Eternal Starlight of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Starlight is a space-themed strategy game that sees the player attempt to defend mankind’s claim to Proxima, a planet representing our last hope of survival. The story details humanity’s inevitable destruction of Earth and our equally inevitable pilgrimage into the stars to find a new home. Enter Proxima. Of course, we are not alone in our desire for this life-sustaining planet, and the warlike Kraya are hell-bent on clearing the “Terran scum” out of the region. 

The crux of the campaign essentially sees the player embarking on a series of micro missions, attempting to build resources and alliances that will help in the next looming confrontation with the Kraya. The player is free to choose which of the randomly generated missions to pursue based on the resources, items, and potential alliances to be earned. Thus, these missions are more like combat vignettes than actual missions. Most of them are over in an anti-climactically short time. Once complete, resources can then be spent on upgrading your flagship vessel or purchasing auxiliary vessels to bolster your armada.

But be careful – because defeat comes at a high cost.

Fire Photon torpedoes when ready!

The gameplay in Eternal Starlight sees the player take control of an initially tiny fleet consisting of your main flagship vessel and a small fighter. You control these ships by grabbing them and tracing the path you would like them to fly or highlighting the enemy craft you want them to attack. It’s reasonably intuitive, and for anyone who has played the outstanding Final Assault will come very naturally. 

Both the pace and the game’s scale can be manipulated to suit the players’ needs throughout the battle. At any given point, you can slow the action down to strategise and then put some manoeuvres into action. Also, using simple gestures, you can expand and contract the scale of the battle to allow you a tactile degree of control over your vantage point throughout the combat. While this sounds great in theory, the implementation is sadly lacking in Eternal Starlight. 

The speed with which crafts traverse the expanse of space during combat is far too quick to allow for any effective use of the zoomed-in viewpoint. The exception to this is when you’re targeting specific enemy systems. Although cool in theory, this feature can only be manipulated through a cumbersome process; slowing time, zooming in and selecting the target ship, then targeting the desired system, then expanding back out to a scale that allows some level of tactical control. Unfortunately, this process is required every time you want to target specific systems. On paper, the system seems great, but in practice, it just adds a tedious stop/start component that makes combat feels stilted and swiftly becomes a chore.

Similarly, the controls for this world-shifting are missing one of the most obviously necessary functions. That is, to be able to rotate the world around you. Unlike the excellent control system employed by Demeo, which allows the camera to effortlessly and intuitively be turned around the horizontal plane, Eternal Starlight offers no such mechanism. To shift your view along this axis, you need to physically move in virtual space or use the thumbsticks to spin the world in a broad and disorienting arc. 

Given that the perfect model for this system exists elsewhere in numerous incarnations, it is frustrating, bordering on unforgivable, to have it so poorly implemented here.

Death By Alien

Like all good roguelikes, Eternal Starlight builds tension by employing the ever-present threat of permadeath. That’s right, fail the mission, and you can lick your wounds and try again, but lose your flagship, and it’s “game over man!”. Now I’m generally I pretty big fan of roguelikes, but there’s something about it that just doesn’t work in Eternal Starlight.

But I’ll get to that later…

Eternal Starlight also has a Skirmish mode available, which allows the player to create custom battles from all the unlocked craft available. Utilising a point system, the player can face off against a fleet of up to six ships. This is, quite frankly, the most enjoyable part of the game. Once some of the more interesting ships have been unlocked, this mode provides a proving ground for your tactical proficiency and offers some higher intensity action. Had the rest of the missions felt a bit more like Skirmish, then this review may well have gone a little differently.

Deep Space

Eternal Starlight has a deep and varied progression system that could have made it a real star had a few alternative design choices been made. There are multiple branching tech upgrades, allowing you to either enhance a single vessel or purchase an armada of smaller vessels. The options are wide-ranging and interesting and, when deployed correctly, add a decent amount of tactical depth to the gameplay. In addition, there is a range of specialisations within each tech branch, each randomly generated for the current playthrough. This variety ensures that no two runs are the same and forces you to adopt a somewhat different strategy every time you play.

