Yeeps: Hide and Seek has just launched on the main Quest store. But, even before that, the game racked up some 20,000 reviews on App Lab in just a few months. More than a clone, Yeeps understands what’s special about Gorilla Tag and how to add meaningfully new elements to the experience.
There are those who have dismissed Gorilla Tag as a ‘meme game’ and some kind of viral fluke. And there are those who see something special about the game that’s worth understanding. Given Gorilla Tag’s recent milestone of $100 million in revenue, it’s fair to say the second group has the right idea.
Developer Trass Games certainly sees the value in understanding what makes Gorilla Tag special. With Yeeps: Hide and Seek, launched on Quest App Lab just a few months ago, the studio has successfully emulated the essential arm-based locomotion and social aspect of the game, while fusing it with building elements along the lines of Fortnite and Minecraft.
The game doesn’t merely copy Gorilla Tag’s essential elements, but pushes them further. The social aspect is amplified with in-game items and creation, allowing players to make their own structures, mini-games, and activities. And arm-based locomotion is supplemented with even more free-form movement like gliding, grappling, and launchpads.
And it’s working.
In just four months on App Lab, Yeeps amassed nearly 20,000 reviews. And the game has only just launched into the main Quest Store—where it’s likely to grow even more rapidly.
Gorilla Tag itself followed a similar trajectory. Initially launched on App Lab, the game spent nearly a year there while it spread rapidly through word-of-mouth alone, eventually surpassing Beat Saber as the most reviewed game on Quest—even though it hadn’t launched on the main Quest store by that point.
While Gorilla Tag has spawned countless clones, games like Yeeps and others are taking the parts of the game that work best and turning them into something new. The result has been a new genre of VR games emerging right before our eyes.
Metal: Hellsinger VR is a very unique flatscreen game, and also has the potential to be a very unique VR game. But it’s going to take a little tuning up before launch to really make it sing.
If you’ve never played the flatscreen version of Metal: Hellsinger, it’s probably unlike anything you’ve played before. It’s a fast-paced FPS game that asks you to shoot to the beat. Doing so nets you more damage, more points, and more intense music. It feels completely different from your usual shooter, in way that gets you into an awesome flow.
That flow state can be even more fun with the all-encompassing immersion of VR, and to that end, the idea to build a separate VR version of the game—aptly called Metal: Hellsinger VR—is well-premised. But as ever, porting mechanics that weren’t originally made for VR requires serious attention to detail and polish to make things feel just right.
Metal: Hellsinger VR is coming to Quest, PC VR, and PSVR 2 later this year. I played the newly released PC VR demo, and while the game’s potential to shine in VR is clear, it’s falling just a few notes short of a perfect arrangement. However, this isn’t because the mechanics aren’t well suited for VR, but simply because they need that ‘last 10%’ of polish to really sing. Because nothing is fundamentally wrong with the game, I have real hope that they can tune things up by the time it reaches release.
There’s little doubt that you’ll find yourself unconsciously bopping your head to the beat as you play Metal: Hellsinger VR. The heavy metal soundtrack is solid, and physically aiming your guns and pulling the trigger amplifies the feeling of being totally in tune with the beat.
Gameplay is unabashedly fast-paced, but the developers have built in a decent set of VR comfort options. Teleport movement is unfortunately not available, though I think the developers are warranted in not including it—the pace, flow, and combat balance of the game just wouldn’t be right with teleport. And although the game defaults to smooth turning (not the best idea), snap turning is available, as well as peripheral blinders. Using a heavy blinder managed to keep me comfortable for at least an hour of play, despite all the fast stick movement and double jumping.
The bones here are good, but it’s the essence of the gameplay—and how it feels in VR—that needs to find the right key.
For instance, pumping the shotgun. By default the game asks you to manually pump the shotgun, which should feel absolutely awesome, right on the beat, between shots. But the particular way the pump gesture is detected—and the way the game handles two-handed weapon aiming—doesn’t feel quite right. In the end it often feels frustrating to pump the shotgun, perhaps due to the ‘correct’ window of timing being too tight. Quantizing the pump sound and timing a bit could be one solution to making this feel right.
The developers ostensibly realize the shotgun doesn’t feel quite right, because they included an option to disable manual pumping. As much as I wanted the feeling of pumping the shotgun on my own, disabling it turned out to be a more enjoyable experience.
