building genre has huge potential in the VR market and we couldn’t wait to work on this IP. We’ve spent a ton of time, research, and energy to translate Cities: Skylines to VR in a way that is both approachable for new players and a new challenge for Cities veterans. We can’t wait to see what players build!”
Fast Travel Games says they’ll be talking more about Cities: VR closer to launch on Quest 2 (re: not the original Quest), so we hope to learn more about other platforms and whether the VR title will support any mods or additional paid DLC such as different buildings, environments, or gameplay features.
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.
Cosmonious High Review–The Facts
Platforms:Quest 2, SteamVR Release Date: March 31 Price: TBA
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!
Puzzling Places from Realities.io added its first monthly paid downloadable puzzle pack and detailed plans for additions to the game going forward.
You can buy Monthly Pack #1 for Puzzling Places on PlayStation VR or Quest now and we had Azad Balabanian from Realities.io in our studio to detail the pack and the plan going forward. Check it out in the video embedded below.
The plan is to divide up the team behind the innovative puzzler so some folks can work Premium Packs that include audio and maybe offer a cohesive story or layer in new gameplay elements, while other members of the team work on Monthly Packs that don’t have audio but offer a regular new batch of content to dig into.
“Some people will just want to play the premium puzzles – they just want to check in every couple of months, have an amazing puzzling experience, have a great time and get out,” Balabanian told me. “Some players just want to have really fun puzzles to play every single weekend. And that’s kinda where the monthly packs really help them scratch that itch.”
Here are the details provided by Realities.io on the six puzzles included in Monthly Pack #1:
If you’re unfamiliar with Arkio’s design tools, now is the time to check it out on Quest 2.
The design app is available now in the Quest store starting with a free tier which has multiplayer, passthrough portals to the physical world, hand tracking, and the core modeling tools for shaping worlds. Starting at $8 per month, though, hobbyists looking to get started with spatial design get Unity integration that includes the ability to import and export directly from Quest to the world’s most popular game engine.
“Game devs can take their Unity scene, import it into Arkio, make changes, and then export everything back to Unity and everything will update on that end as well,” Arkio’s founder and CEO Hilmar Gunnarsson told UploadVR.
There are additional pricing tiers as well with features designed for professional architects and enterprises — the types of things we learned about when Arkio launched on Quest’s App Lab last year. But with those first two pricing tiers now available with the full launch, Arkio should offer creators a powerful new tool for designing spaces directly in VR. While ShapesXR seems tuned particularly for 3D storyboarding sessions and Meta’s Horizon Worlds is focused on creating worlds you might want to visit with friends, Arkio seems designed to appeal to a wide range of spatial designers.
I sat down with Gunnarsson in our virtual studio this week and he explained the features launching with Arkio. You can check out a 5-minute cut of our interview in the embedded video above where he goes into detail on Arkio and, in particular, explains how the passthrough features effectively break down the walls between virtual and physical worlds. In the video, he shows how one designer could layer shapes onto their physical environment for interior design purposes while a colleague designs a vast cityscape right outside the physical window.
Cities: VR, the spin-off of the popular Skylines city-building simulator, is coming to Quest 2 next month.
The game, developed by Wraith and Apex Construct studio, Fast Travel Games, hits the standalone headset on April 28. Pre-orders are launching on the Quest store today with a 10% discount. There’s also a brand new gameplay video that you can see below.
Cities: VR Release Date Confirmed
In the video, programmer Martin Larsson takes us through how you’ll get started in the game, and the systems you’ll have to consider when building. Though it’s marked as Quest 2 development footage, it’s tough to miss much of the pop-in and graphical issues throughout the video, which has us wondering if the Quest 2 is up to the challenge of fully replicating the Cities experience on a technical level. That said, many of the systems fans of the series are used to are alive and well here.
Though the game’s launching as a Quest 2 exclusive, Fast Travel has hinted that it could bring the game to other platforms in the future.
Today’s release date reveal comes at an interesting time. Just a few hours ago we also reported that another city building VR game, Little Cities, comes to Quest 1 and 2 on April 21. The pair have been closely compared since their announcements last year and now they’re releasing just a week apart. We’ll be keen to dive in and discover the differences between the two games once they’re both available.
Will you be picking up Cities: VR next month? Let us know in the comments below!
