Meta or worse?
December always feels like a good month for VR gaming. Perhaps it’s because Christmas and VR headsets go together like mangers and Messiahs, or perhaps its because virtual reality is the only place I’m likely to see sunlight before March. In any case, if you’re giving or receiving a pair of magic goggles this festive season, I’ll be recommending a couple of stocking fillers to go with it at the end of this article.
There was some good news amid the chaos. A properQuest 3is on the way, likely coming next year. Also, as of June this year, Meta had sold anestimated15 million Quest 2s, which means that, combined with all the other headsets floating around out there, VR now has a firmly established user-base for developers to sell their games to. That’s still a much smaller user-base, than say, PS4 or Switch (or indeed, regular PCs) but it does mean you can make a VR game and have a decent shot of it selling well. To give an example, After The Fall, a four-player cooperative VR game from the creators ofArizona Sunshine, earned$1.4 million within 24 hoursof launch, more than Arizona Sunshine did in its first month.
In short, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s best efforts, VR gaming is in a pretty healthy place right now. The market remains only a fraction of the size of your regular flatscreen games, and the extra inconvenience of VR means it will likely never lead the charge in video games. But we’re not seeing a repeat of VR in the 1990s. The tech works. The games are good. VR is here to stay.
JOLLY SAINT RICK’S VR CHRISTMAS GIFT GUIDE
Ho ho ho! Jolly Saint Rick here. Can’t quite manage the long white beard yet, but I’ve got the waistline and supernatural consumption-rate of sherry neatly covered. Anyway, if you’re looking for a new VR game for yourself or a significant other this Christmas, here are three excellent titles from this year that I would heartily recommend.
Another game heavily oriented around clocks, although in this case it’s a time-travelling watch that talks.Wanderersees you striving to avert an apocalypse that’s already happened by travelling back to different time periods to alter the course of history. Interactively it’s a fairly standard VR puzzler, with lots of rummaging through rooms and fiddling with highly tangible objects and contraptions. But the time-travelling conceit adds an entertaining dose of novelty, as you must frequently transport objects from one time period into another to solve the puzzles. It’s also one of the prettiest VR games around outside of Half-Life: Alyx, with impressive environments and pleasingly detailed interiors. I found the watch’s Southern Gentleman shtick to be a tad irritating, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying this ambitious and extremely lush adventure.
Although I’ve highlighted the sequel here because it came out this year,bothMossgames are well worth your time for the way they synthesize first-person VR and third-person platforming. You assume the role of a godlike narrator who must guide a little mouse called Quill through a gorgeous miniature fantasy world. But it’s how Moss plays that makes it special. You control Quill like a regular platforming character, using the analogue stick to move her around, and the buttons to jump and fight enemies. At the same time, you also use your hands to manipulate objects in the environment, solving puzzles and moving obstacles out of Quill’s way. The sequel is simply a bigger, better version of the original. But the first game’s only real problem was that it was quite short, so a sequel which delivers more of the same is just dandy.