Reloading the shotgun has a similar issue. In theory, it should be perfect for VR: when you press the reload button the break-action opens and then you’re asked to flick the shotgun closed on the right beat to successfully reload.
But something in the way the ‘flick closed’ gesture is implemented makes it very difficult to time correctly. This is likely a result of the developers having a particular motion in mind for the flicking action, which might not be quite the same way that other people tend to do it.
For instance, do you flick ‘up’? Do you flick ‘down then up’? Must it be a sudden motion? A smooth motion? If you test this with 10 different people, they’ll probably all do it in a slightly different way. And further, at what point exactly in the motion does the game consider the ‘moment’ of the reload? Without communicating this clearly, it’s hard for the player to find the right timing.
This is the kind of thing that requires serious polish in VR to feel fun and fluid. But when it doesn’t quite get there, it winds up feeling tedious and frustrating.
I probably spent 10 minutes just sitting in a corner trying to practice the shotgun reload flick. After a while I started to get the hang of it, but it still feels more tedious than gratifying, and frustrating when you don’t land it even when you felt like you had the right timing.
Another weapon in the game—the dual-wielded pistols—feels similar. Again, they have a reload gesture that in theory should feel awesome in VR (flick your guns inward so the chambers swing into the gun). But the motion required and the timing window never feel quite intuitive.
Image courtesy Funcom
And then there’s the ‘Slaughter’ mechanic—a satisfying finishing move that crushes weakened enemies to the beat. Or it could be satisfying… with the essential VR polish.
In the fantasy of the game, the Slaughter mechanic has you dash toward your victim and chop them in half with a sword, perfectly on the beat.
But in Metal: Hellsinger VR you just press a button and it all happens automatically.
I can’t tell you how incredibly, deliciously satisfying this mechanic could be with just a little more VR-native design put into it. It’s so close… I can feel it.
Instead of simply pressing a button, a ‘pulling’ gesture (as if yanking yourself toward the enemy with an invisible chain) would be a great start to involving the player’s body in the action. And to really make this mechanic feel amazing, asking the player to actually swing the sword at the enemy would make for an incredibly satisfying finishing move.
You can probably imagine it in your mind as one continuous, satisfying motion: reach out with your right hand toward the target and hold the grip button to ‘grab’ them. Yank your hand to pull yourself to them in a dash. Then—with your hand already drawn back from the ‘pull’—the sword appears in your hand and you swing to cleave through the enemy. All to the beat.
The pieces already exist to make Metal: Hellsinger VR an awesome VR game. But as is always the case with VR ports… it’s all in the details.
There’s at least some hope the developers can close this ‘VR gap’ before the game launches. For what it’s worth, I appreciate their commitment to making the game feel at home in VR, even if it wasn’t designed for it in the first place.
Metal: Hellsinger VR has an all new hub area where players can select levels, equip their loadout, and see the game’s narrative sequences, all in an immersive way. They even converted the game’s Settings pages into books that sit on a shelf. They’re a little cumbersome to use at present, but you can tell the developers have their heart in the right place when it comes to trying to make the game feel at home in VR.
The closest thing to Metal: Hellsinger VR that’s actually a native VR game is Pistol Whip. While they’re different games striving for different gameplay, the ‘ease of play’ that can be felt in Pistol Whip is a great bar for Metal: Hellsinger VR to aim for, and one that I hope it can reach.
Ultraleap, the company behind the Leap Motion hand-tracking module, informed staff on Wednesday that it was proposing a layoff amid a potential restructuring of the business that could see the company split in two.
The Bristol, UK-based company acquired Leap Motion in 2019, prompting a rebrand from its original name Ultrahaptics to Ultraleap. Prior to the acquisition, the company was best known for pioneering its mid-air haptic technology, which uses ultrasound to project tactile sensations onto the user’s hands.
As reported by Sky News, Ultraleap is allegedly now seeking to sell off its hand-tracking business entirely, and spin out its mid-air haptics division into a new company, which would be owned by Ultraleap’s existing shareholders and also seek additional external funding.
Leap Motion 2 in front of its predecessor | courtesy Ultraleap
The company hasn’t publicly confirmed the sale of Leap Motion or the specifics surrounding the restructuring of its haptics business, however it has confirmed layoffs are coming:
“After much consideration, we have made the difficult decision to reshape some of our divisions and reduce the size of our team,” an Ultraleap spokesperson told Sky News. “This decision has not been taken lightly, but it is necessary for us to adapt our business to better serve our market and our customers.