Each of your main ships can be upgraded with specific modifiers, additional weapons and weapons slots, as well as fantastic new special abilities. The combination of these elements will change the way you approach missions significantly. This means that each run can be played repeatedly thanks to the procedural generation of missions, rewards, and perks. Again, this sounds great in theory; however…

The rewards gained throughout each run are so miserly that it becomes either tedious or impossible to draw out the best elements of the game. Additionally, given that there is little lasting benefit carried over into future rounds, you have a recipe for disappointment and frustration.

You find yourself studying the various branching technology trees available, wish-listing a path and a strategy that you might like to employ. Then you’ll realise, after a few missions, that to earn enough currency to implement your strategy, you would need to complete the whole game three times over. The difficulty curve also escalates disproportionately with your access to enhanced gear. This means that after being frustrated that you can’t afford to buy anything good, you’ll just get blasted into space dust all over again. Another chance to wallow in the knowledge that you’ll have to start the whole bloody thing again. It’s maddening!

Good roguelikes (In Death: Unchained, I’m looking at you) reward each playthrough with a little something to take into the next run. This builds the gameplay loop’s depth and the difficulty over time and gives the player a reason to keep coming back. Eternal Starlight, however, does none of that and consequently would actually have been better served as a standard campaign-style RTS. As it is, Eternal Starlight artfully dodges the best elements of the roguelike genre and manages to catch only its most frustrating traits. As a result, Eternal Starlight feels like the Star Shaman of the RTS world in many ways, as it suffers from almost the exact same raft of problems.

Star Shrek

Eternal Starlight is an ugly looking game, but it has layers. 

The overall visual presentation of Eternal Starlight is regrettably lacking in polish and depth. The world away from the core gameplay sees the player on the ship’s bridge or in their living quarters. Unfortunately, these environments just seem flat and unrefined. The characters that appear on your comms screen are also delivered with a retro-style aesthetic that doesn’t land as stylised but instead comes across as poorly executed.

The actual gameplay is obviously set in the expanse of deep space, so backgrounds are understandably barren. However, this isn’t compensated for by detailed, textured models for the various crafts, nor were the graphical resources spent on lighting and effects for the weapons.

Graphically, Eternal Starlight is serviceable at best. The visuals don’t hurt the gameplay, but they also don’t give the player the sense of awe one might have hoped for from a game set in the vast, inky void of the cosmos.

The sound in Eternal Starlight is the weakest component of the game and really let the game down. The sound effects are perfectly acceptable, with a decent array of zaps and pews and kabooms that sell in a decently convincing sense of futuristic space combat, but sadly that’s where the praise for the audio ends. 

The ambient music is rather monotonous and does little to convey a sense of urgency or tension throughout the brief combat encounters. It’s not distracting, but it adds so little to the game that, to a degree, it may as well not even be there. 

The voice-over, or rather the abject lack of it, is where the biggest problems occur. There is some dialogue between the player and the various other characters in between every cut scene, all delivered via text. While the text plays out, the character offers a sound bite, like “We don’t have much time”, but there is only one such recording per character, and it plays every time they are on screen. This happens regardless of the context of the dialogue. It is distractingly lacking to the point of being immersion-breaking and, unfortunately, screams of a production that lacked the experience and budget to deliver this element to a benchmark standard. 

CONCLUSION

Eternal Starlight is an ambitious attempt at combining the RTS and Roguelike genres that sadly fails to deliver on the enormous potential of the concept. The game offers a profound system of branching tech upgrades that could have been amazing if coupled with more extended missions and more accessible resource management. As it stands, the vignette style 3-minute mini-missions create a disjointed experience that prevents the player from immersing themselves in action.

The Quest library desperately needs something to fill its gaping RTS shaped void, but sadly Eternal Starlight just isn’t it. That said, it’s not entirely devoid of positive elements, so genre enthusiasts may still find some fun to be had. For everyone else, I suggest that we all keep praying to the Oculus Gods for a port of the amazing Brass Tactics.