Wendy’s is more than a chain restaurant that serves square-shaped burgers. It’s also a marketing powerhouse that’s known for kicking off the trend of companies openly roasting their competitors (and other people) on Twitter. Now Wendy’s is taking a big first step into VR April 2nd with its upcoming ‘Wendyverse’, which will be hosted on Meta’s Horizon Worlds.
Horizon Worlds is Meta’s social platform for its VR headsets, Quest 2 and Oculus PC. Worlds still in a pretty early state—it’s only currently open to 18+ users in the US & Canada—however it’s already demonstrated its role as a brand engagement vehicle in the short few months after exiting invite-only beta.
Last month, Meta opened a virtual version of the arcade depicted in its Super Bowl Questy advert, which offered up VR users a host of mini-games and avatar costumes to mess around in. Granted, Questy’s was a fictional brand, but it must have been an intentionally appealing usecase of how brands could use Meta’s social VR platform to promote their wares.
The Wendyverse hype video shows off a very Questy-inspired space that includes its fair share of costumes and mini-games: a type of shuffleboard using a burger, a basketball court with a hamburger-shaped basketball, and a carnival-style darts game using straws and Frosties.
This comes amid Meta’s greater push to incentivize third-party developers to create for Horizon Worldsvia a new program that’s offering training and over $500,000 in funding and cash prizes. Much like established social VR platforms like VRChat and Rec Room, Horizon Worlds emphasizes user-generated rooms as a big attraction.
If you’re interested in getting a crack at the Wendyverse, download Horizon Worlds on Quest 2 or Oculus PC and follows these instructions:
Turn over your left wrist and select the Three Line icon from the Personal Menu, and then select the Pin icon (towards the bottom)
Select the Magnifying Glass icon (in the upper right-hand corner)
Use the virtual keyboard to search for “Wendyverse”
Among Us VR and Cities: VR will be present at the Meta Gaming Showcase next month.
The showcase is the second of its kind, providing the latest looks at titles coming to Quest. As announced yesterday, it will begin at 10am PT on April 20, hosted by Oculus Studio Executive Producer Ruth Bram.
Yesterday we speculated on what we might see at the showcase, including potential updates on GTA: San Andreas, Vertigo Games, Stress Level Zero, Splinter Cell/Assassin’s Creed and Among Us VR.
heads up Crewmates, we're gonna be in the Meta Quest Gaming Showcase! april 20 new bean footage no Impostors allowed
Well, it looks like we’ll be getting our wish for at least one of those — the Among Us VR Twitter account confirmed the game will appear in the upcoming showcase, featuring some new footage. Hopefully we’ll also learn a little about a possible release date for the game, too.
We also got confirmation that Cities: VR, the spin-off of the popular Skylines game, will be at the show. Developer Fast Travel pointed out that you won’t want to miss the event. Could this be where we learn about the spring release date for the Quest 2 exclusive?
For now, those are the only developers and publishers we’ve heard from — the rest of the showcase remains wrapped under a blanket of mystery. We should also expect a bit of the unexpected as well — Meta confirmed yesterday that alongside updates on previously-announced titles, we’re also in store for some brand new game announcements.
It won’t be the only VR showcase this year either — the UploadVR Showcase is back this June. Keep an eye out for more details soon.
Meta announced it’s returning this year with another installment of its Quest Gaming Showcase, which means we’ll soon be getting our annual download on upcoming Quest games and updates coming this year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg today announced the second annual Meta Quest Gaming Showcase, which is slated to take place on April 20th at 10am PT (local time here).
Meta says we can expect new game announcements, gameplay first-looks, updates on games coming in the next year, and “a whole lot of surprises.”
Ruth Bram, Executive Producer at Oculus Studios, will be returning to present the show this year.
Last year’s showcase, which was previously called the Oculus Gaming Showcase, was mostly centered on updates to platform favorites such as Pistol Whip, The Climb 2, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, and revealed footage of I Expect You To Die 2, Resident Evil 4, and Lone Echo II.
We’re hoping this year’s show focuses more on wholly new games. You can follow along with us on April 20th by watching the showcase via Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, and Oculus TV.
PSVR 2 has been announced and is hopefully coming soon, but what about PSVR 2 games?
Note: This article was originally published on January 6 and has since been updated.
We’ve got a full rundown of all announced and rumored PSVR 2 games to keep track of. We’ll be keeping this list up to date, so check back often.