Initially released in 2013, Leap Motion was one of the first viable hand-tracking modules to come to market. While it was originally created to work as an input method for PCs, a few years later the then still independent company would hard pivot into the VR space, providing hand-tracking to headsets which at the time had none.
Fast-forward to today, and many standalone headsets pack in their own onboard hand-tracking thanks to the requisite bank of optical sensors that are also used for tracking the user in room-scale environments. The shift has made bespoke modules like Leap Motion less desirable for consumers overall, leaving the company to focus on integrating its tech with boutique headset manufacturers such as Varjo, Pimax, and Vrgineers.
Availability of Quest 2 direct from Meta seems to have dried up, as the company’s last-gen headset is now showing out of stock in nearly all regions—likely making way for what’s next.
Although you can probably find new Quest 2 headsets from the usual online retailers and stores, when Meta pulls the plug on direct availability on any headset, it typically means there’s something just around the corner.
At the time of this writing, the only region with availability direct from Meta is the UK, which still has the 128GB variant in stock, priced at £200.
Quest 2 (left), Quest 3 (right) | Based on images courtesy Meta
The chief rumor going around is the company’s next headset will replace Quest 2 as its cheaper, lower-end hardware next to its flagship headset, Quest 3.
Meta hasn’t confirmed as much, however the company is indeed planning to release a cheaper VR headset in 2024, making the next logical opportunity for launch sometime around its upcoming Connect developer conference, which is planned for September 25th-26th.
Initially released in late 2020, Meta has tinkered with Quest 2 variants and pricing over the years. Most recently, the company slashed the price of Quest 2’s 128 GB version to just $200, likely making it the headset’s final barnburner sale.
Meanwhile, Meta will soon be making a monumental shift in how it operates by releasing its XR operating system to third-party OEMs for the first time, which will see Quest-like devices from ASUS, Lenovo, and Xbox—all of which will have the same OS, content library, and Horizon Worlds social VR layer.
Bandai Namco revealed late last year that it was partnering with XR studio Atlas V (Gloom Eyes, BATTLESCAR) to release a Mobile Suit Gundam game for Quest. While we saw a pretty vague teaser earlier this year, the studios tossed out a little more information today for its “full-length” anime, including release window and mixed reality elements.
Update (June 26th, 2024): Announced during UploadVR’s Summer Showcase today, Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom is officially coming to Quest this fall, bringing along with it some mixed reality gameplay elements revealed in a new trailer. UploadVR says the MR part of the game is set to include the ability to fight battles in your own living room using mobile suits featured in the main storyline and exclusive suits “designed specifically for this immersive experience,”
The new trailer follows above the original article, which includes all other extant information about the game.
Original Article (March 21st, 2024): Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom is being pitched as a “virtual reality interactive movie,” which is said to provide fans with the opportunity to immerse themselves in the Gundam series in a new way and brand new story.
While the studios were previously very light on the detail when the project was announced late last year, it’s now been revealed the narrative will take place in the Universal Century 0096, including battle scenes in outer space.
Now, just in time for the Tokyo-based anime consumer show Anime Japan, we’ve got a brand new teaser for Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom (linked above).
If you’re looking for a slightly deeper dive, Bandai Namco Filmworks and Altas V also showed off a behind-the-scenes video at SXSW 2024 last week, which gives us a brief glimpse its storyboards and character design.
In the meantime, we’ll be waiting to hear word on exactly when to expect Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom on Quest, as for now the release date is still a complete mystery. The studios tell us we should expect a Quest Store page soon however, which will let you wishlist the game.
There are a few great ways to market VR games, but there’s arguably none better than by showing real people immersed in virtual environments thanks to mixed reality capture. While Meta has its own Mixed Reality Capture tool (MRC), the company is taking a step back from development by adopting third-party app LIV as its official solution.
LIV describes the deal as a “multi-year partnership with Meta to bring LIV’s mixed reality capture & virtual camera solutions to developers publishing on Meta Quest and soon also creators who wish to use those features in Meta Quest and Rift apps.”
To boot, LIV is today releasing in beta its new SDK v2.0 for Unity-based apps which support Meta’s Presence Platform capabilities, such as hand tracking, passthrough, spatial anchors, etc.