Child’s Play

The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets belongs to a curious genre for VR gaming. The recommended age of use for the Oculus Quest is 13 and up, but Curious Tale seems geared towards the tween set— around 9 to 12 years old. If you’re a parent and you’re willing to let your kid try on your expensive headset, Curious Tale is a pleasant introduction to playing in VR, with a charming aesthetic and a measured but steady pace of simple puzzles to solve. For other children-friendly games, you can check out our list of the Best Children’s Games on Quest.

One thing you can be assured of is that you or your kid won’t be thrashing around in VR, knocking into walls, or tumbling on the floor. This is no fast-paced action game. Instead, you have to peer steadily into miniature 3D scenes like a hillside cottage or a snowy ski chalet. You can spin them around like an interactive dollhouse, opening doors and watching tiny figures skip around on their own.

Each of the five levels is charming in its own unique way. In addition to the cottage and ski chalet, you’ll explore an underwater aquarium, a prehistoric volcano, and a magical castle. These levels are filled with lovely details like waterfalls and leafy trees, and it is apparent each one was designed with care. If you’ve ever enjoyed a highly detailed model train set or museum diorama, you have an idea of what to expect.

Poking Around

To find the hidden pets, you have to accomplish simple tasks that involve pressing buttons, lighting fires, or discovering hidden keys. You’ll often be able to do this with a single button press, and instead of digital hands and fingers, your cursor is a ball of dandelion fluff. Occasionally you will pick up a tool, like a brush or a hairdryer, and use it to interact with the scene. All of the adorably-crafted creatures and environments are cute and tiny, like illustrations from a storybook.

Also, like a kid’s storybook, Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets is a breeze to finish and won’t last you very long. None of the puzzles tripped me up too much— but then again, I’m an adult who enjoys complex puzzle games, and probably not the intended audience. The one time I got stuck was on a scene where you have to [mild spoiler ahead – ed] place a large object into a volcano, causing it to blow its top and flood lava. This is required to unlock the rest of the level’s puzzle solutions, and since the physics didn’t cooperate the first time, I spent way too long poking and prodding at every interactive feature of the map. Only when I plugged the volcano with a lucky throw was I able to progress.

The Secret Life of Pets

Once you find all of the hidden pets across the five scenes, which only takes about an hour, you can go back to try to collect all the hidden coins that sparkle invitingly. However, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to do so, and the cutesy aesthetic and good-natured story only lasts a short while.

Special note should be made of Curious Tale’s soundtrack, which is composed by Wintergatan, a Swedish alt-pop band who are probably best known for a viral video they made of a music-producing marble machine. Wintergatan’s musical contribution to Curious Tale adds a degree of whimsy, and it matches the hand-crafted feel of the art. Like the levels, the ephemeral musical tracks may be short, but they are playful and heartfelt.

The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets certainly makes a good-faith effort to create a kid-friendly VR puzzler, but it doesn’t go very far with its miniature level design and limited storytelling. With a longer adventure, more hidden surprises, or a more in-depth storyline, this Curious Tale would feel more like a complete tale and not just a fanciful diversion.

That might sound like I’m taking a pop at Gadgeteer for its lack of ambition, but I’m really not. I’m a big fan of VR experiences which set out to replicate familiar real-world conceits without the hassle or mess of setting up or cleaning up afterwards. Things like fishing, board games, or being a hitman. We’ve all been fascinated by YouTube videos of silly but ingenious machines at some point. Gadgeteer gives you the chance to mess around with marbles, dominoes, ramps and such, without all of the tedious and time-consuming vortexes of sticky tape and disappointment that go with it. 