Harnessing the power of the PS5, PSVR 2 will be capable of much more ambitious games than the original headset, which ran on the PS4. But with the device only just announced, Sony is playing its cards close to its chest when it comes to the software library. So far we have only a handful of fully announced PSVR 2 games, but there are plenty of other titles that are rumored or hinted at to talk about too. This list includes rumored PSVR 2 games and also titles that appear on both PS4 and PS5 but have PSVR support for the latter, making them likely targets for PSVR 2 too.
The first game Sony itself has officially announced for PSVR 2, Horizon Call of the Wild is a spin-off of the popular open-world series. You’ve likely already played Horizon Zero Dawn, in which protagonist Aloy learned about the near-extinction of humanity and the rise of dinosaur-like machines, and the sequel, Forbidden West, is coming to PS4 and PS5 soon.
Call of the Wild is an all-new entry in which you play as a new character (though you will meet Aloy) and is developed by one of Sony’s newly-acquired studios, Firesprite. More details are yet to be revealed but you can see the first gameplay above and we’re hopeful that this will be a PSVR 2 launch title, too.
Firmament
Myst developer Cyan World’s latest game was originally planned to come to PSVR. But the studio recently confirmed that it’s stopping work on that version of the game and will instead bring it to PSVR 2. It’s clear to see why the PSVR version might have been an issue – Firmament looks like an absolutely gorgeous game and another interesting addition to the adventure genre. It was actually announced all the way back in 2018 but the full release is planned for 2022 with PSVR 2 support arriving when the headset is ready for launch.
Unannounced Coatsink Game
Esper, Shadow Point and Jurassic World Aftermath developer Coatsink is confirmed to be working on a launch title for PSVR 2. Parent company Thunderful confirmed as much in a recent financial report. Exactly what the team is working on is unclear – it could be a port of one of its older VR titles, or it could be something brand new. Aftermath was its most recent VR effort, but it’s unclear if that game is fully exclusive to Quest or could come to other platforms.
Unannounced nDreams Games
In a recent funding announcement, UK-based nDreams confirmed that it’s working on multiple projects for PSVR 2. The studio has a long history with VR, but is best known for its 2020 stealth action VR, Phantom: Covert Ops, in which players infiltrated hostile territory in a kyack, and last year’s blockbuster PSVR shooter, Fracked. There’s no word yet on what these new projects will be, but nDreams now consists of three studios making VR content, and we’d gladly replay Fracked on new hardware.
Runner
Horizon might be the first game Sony announced for PSVR 2, but Runner developer Truant Pixel announced its intention to release on the platform nearly a year before that. This is an anime-inspired biking game in which you speed down futuristic highways fending off enemies with dual-wielding weapons. It’s got gorgeously animated cutscenes and is also expected to launch on Quest 2 and PC VR. Perhaps not a raw display of PSVR 2’s power, then, but a good indication of what you can expect from indie development on the headset.
Low-Fi
The long-anticipated sci-fi title from Iris VR has been promising to join the line-up of PSVR 2 games for years now. Low-Fi is designed to be a futuristic life-simulator inspired by the likes of Blade Runner in which players can make their own choices about how to proceed. It’s been in early access on Itch for a few years, with the developer continuing to bolt on new features. Hopefully 2022 will see the launch of the full version of the game on PSVR 2.
Samurai Slaughter House
Another indie studio that’s been very quick to confirm it’ll join the list of PSVR 2 games, Samurai Slaughter House is a bloody melee combat game with a black and white art style and physics-based fighting. The game’s also planned for PC VR and Quest 2.
PSVR 2 Games: Rumored Games
These are possible PSVR 2 games that developers have either hinted at or seem very likely to come to the platform.
Resident Evil 8
Capcom’s staple horror series returned with another mainline entry in 2021. Resident Evil 8 returned to the first-person camera perspective first seen in 2017’s PSVR-supported Resident Evil 7. Reports that correctly revealed the game’s setting and mechanics ahead of launch also claimed that Capcom was implementing VR support into the title at one point in time. Is it possible that implementation was put on pause until PSVR 2 was out? We certainly hope so.
Gran Turismo 7
PS4’s Gran Turismo Sport featured bare-bones support for PSVR. The actual experience was incredibly polished, but it only let you race against one other AI opponent or perfect your lap times. Series creator Kazunori Yamauchi himself expressed frustration with the performance needed for a good VR experience and once said he expected that to improve in the next-generation of consoles. More recently, he cryptically noted that he couldn’t talk about possible VR support for Gran Turismo 7 “yet”. All things considered, this seems like a solid bet to become a full PSVR 2 game in the future.