The studio says that later this year a beta release of SDK v2.0 for similar Unreal-based apps will also arrive, with official release of both Unity and Unreal versions coming sometime in Q4 2024.
Although a headlining feature, LIV isn’t just a mixed reality capture tool; it also specializes in avatar solutions for Vtubing and allows streamers to monitor chats, alerts and notifications in VR. Notably, to create mixed reality videos like the one seen below, you’ll need a PC with a supported external camera, and of course the free PC app itself.
One of the biggest names to use LIV is Another Axiom’s Gorilla Tag, which has just topped $100 million in revenue, making it one of VR’s most successful games to date.
“Another Axiom builds fully realized spaces that are meant to be shared together, like in our popular game Gorilla Tag,” said David Yee, COO at Another Axiom. “We’re always looking at new ways to give our players and creators a great experience they can share with their family and friends. This partnership between LIV and Meta provides access to best-in-class capture and virtual camera technology, introducing new ways to capture and share in-headset experiences. We can’t wait to see what the community does with these new tools.”
You can download LIV on Steam and get started on integrating LIV SDK to your Quest app starting today, both of which are free for content creators and game developers alike.
Indie studio Ivory Crow Games have released a new demo for Chrono Weaver, a single player game that lets you make copies of yourself to solve physics-based puzzles.
Set in a mysterious science facility filled with mind-bending puzzles, you use your trusty slingshot and time travel device to find solutions to seemingly impossible tests.
If you’ve noticed a few familiar influences in the new trailer, you’re not wrong. Here’s how the studio described Chrono Weaver to Road to VR:
In our game you play as a test-subject starting a new job, with unknown origins and a simple goal: Smash the Data Disk. Guiding you along the way is a flying robot named Yoto, a quirky character who manages your journey and helps make sure you don’t get too lost along the way.
The gameplay loop has a vibe similar to Portal, going from puzzle to puzzle with short bursts of story and mystery in between. The game teaches as you go along, so there is no true tutorial, instead it grows in difficulty, introducing mechanics and weaving them together creating exciting and challenging puzzles. Other games that are similar to it in VR are The Last Clockwinder, We Are One, and Transpose VR.
While there’s no release date yet, the two-person indie studio has released a demo that shows off a good slice of the game’s time-bending fun. Notably, this is a completely overhauled demo from the one distributed during Steam VR Fest back in December.
The demo is said to take between 30 minutes and an hour long to complete, which you can download for free for both Quest 2/3/Pro and SteamVR headsets. If you already played the original demo from December, the studio says you’ll need to replay it from the top, as saves don’t carry over.
Still, the studio says that with all the changes “it is basically a brand new experience so we think you will enjoy it.”
Resolution Games today confirmed that Spatial Ops, the studio’s multiplayer mixed reality shooter currently in beta, is heading for full launch on Quest sometime later this year.
Spatial Ops lets you turn any physical space big enough for mixed reality play into a virtual battlefield, replete with barriers and a host of weapons, such as Tommy guns, revolvers, shotguns, scoped rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, and a riot shield—making it feel more than a bit like a game of laser tag on steroids.
Featuring 1-8 players, Spatial Ops offers a number of modes, including a solo PvE bot mode, and PvP modes like Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Domination, and Free-For-All.
While it might seem like the game is designed with VR arcades in mind, thanks to a handy level editor basically anyone can pick up Spatial Ops and tailor it to their living room, basement, or well-lit outdoor space for some pretty impressive battles. Check out our early hands-on here to learn more.
Resolution Games says the launch version of Spatial Ops will focus on reduced gametime setup, pre-set and movable maps, performance optimization, more gameplay, more enemies, and more modes.
Spatial Ops is already available to wishlist on Quest 2/3/Pro via the Horizon Store (ex-Quest Store). If you’re interested in playing the open beta, you can play it via SideQuest up until its full launch.
Meta’s social VR platform Horizon Worlds hasn’t been available to everyone, with the company restricting the app’s use to only a few countries. Now it’s rightfully rolling out to every region where Quest is supported.
Despite being available on the web since last January, geolocation restrictions only allowed Quest users access in select countries, which included Canada, France, Iceland, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Meta today announced that starting this week the company will begin rolling out Horizon Worlds “to people in all Meta Quest markets in supported languages so more people can connect with each other around the globe.”