NO-ONE CAN STOP MR DOMINO

There are two main modes in Gadgeteer; Puzzle, and Sandbox. Puzzle mode puts you in a room with 60 different conundrums to solve sequentially. They all involve pressing a button that sets something off, either a domino falling or a ball rolling or somesuch, and it’s up to the player to place other dominoes, ramps, and shapes to ensure that the next button in the sequence is pressed. There’s a good sense of player agency throughout, with enough components available to solve each puzzle without it feeling like the designers are proscriptive. Every discrete puzzle is shown as part of one larger circuit in the apartment setting, and it provides an excellent impetus to see the bigger picture as you progress. 

RAMP IT UP

That sense of progression, however, is a little slow. There’s a decent tutorial, which carefully explains the basics of placing, duplicating and deleting blocks using the multitool attachments for the virtual controller, and the win condition for each puzzle you’ll face. After that, Puzzle mode continues to teach you the game’s ways, to the point which it just seems the wrong side of patronising. It’s a few small puzzles in before it burdens you with the heady responsibility of releasing a marble on a ramp. It might work for some; the game wants to be accessible, and it wants you to understand each step you’re making, but I think some might feel a bit stifled by the early game. The complexity and depth of the puzzles certainly increase to a decently involved level later on, for sure, but some players might have wandered off in search of some aliens to stab before then. 

Sandbox mode certainly provides a lot more scope for the easily bored, however, giving you access to all of the game’s gizmos so you can make your own pointless but fascinating masterpieces. The sense of freedom and fun of this mode is where Gadgeteer really feels like it’s letting its hair down, and where it provides the most fuel and kindling for the imagination. It’ll be fascinating to see the machines that players come up with now the game is released.

MAKE IT STOP

There is so much to commend and admire about this game. It sets out with a clear idea of what it wants to achieve, which is modest but brilliant. It feels finely tuned and superbly designed. Even though I have my misgivings about the glacial sense of progression in puzzle mode, I’ve no doubt that this is a deliberate decision by a talented dev team rather than an oversight, and it’s my personal preference rather than a failing of the game. The virtual physics are just right, friendly enough to be accessible but still convincing. The controls are quietly brilliant, from the slick switching between tool attachments to the ingenious and convenient methods of movement and navigation. (There’s free movement on the left stick, but you can also ‘grab’ the environment and put it where you want). Everything about the game feels finely tuned, except…

If there’s one specific thing that can be singled out for criticism in this otherwise pleasing and well-wrought game, it’s music. It initially sounds benign and inoffensive, but within a couple of minutes at most, it will start to drive you crazy. It’s tuneless and weird, and its vapidity will begin to drill into your brain very quickly. If you’ve ever watched How It Works and marvelled at the way incidental music can be so aggressively and invasively bland, then you might have some idea what to expect. So, you turn the music off, and another problem becomes apparent.

THEY LET THE DOGS OUT!

As I’ve said, the game is set in an apartment. For reasons which might have seemed like a good idea at the time, the soundscape involves a loud, regular sample of a dog barking outside. At best, this is an incredibly annoying distraction. It’s the sort of situation that you’d go into VR to escape; a neighbour having a noisy dog is something no-one enjoys. Worse still, if you’re a dog owner in real life, as I am, then be prepared for the virtual barking to set your actual dogs off doing the same. It’s not a happy experience for anyone, and I’ve no idea why the devs thought this was a suitable inclusion. It’s so much of an issue that I’m marking the game down because of it. It’s one thing having to turn the music off in a game if it isn’t to your liking, but to have such poorly judged audio that you have to turn all the sound off is bad form.

REVIEWERS EDIT: The developers have wisely listened to everyone except the dog, and they’ve taken the barking asshat out of the game. So they get a gold star for excellence, and Gadgeteer gets upgraded to a more than solid 8.

There are only a few minor niggles elsewhere. There are occasional frame-rate dips that the devs inform us should be fixed by release. Having played the PC version, it’s evident that there are some textures that have been downgraded for the Quest in such an ugly and lazy fashion that you wonder why they weren’t omitted entirely. It’s not enough to distract from the game, but certainly worth mentioning.