Farpoint 2
Farpoint became one of PSVR’s most popular shooters thanks to its reliance on the excellent rifle-shaped Aim Controller. The game had a full single-player campaign and a fun — if limited — multiplayer option, sending players to an alien world to fight spider-like monsters. Developer Impulse Gear recently put out another great shooter named Larcenauts for Quest and PC VR. Around that time, we asked the studio’s Greg Koreman about a possible return to the series.
He told us: “We definitely don’t have anything to announce at the moment but that is our roots and we’re very happy with what we did on Farpoint. And I think you look at that game and that universe and there’s absolutely a lot more to explore there.” Yep, it sounds like a sequel is very possiblyy one of the upcoming PSVR 2 games.
Half-Life: Alyx
What must be one of the most hoped-for PSVR 2 games is a port of Valve’s stunning return to its flagship franchise from 2020. Alyx absolutely delivered on the AAA VR dream with a long, highly-polished campaign that really capitalized on the platform. Before launch in 2019, Valve’s Greg Coomer had this to say to PushSquare on the possibility of a PSVR port for the game: “We believe Sony’s VR platform has been a huge success for the medium, and we assume that lots of Sony customers would love to experience this new chapter of Half-Life.” Could we see Alyx arrive on PSVR 2 with this in mind?
PSVR 2 Games: Cross-Gen Games With PSVR 1 Support
There are games that are on both PS4 and PS5 already and have PSVR support on PS4, thus making them likely candidates for PS5 games in the future.
Hitman 3
Arguably the last truly huge PSVR release, Hitman 3 featured timed-exclusive support for the headset when it launched in January 2021. Not only could you play the entire game in first-person using the DualShock 4’s motion controls, but you could import the campaigns from Hitman 1 and 2 and play them there too. This January the timed-exclusivity window will be up and the game’s getting VR support on PC, too, with two-handed motion controls. It’s a very good indication that, when PSVR 2 drops, the PS5 version of Hitman 3 could well add in support.
Resident Evil 7
Resident Evil 7 is due to get a PS5 remaster later in 2022. It will include ray tracing support, improved framerates and integration with DualSense’s’ haptic feedback and resistence triggers. There’s been no confirmation of PSVR 2 support thus far but, given this remains one of the best games on the original headset, we’ll keep our fingers crossed. If PSVR 2 gets Resident Evil 7 and 8? We’ll be very lucky indeed.
No Man’s Sky
Hello Games’ celebrated sci-fi epic has had VR support on PS4 and PC for years now and maintained a consistent player base. In fact, the game even supports upgraded visuals for PSVR on PS5, giving players an early taste of the visual clarity they can expect for PSVR 2 games. But we’re fully expecting the native PS5 version of the game to get full support for Sony’s new headset when it finally launches. There’ll be hundreds of hours of space exploration just waiting for you. It’s an exciting thought.
The Persistence
Sony bought Horizon Call of the Mountain developer Firesprite in 2021, but the Liverpool, UK-based team had been showing support for PSVR long before that. It created the fantastic timed-exclusive, The Persistence, first for PSVR. It’s a thrilling, procedurally generated survival horror game that established palpable atmosphere. The Persistence eventually found its way to other headsets and flatscreen platforms including PS5. Once the new headset’s released, it’s a solid bet that this will be one of the new PSVR 2 games we can enjoy on the device.
Kona
Kona is something of an oddity. It’s a first-person investigation game set in snowy Northern Canada. You look into strange events that have left a small town deserted and survive the blizzard. The PS4 and PC versions of the game got premium VR DLC that let you play the entire experience with a headset. A PS5 version arrived somewhat out of the blue with a free upgrade. Hopefully we’ll see this version also get PSVR 2 support once the headset arrives.
And that’s the current list of confirmed and rumored PSVR 2 games! What are you looking forward to? Are there any other titles you’re hoping get announced? Let us know in the comments below!
Beat Saber, the popular block-slashing rhythm game, is getting a new paid music pack soon that will feature eight tracks from Fall Out Boy.