This includes access for users 13+ across the following Quest-supported regions: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Users must be 14+ in South Korea and Spain.
This comes as the company ostensibly seeks to promote Horizon Worlds as a more fundamental social layer to its rapidly growing platform, which is soon set to include third-party VR headsets for the first time.
Horizon Worlds will come part and parcel with Horizon OS (ex-Quest OS) and the Horizon Store (ex-Quest Store), which will be available on Quest-like headsets built by ASUS, Lenovo and Xbox.
Quest users have long wanted a better way to manage windowed content to make web browsing and using 2D apps easier. It seems the next Horizon OS update (ex-Quest OS) will include a way to do just that.
As discovered by XR enthusiast and serial data miner Luna, the public test channel (PTC) has allowed some users early access to the headset’s v67 update, which includes a new experimental feature that allows a more flexible way of placing windowed content—feeling more than a little inspired by Vision Pro.
Meta first unveiled multitasking support in early 2020, which allowed users to place multiple windows in three docks. Luna notes that, at least in its early access release, windowed content appears to be limited to three docked panels and three freely placeable panels, making for a lot more flexibility when it comes to setting up your virtual home office.
There’s also set to be a new virtual keyboard feature that lets you to place the keyboard both vertically or at an angle for easier typing.
To access these features before stable release, you’ll need to enroll in the PTC. If you haven’t already, follow this quick guide, courtesy of Meta.
To sign up for eligibility for Quest PTC from the mobile app:
Open the mobile app, tap Menu in the bottom-right corner, then tap Devices.
Tap Headset settings, then tap Advanced settings.
Tap the toggle next to Public Test Channel to try to join Quest PTC.
If the toggle doesn’t work, Quest PTC is currently full and not available.
From there, as Luna mentions, simply head to Settings > Experimental Features > New Window Layout, and toggle the feature to activate.
If you’re on PTC and don’t have those features yet, make sure to check back regularly, as Meta tends to do soft rollouts of both its early access and stable OS updates.
The 2D to 3D photo conversion feature coming to Vision Pro in VisionOS 2.0 makes a novel capability meaningful for the first time.
Cue “Apple didn’t even do it first!” in the comments.
You’re not wrong. There’s been seemingly a hundred different startups over the years that have promised to turn 2D photos into 3D.
Even Meta had a go at it when it added 2D to 3D photo conversion to Facebook several years ago. But they never really caught on… probably because seeing 3D photos on a smartphone isn’t that exciting, even if Facebook added a little ‘wiggle’ animation to show the depth on 2D displays.
When it comes to features that people actually want to use—it doesn’t matter who does it first. It matter who does it well.
This headline says “the real deal,” because Apple has, in fact, actually done it well with Vision Pro. The 2D to 3D conversion doesn’t just look good, the feature is actually implemented in a way that takes it beyond the novelty of previous attempts.
The feature is part of visionOS 2.0, which is currently available in a developer beta. Apple says the feature creates “spatial photos” from your existing 2D images (which of course just means stereoscopic ‘3D’).
Granted, even though it’s “just stereoscopic,” seeing your own photos in 3D really adds a layer of depth to them (figuratively and literally). While a 2D photo can remind us of memories, a 3D photo feels much closer to actually visiting the memory… or at least seeing it through a window.
In VisionOS 2.0, just go to the usual Photos app, then open any photo and spot the little cube icon at the top left. Click it and the headset analyzes and converts it to 3D in just two or three seconds. With a click you can also return to the original.
The results aren’t perfect but they’re very impressive. It’s unfortunate I can’t actually show them to you here—since I have no way to embed a 3D photo in this page, and 99.9% of you are probably reading this on a 2D display anyway—but it’s the best automatic 2D to 3D photo conversion that I’ve personally seen.
The speed and accuracy is doubly impressive because the conversion is happening 100% on-device. Apple isn’t sending your photos off to a server to crank out a 3D version with cloud processing resources and then sending it back to your headset. That makes the feature secure by default (and available offline), which is especially important when it comes to a dataset that’s as personal as someone’s photo library.
Across the photos you’d find in the average person’s library—pictures of people, pets, places, and occasionally things—the conversion algorithm seems to handle a wide range of these very well.