Fast Travel Games is not a new studio, the Stockholm, Sweden-based company was founded in 2016 by industry-leading veterans. Their debut title Apex Construct was available on the Oculus Quest since it launched. Shortly after Curious Tale is released, they plan to follow it up with Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency later this year.

In The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets, you get to help your grandfather solve the mystery of the stolen pets by exploring miniature worlds crafted from the ground up for VR. Every world is promised to be unique, full of playful interactions, joyful puzzles, and colorful life. 

Recently winning the ‘Best Immersive Game’ award at the 2019 Raindance Film Festival, The Curious Tale also features music from Wintergatan who claimed world recognition with their Marble Machine, a musical instrument using 2000 marbles.

Curious Tale is set to sell at $14.99 and supports Cross-buy between the Quest & Rift version.

Like I said in my hands-on preview, Dreadhalls is deeply, devastatingly scary. The game triggers a physical reaction in me the way no other game, even on VR, has to date. I can feel my hands shaking, my blood pumping, and my senses assaulted by every scary trope. If you have one of those arrogant friends (like me) who boasts that no horror movie scares them anymore, make them try Dreadhalls on for size. It will humble them.

GET ME OUT OF HERE

Dreadhalls takes place in a series of claustrophobic underground dungeons, where you are armed only with a lantern that casts a moderate amount of light onto your surroundings. You have to escape from these vast mazes by collecting bloody eyeballs, a gooey magical replacement for a set of keys. You’re aided by a map that automatically draws in the corridors and dead ends as you explore.

Lurking just ahead of you in the darkness are a myriad of freaky creatures, including a tall witch, a fleshy goblin, and a hulking hellhound. Coming across one of these monsters in the dark, with their various growls and screeches, can be utterly terrifying. You often have no choice but to run, hide, and perhaps extinguish your lantern.

WHISPERS IN THE DARK

Though the graphics are merely serviceable, with most of your view shrouded in darkness, the sound design in Dreadhalls really stands out. Creepy music permeates every twist and turn in the dark, and the monsters’ eerie sounds will have you feeling constant dread. You’ll have a brief moment to relax when you return each bloody eyeball-key to its proper place, but then it’s back into the dungeons for more scares.

Dreadhalls never builds too much gameplay on top of the basic haunted-hallways premise, but there are a few additions. Doors have to be opened by “jiggling” the handle, or you can use a lock pick to force it open faster. You can collect coins to unlock bits of lore from creepy statues, but it has minimal bearing on the game overall. And over time, your lantern will run low on fuel and have to be replenished by jars of oil.

I would have gladly traded all of my lock picks, coins, and oil for just one gun or melee weapon, but Dreadhalls just isn’t that kind of game. It’s like playing through Doom as a pacifist. Monsters will try to end your run horribly, and all you can do is quiver, scream, and run away. ProTip: Play with some friends in the room, so you don’t feel quite so vulnerable.

TRUE VR SCARES

Dreadhalls is the kind of experience that really shows off the power of VR. On a computer screen, this game would be so-so, but in VR, you are entirely immersed in a powerless, frightening, and overwhelming situation. The visuals, audio, and tense gameplay all add up to a ghastly feeling that sets the gold standard for VR horror.

Dreadhalls is also a bit longer than you might think (or hope). Just when you think you’ve collected all the necessary eyes in an area to move on, the game continues with another set of procedurally-generated mazes. This gives it some decent replay value, ensuring that you’ll never become too comfortable with the dreadful environments.

It’s hard to recommend Dreadhalls as a pleasurable experience, but it is definitely successful at what it sets out to do. I haven’t felt this immersed in a horror experience since I first saw The Shining as a kid and rushed to turn on the lights. If you think you can handle the fright— well, you probably can’t, but you should play Dreadhalls anyways.

If this pitch sounds appealing to you, then take it from someone who’s already been down in the mines: Cave Digger: Riches offers a mixed bag, with a few scattered nuggets of gold and a lot of rocks. The central premise is strong, and you’ll uncover some delightful secrets and off-kilter humor, but it’s not always worth digging through the rougher parts of the game.