The American rock band announced the news via Twitter, and included a full tracklist too. Listed below, the music pack spans the band’s early 2000s period as well as more recent tracks from when it returned from its 2009 – 2013 hiatus.
Centuries
Thnks fr th Mmrs
This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race
Immortals
I Don’t Care
My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)
Dance, Dance
Irresistible
Like the band’s live shows, the tracks are said to be “filled with pyro,” with the pack’s trailer showing off a stage, lighting effects, and a stream of fire eruptions.
“That’s why our first VR collab had to have a TON of it… this will be the biggest rock show that Beat Saber has ever seen,” says Fall Out Boy bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz.
The Fall Out Boy Music Pack is slated to release on all supported platforms tomorrow, March 31st, at 10:00am PT (local time here). Individual songs cost $2, while the whole pack costs $11.
This follows the release of multiple music packs over the years, including tracks from Skrillex, BTS, Linkin Park, Timbaland, Greenday, Panic at the Disco!, Imagine Dragons, and a host of artists under the Interscope music label.
Live actors are returning to Tender Claws’ experience The Under Presents for a limited run starting from April 1.
The Under Presents launched in late 2019, as a wholly unique VR experience that merged single player, multiplayer, social VR and live theater together into one surreal package. There’s a whole single player campaign to work through, but there’s also a multiplayer and social side to the experience that blends pre-recorded and live segments together and is ever-changing.
Three years on from release, many of the original cast members are returning for a “limited engagement” of new live performances in The Under Presents. From April 1, players will be able to view these new performances that feature “new story beats and mini events to explore.”
Take note – Live performers are returning to The Under Presents starting April 1st! Come witness the emergence of friends, old and new, from the sands of time! pic.twitter.com/AQuDi1Ubyi
You can see a glimpse of what to expect in the video embedded above, tweeted by Tender Claws, showing a giant (and presumably live) skeleton bend down to pick up an item and interact with players.
Tender Claws is known as a studio that pushes the boundaries of VR and examines the medium through a surrealist, critical lens across varied types of experiences. Its most recent release, Virtual Virtual Reality 2, was a very different project that was equally ambitious as The Under Presents, but not quite as successful in its execution.
Will you be returning to The Under Presents for new live performances? Let us know what you think in the comments.
I’ve spent over 10,000 hours in ‘the metaverse’—or at least the proto-metaverse—virtual worlds inhabited by real people represented as avatars. The experiences and relationships I had there saved me from a dark place and set me on a mission to do the same for others.
Guest Article by Noah Robinson
Noah is founder and CEO of Very Real Help, and a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University. Very Real Help has built a clinical research platform called Help Club to explore how social virtual reality environments can be used to deliver transdiagnostic cognitive behavioral peer support. Very Real Help has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and investors to use Help Club for the treatment of substance use disorders and other mental health conditions.
There’s real pitfalls and dangers in the metaverse, such as the pedophilia and child grooming recently highlighted by theBBC, or the sexual assault that’s occurred on various platforms. But like any technology, the metaverse can be used for both good and bad. It all depends on how each application is built and how we choose to use them. With immersive virtual reality, where the entire environment can be controlled, the potential to help people is nearly limitless.
When I was 13 I escaped into a virtual social game called Runescape. Right when I hit puberty, I realized I was gay. I was overwhelmed with feelings of shame and anxiety. Several years into the burden of being closeted, I felt hopeless for my future and considered ending my life. But one thing kept me going: as I made friends and leveled up alongside them in Runescape, virtual stimuli created real hits of dopamine. These hits are an important treatment target for depression—in therapy, we teach patients to engage in rewarding behaviors to increase motivation and potentially overcome depression.
I spent most of my teenage years, nearly 10,000 hours, living in this virtual world. Inside I could build a virtual identity in a fantasy world where sexual identity was not a factor. As I gained confidence in the virtual world, I eventually created my first clan which steadily grew in size. Although it consisted of 400 ‘strangers’ on the internet, they were my closest friends. Eventually I felt enough social belonging and validation to come out of the closet to them. My friends accepted me, even when they knew my deepest, darkest secret. Going through this process virtually empowered me to come out of the closet in the real world and eventually to overcome my depression.
From that moment on, I knew I wanted to devote my life to building virtual experiences that were as compelling as a videogame but also as effective as therapy.