While the feature works best on real-life photography, you can also use it on synthetic imagery, like digital artwork, AI-generated photos, 3D renderings, and the like. Results vary, but I overall I was impressed with the feature’s ability to create plausible 3D depth even from synthetic imagery which itself never actually had any 3D depth in the first place.
The thing the algorithm seems to struggle with the most is highly reflective and translucent surfaces. It often ends up ‘painting’ the reflections right onto the reflecting object, rather than projecting them ‘into’ the object with correct depth.
The only major limitation at the moment is that 2D to 3D photo conversion doesn’t seem to want to work on panoramic images. On Vision Pro panoramas can already be blown up and wrapped around you in a way that feels life-sized, but they would still get another layer of emotional impact from being 3D-ified.
It’s unclear why this limitation exists at present, but it’s likely either because panoramas tend to be very high resolution (and would take longer than a few seconds to convert), or Apple’s 2D to 3D algorithm needs more training on wide field-of-view imagery.
Beyond that limitation, the thing that really makes this feature… a feature (not just a ‘technical possibility’), is that it’s built right in and works in the places and ways you’d expect.
Not only can you send spatial photos to other users who can view them in 3D on their own headset, you can also start a SharePlay session and view them together—an incredible way to share moments and memories with the people that matter to you.
And its easy to actually get the photos you want onto your headset for viewing.
Many people will have their iCloud photos library synced with their headset, so they’ll already have all their favorite photos ready to view in 3D. I personally don’t use iCloud photos, but I was easily able to select some of my favorite photos from my iPhone and AirDrop them, which automatically opened the Photos app so they were right in front of me in the headset.
Further, you can just save any old photo to your headset—be it from Facebook, a website, or another app—and use the 2D to 3D conversion feature to view them with a new layer of intrigue.
And this is what makes this visionOS 2.0 feature different than 2D to 3D conversion software that has come before it. It’s not that Apple has any groundbreaking quality advantage in the conversion… it’s the fact that they made the experience good enough and easy enough that people will actually want to use it.
RIVEN (1997), the sequel to iconic point-and-click puzzle-adventure MYST (1993), just got the VR treatment in its new remake. Unlike Myst, which felt a little too game-y and obtuse at times, Riven plays a lot more like a modern title, which thanks to Quest and SteamVR support, is true in every sense of the word now. Granted, you’ll need to look past some VR implementation issues which keep it from feeling like a ground-up VR native, although however you play, you’ll be exploring a fascinating world that’s both puzzle-dense and undeniably beautiful at every turn.
RIVEN Details:
Available On: Quest 2/3, SteamVR Reviewed On: Quest 3, Quest 3 via Link Release Date: June 25th, 2024 Price: $35 Developer: Cyan Worlds
Gameplay
I know Riven pretty well by now, having shuffled my way around its five PlayStation 1 discsa number of times as a kid. This is the first time popping back in as an adult though, so I kind of get the chance to not only relive a bit of the past, but rediscover puzzles long forgotten, this time in the immersive first-person view of a VR headset.
While I really can’t stop nostalgia coloring some of my experience with the new 3D-rendered Riven, I’ve spent enough time in VR to know where things fit on the VR-port-continuum. Some games feel unnecessarily forced into working with VR, some are indistinguishable from VR-natives, and somewhere in the middle are great games that still feel like ports, but that’s okay because they bring enough to the table on their own. That’s where Riven sits—great game that works pretty ok in VR.
If you’re playing it for the first time, you’re in for a patently Cyan experience of deciphering codes, shuffling puzzle pieces around, and visiting (and possibly re-re-revisiting) places, doors, and enigmatic set pieces to figure out the world around you. That’s reason enough to play if you’ve never had the chance. Riven’s puzzle can be tough for the uninitiated, but ultimately more rewarding than Myst thanks to its heaps of environmental storytelling that feels less formulaic, and a lot more organic. More on that in the Immersion section.
Image captured by Road to VR
If you have played before though, many of the game’s puzzles and gadgets are slightly modified from the originals, likely due to the spatial nature of real-time 3D graphics as opposed to the single-frame point-and-click original, which was much more static in how its presented interactive elements. A 27-year-old walkthrough guide that works with the original may still be useful to help with the broad strokes, but you’ll definitely notice differences here and there, with some puzzle elements simplified, or complicated in new ways separate from the original.