Working in a Coal Mine

Initially, Cave Digger: Riches takes place in an elevator, where you’ll descend for timed excursions beneath an old-timey, Western-style saloon. With a limited supply of oxygen, you have to quickly swing your pickaxe to chip away at rocks and reveal chunks of gold, diamonds, and other precious minerals.

As gems rain down, you’ll have to chuck them into a receptacle placed in the middle of the elevator so that you can trade them for cash. Disappointingly, you can’t just leave them on the floor, because every time the car moves up or down, your loot will simply vanish.

This requires you to keep a hand free for collecting gems, which slows down the process quite a bit. You can also buy upgrades like dynamite and saws, and you’ll constantly have to switch tools by throwing them on the floor or hanging them from your belt.

Using these specialized tools, you can drill for oil or saw out precise patterns to release rare objects. The tools aren’t the most intuitive to use, forcing you to pay close attention to the one-time voiceover instructions when you first buy them. There are pictures in the elevator that give you some hints as well, but I wish the game offered straightforward (and preferably, written) instructions when new items were unlocked.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

On Steam, Cave Digger is listed as a free download with a $20 Riches expansion in the form of bonus train levels. On the Oculus Quest, some rough edges still seem to be showing.

While you can walk freely around your elevator car, or walk and teleport using the thumbsticks, I often found myself getting stuck on bits of the environment. When the clock is always ticking, these minor inconveniences can add up to frustration.

Also, Cave Digger: Riches is not an attractive game on the Oculus Quest. The Western saloon and outside train station look like part of an abandoned ghost town or a flimsy movie set. Underground, the visuals are bleak and muddy, and not in a good way.

Once you earn enough cash to unlock the train levels, the game takes on a very different feel. Now you can explore horizontally instead of just vertically, with wide-open caverns containing clever extras. One of these is a friendly-looking living treasure chest named Mimi Jewels, who follows you around while scooping up gems for you to sell later.

Hidden Gems

In addition to Mimi, there are a few more notable reasons to play Cave Digger. A lot of thought has clearly gone into creating unique achievements for the game. You may accidentally uncover these by blowing up a stick of dynamite in your hand or casually tossing a gem into the hopper behind your back.

Also, there are multiple endings and bright secrets to uncover. You can collect Infinity Stone-style unique gems, which will let you pretend to be Thanos while you smash through rocks with your fist. An underground mushroom level will send you on a spaced-out trip if you help yourself to a snack in the middle of the workday. And if you find four hidden keys, you can unlock a cavernous vault for another strange surprise.

These extras are a fair payoff for enduring the game’s rougher components. Most of the game, especially the early stages, can feel repetitive and unsatisfying. Despite its positive aspects, and some fun surprises, Cave Digger: Riches can feel like a bit of work to get through.

Fore-words

Cloudlands 2 is a fun, casual golf game that has options for playing both regular and mini-golf. It includes both single and multiplayer modes, a campaign mode, as well as a course editor that can create surprisingly complex holes, which can be shared online.

Unfortunately, Cloudlands 2 misses out on a lot of the personality of the golf games mentioned above. While the courses have a minimalistic and clean look, there are no human characters in the game. It’s just you alone on the golf course in most modes, though you can see other player’s Oculus avatars in online multiplayer. Each hole is its own floating island, so you don’t get to see the rest of the course around you. This gives you the feeling that each hole is its own world rather than being part of a more extensive course. The sound is mostly forgettable as well with a few chill atmospheric music tracks and some very stock sound effects.

Taking a Swing at It

Cloudlands 2 features a good variety of courses, encompassing a mixture of both regular golf holes as well as mini-golf holes. The basic golf swing mechanic works well. However, the power level seems off on standard golf holes, especially when putting. The game features some very long mini-golf holes, so I understand the need to allow gamers to put a lot of power their swings, but this doesn’t translate well to putting on the regular greens. The slightest swing can seem to send the ball flying if you’re expecting to take your normal putting swing. There is an option to customize the power of your clubs, but since courses mix regular golf and mini-golf, switching power settings back and forth can get annoying.