I know it’s possible because I’m already on that journey. I’ve built a mental-health focused virtual app called Help Club—available on Quest, PC, Mac, and iOS—that allows anyone to improve their well-being and mental health in a virtual setting. You can join as an avatar and attend live groups that are led by trained coaches. A fully realized metaverse has the potential to change millions of lives by making it easy to connect with this kind of virtual support group.
Avatars inside Help Club | Image courtesy Very Real Help
Help Club is just getting started—since launching our beta in October we’ve had thousands of people come into our community—we’re starting to see that a safe, supervised environment can quite literally change peoples’ lives. Help Club is designed from the ground up to support mental health. We’re training everyday, ordinary empathic people to become coaches who can lead support groups and teach the scientifically validated tools of an approach we’ve developed called Cognitive Behavioral Immersion.
It’s a place I wish I had as a 13-year old to guide me toward healing rather than entice me into a world of escape.
Building a mental health space that’s ready for the metaverse isn’t easy and we’ve had to use technology to ensure a safe world for all. We screen folks and monitor interactions—although we’re not delivering therapy, we’ve adopted standard practices developed in therapy training clinics such as recording interactions to monitor for quality and prevent trolls from causing psychological harm. Although we only support people who are 18 or over, we’ve also seen demand from minors who have found our platform and want mental health help.
We’re starting to see exciting results from our virtual mental health platform. It’s attracting people who need help; 53% of our users have (self-reported) levels of clinical depression, and 45% have clinical levels of anxiety. And we’re starting to observe decreases in symptoms of depression and anxiety for those who spend time in our application.
While VRChat is the platform the BBC highlighted recently in its story on child grooming, there are examples of safe spaces on the platform. For example, a beautiful transgender community blossomed in VRChat and allowed safe spaces to exist for some people who were struggling with the same things I did as a teenager. One person even described that they were thinking about transitioning to the opposite gender for 10 years, and it took trying on a female avatar in VRChat to finally begin the acceptance process and seek out a gender therapist.
We’ve also seen Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and chronic illness support groups come to fruition in Altspace. These groups find refuge in these virtual spaces—safe places to connect with others in a nonjudgmental space. The spaces are safe because people have the comfort of being anonymous while also feeling the immersive social support of avatars around them. Although these platforms can deliver help, they can also cause harm if there is no moderation or accountability. These platforms also need to protect minors by keeping them in safe, moderated environments.
Help Club is also changing lives. We have Help Club members who started out with severe social anxiety or depression and have now completed our coach training and are leading meetings to help others.
One of our members publicly shared that she had not been able to leave her house in nearly three years. Help Club helped her to feel comfortable leaving the house again, and she reported her experience was “infinitely better than three years of therapy.” Now that she can leave home, she’s able to engage in rewarding real-world activities that help people to overcome depression.
Image courtesy Very Real Help
Another member reported that he was too depressed to go to work and had been lying in bed all day. For nearly two weeks he went to Help Club meetings every day and reported that he was able to go to work for the first time in a long time. He told us he had tears in his eyes after coming home from his first day of work, thinking about how Help Club had gotten him there.
This is just the beginning. More research is needed, including randomized control trials, to truly know if the metaverse can deliver on its promise of helping people overcome real-life problems. But even right now I know that there are thousands of other people out there like me, looking to escape into the metaverse to avoid, and maybe even heal, real-life pain.
Cosmonious High sees you travel back to school to re-educate yourself in the realm of VR. But what’s a school without classmates?
Today on Upload Access we’re meeting the cast of Owlchemy’s newest VR game. We’ve got detailed rundowns of all the new friends you can expect to work with during class and hang out with as you move between the halls. Read on for exclusive character bios for your new classmates.
Fren
Fren hails from the Bipid homeworld, Boptune. The chaos at Cosmonious High might be intense, but so is a homeship packed with a dozen or so siblings. She can handle the heat of the hottest sauces and is the Fren-liest kid in school!
Blort
Blort’s a fun-loving flan who will happily help you through Cosmonious High: from still lifes in Visualetics to singing in Auditoriology. But their true love is the Sports Dome… or at least, that’s where he hangs out…
Speks
Blipping into Cosmonious High, we have Speks, a pandimensional Trisk! Speks is hyper, friendly, forgetful, fun-loving, fated to save the world, and did I say ‘friendly’ already? When she’s not doing homework or fending off the Doomfather, she’s happy to help!