One thing that hasn’t changed is there’s still a ton of walking and looping around to do, which is just a feature of the game due to its wide and varied puzzles. You’ll spend a good amount of time circumnavigating one of the game’s five islands for the umpteenth time turn on a thing, to return to a puzzle across the map to see what it did. Then again, that’s just the old school charm and hands-off approach Riven brings to the table.
Image captured by Road to VR
Not only that, but the old school approach to game design makes you rely upon your own spatial memory. There are no map markers, signs, or ‘helpful’ NPCs to guide your way—an aspect of the game that still makes it one of my favorite experiences.
And unlike Myst, you can go a pretty impressive distance through the game with only a few hard roadblocks to stop you, making progression feel very natural. Then again, Riven is beloved for being more organic in level design, and less formulaic than Myst overall, feeling much less like of a jumble of toys, and more like Cyan’s modern titles Obduction (2016) and Firmament (2023).
Image captured by Road to VR
Knowing Riven’s past, I shouldn’t really complain about loading times—they’re certainly faster than shuffling through a broken jewel case filled with PS1 discs—however on Quest you’ll be sitting there for a while waiting for levels to load, the longest of which is the initial startup screen which the game warns “could take a few minutes” to do (it does). From there, whether on Quest or SteamVR, vehicle transitions will constantly toss out 10-second loading screens, which doesn’t sound like much, but happen on both sides of transfers between islands.
Another niggle: there’s no practical way to write down notes so you can remember clues or sketch out solutions, which is precisely what you’ll need to do to decode stuff. You can take a screenshot with the game’s built-in camera system, and that’s about it. I just wish there was a spatial pencil so I could annotate found letters, or somehow keep myself from taking off the headset to write stuff down.
Immersion
I had a chance to play both on Quest 3 natively and PC VR versions. Here’s the breakdown between the two, which most anyone can guess.
On the Quest version you’ll notice a ton of low-res textures and geometry that dynamically chunk-loads into place the closer you get to it. Once things are in place though, at times Riven can be one of the prettiest games on the Quest platform. That’s if there aren’t any NPCs around, which are bloated and a little too cartoony for the game’s lush, natural environment.
Image captured by Road to VR
It also seems Cyan is throwing the entire toolbox of Quest performance tricks at you at all times, including what feels like always-on asynchronous spacewarp and glaringly obvious fixed foveated rendering.
Since it was primarily developed for the flatscreen PC crowd, the PC VR version is a fair bit ahead of the Quest 3 native in terms of visuals. Even on ‘Epic’ settings though, you’re bound to notice some oddly applied shaders that make shadows dance about and move when they shouldn’t, and also discrepancies in how shaders work in both eyes, leading to some pretty visible mismatches in shadows and lighting. Still. chunk-loading of areas is mostly minimal and textures are fairly high, making it rightfully a more graphically intense version of the game.
Like Myst, Riven suffers from middling object interaction, which is a shame considering how many items are strewn about in the game. Oftentimes I’d find myself trying to interact with something, only to find out I wasn’t pressing it correctly, or it wasn’t interactive at all in the first place, making it more of a guessing game than it should be. Here’s me fruitlessly grasping at a weird banana-kiwi thing, then trying to grab a strangely unusable pencil on the same table. Again, I wish I could use that damn pencil.
There is a physical inventory though where you can keep the various books you collect throughout the game, although you can’t use it for anything else.
Whether you’re on Quest or SteamVR, something that never fails to impress is coming to a precipice or turning a bend to find a new, breathtaking scene in front of you. Riven is all about natural beauty, punctuated with megalithic structures that don’t feel nearly as abandoned and lonely as Myst did.
There’s wildlife, sprawling villages, shrines, and plenty of environmental storytelling here to dig into, putting exploration at the forefront. There’s even inhabitants in the world, albeit too skittish to interact with such an obvious outsider.
Comfort
Riven features the full gamut of comfort options in addition to some quality of life options that make things a little easier, but likely less immersive as a result. Traveling between islands is always done on some sort of vehicle, which can be a little jarring for some since it’s fast and a bit jerky.
You can turn vehicles transitions off entirely though, essentially letting you jump right to the next island’s rail station, or put in the option to make windows dirty, which helps ground you a little more in the vehicle’s cockpit. The game also offers similar options for instant traversal of stairs and ladders, which otherwise a manually climbable.