Honk
Meet the Captain of the Cosmo Comets! Sprinting into our hearts, we have Honk: Cosmonious High’s star planetballer! Don’t let his great arms and stunning flame-like hair intimidate you. Honk is the sweetest jock that ever chucked a planetball through a hoop.
Gleg
Meet Gleg, our resident lovable nihilist. There’s no one better for a haigoo or an existential crisis. Gleg doesn’t really like anything, but if it means you’ll leave him alone then he likes dronecore and solitude…
Li Tahn
Here’s Li Tahn, bringing us artistic chill vibes… If you’re looking for her, check the Visualetics classroom. Grab a cup of coffeen and settle in for a chat about the blop art movement. It’s hard to phase Li Tahn, which makes her a calm center in the chaos at Cosmo High.
Penk
Your class president is present to make sure your first day is perfect! Penk is a model student with strong color coordination skills, and the biggest UltraViolett stan at Cosmo High.
Zanesha
Zanesha enjoys making up stories, not being in class, leading the occasional student revolution and pretending she’s a detective. She may or may not have a lair. With her around, it’s never just an ordinary day at alien space school.
Xip
If you want to know about blebs, then Xip is your Trisk! They know everything there is to know about these little cuties – from blebanas to blebbles to blattés! Annnnd they know how to get out of playing planetball without Coach Leti noticing.
Oog
This flan without a plan is running for class president. Known for a flatulent sense of humor, they are the main purveyor of pranks at Cosmo High. Just don’t ask anyone about the Oogcident…
Prax
Prax is the obvious choice for Cosmonious High’s next class president. He’s organized, detail-oriented, and disapproves of chaos in all forms. You’ll find him in class or running a bake sale, stocked with cookies made by his dads.
Jalam
Last, but certainly not least, is Jalam! Jalam’s a diamond ranked Pirates of the Gooniverse player, looking for a nemesis to make her life at Cosmo High remotely interesting. Her sarcastic exterior hides a heart of gold, but… don’t tell her we said so.
Cosmonious High is out on Quest 2 and PC VR on March 31. We’ve got plenty of coverage of the upcoming VR game as part of Upload Access, and check back next week when we discuss the history of Owlchemy Labs.
A Beat Saber Fall Out Boy pack is on the way soon, and we already know the tracklist.
The new pack for the smash hit VR game was just announced on Twitter with a short video seen below. It showcased new visuals for level themes complete with some of the lighting additions made in Beat Saber’s most recent update. There’s also some pyrotechnics on display.
Centuries
Thnks fr th Mmrs
This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race
Immortals
I Don’t Care
My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)
Dance, Dance
Irresistible
That brings the pack to eight songs total. There’s the usual mix of new songs and classics in here but we’ll be the first to point out that Sugar, We’re Going Down is missing from the list and that’s basically a crime and possibly the biggest omission since I Write Sins Not Tragedies missed out on the Panic! At The Disco pack in 2019. That’s two emo anthems from 2005 missing from Beat Saber and I’m sure you’ll all join me in protest.
Anyway, this will be the first premium Beat Saber DLC pack in 2022 after developer Beat Games released another free OST update a few weeks back. Given that pack also introduced some new block types to the game, you can hopefully expect to see them utilized here, too.
A new tweet suggests that Meta has taken another step in its transition to using the Meta brand across its Quest product line, replacing the original Oculus Quest 2 branding on the headset’s outer packaging with the new Meta Quest 2 title.
As shown below, the tweet shows an unconfirmed image of packaging with the headset’s new title, Meta Quest 2. The tweet comes from a Japanese user. We reached out to Meta to verify the image but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
If this new image of Meta-branded Quest 2 packaging is real then the transition from Oculus Quest 2 to Meta Quest 2 is almost complete. You still have to head to oculus.com to purchase an ‘Oculus Quest 2’, which remains the last major piece of the puzzle, save for a few other services that still carry the Oculus name.
april 20
no Impostors allowed
GDC (@TenderClaws) 
Sprinting into our hearts, we have Honk: Cosmonious High’s star planetballer! Don’t let his great arms and stunning flame-like hair intimidate you. Honk is the sweetest jock that ever chucked a planetball through a hoop.
If you’re looking for her, check the Visualetics classroom. Grab a cup of coffeen and settle in for a chat about the blop art movement. It’s hard to phase Li Tahn, which makes her a calm center in the chaos at Cosmo High.