As this is not a simulation golf game, the variety of clubs available in Cloudlands 2 is minimal. Players are only allowed to use a basic wood/driver, iron/wedge, and a putter. While you can adjust the game for your height, the club does seem to auto-fit to the ground, ensuring it’s always the right length for the current player. However, the club appears to just “stick” to one hand, and only the motion of that hand affects the movement of the club. I found myself placing my other hand where it would usually rest on the club while swinging. Although this gave it a more natural feel, whatever you do with your other hand is irrelevant to the gameplay. You could swing one-handed and do just as well if you’re making the same general motion.

Caddy, give me a hand!

Speaking of hands, I really wish this game would give the player a representation of their hands within the game. While the club sticks to your main hand, your other hand is entirely invisible and has no real effect on the game. Clubs are changed by holding down the grip button and moving the stick. Although this works, the inclusions of a virtual golf bag or caddy might have added some realism and personality to the game.

Movement around the course is handled with a standard teleport system, but with the nice added touch that the trigger of the leading hand will always teleport you directly to the ball. However, this often does not necessarily put you in the right position to take a swing, it just puts you near (and sometimes directly on top of) the ball. After this, some additional teleporting or walking around the play space is required to line up with the ball correctly. This leads to a lot of downtime between swings, and it can be especially frustrating if you just have a few minutes to play a quick round.

Build Your Own Course – No Landscaping Necessary!

The course creator is terrific in its simplicity, giving the player a palette of different course pieces to pop out and place wherever they like in the space around them. This part of the game truly feels magical, like you are a giant piecing together your own golf course. You can zoom down to test and then tweak your course to your heart’s desire. The maximum file size on these courses is generous, allowing you to design your perfect hole of golf with wild abandon.

Unfortunately, the course creator also suffers from the game’s strange one-handed design. It would have been helpful to be able to build with one hand and hold the palette with the other. Tilt Brush and SculptrVR work that way, and they’re fantastic. Instead, Cloudlands 2 only uses your “active” hand to interact with anything. The building scale is also small enough that it’s often hard to tell, before testing, just how much space you’re leaving between objects. What looks like a small lip during building can often come off as an impassable mountain during testing. While the tools work well, significant patience is required to build your dream course.

Infinite Golf!

Although the campaign is short, leading the player hole-by-hole through the game’s three courses, all the holes are playable in single-player quickplay, as well as online and pass-and-play multiplayer. The online multiplayer is particularly well done, allowing all players to play through simultaneously without interfering with one another, and allowing chat through the microphone. There is also a wide variety of community-created holes available online for play, giving Cloudlands 2 a significant potential playtime. If you get into playing and sharing holes with friends and the community at large, Cloudlands 2 could be living on your Quest for a very long time.

Last Words

While Cloudlands 2 has a wealth of content, it is ultimately hampered by some confusing design decisions. These are mostly related to the one-handed control scheme, which feels like a holdover from the original game for Oculus Go, which only had a single controller. However, if you are looking for a fun, casual golf game available now with lots of content, you’ll still have a good time with Cloudlands 2. The real golf dads among us will want to wait for a more detailed golf sim to come to Quest.

 A CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK

There’s no tutorial in SculptrVR. You’re just left to dive in. For me that works fine, but I’m already conversant in some of the rules and tools of 3D modelling. I will say that my wife and children have had no problems just exploring the options on offer and just having a play about, and that seems to be the point. If you’re new to the idea, then the clue is in the title. With SculptrVR, you can create shapes, carve away at them, paint them, move them and fuse them with other shapes. In short, you can sculpt in VR. You can do so in a void, or create and add to an entire landscape made of the same virtual ‘rock’ like everything else. The scale is impressive if you want it to be; so much so that the title provides different ways of exploring your landscape, from standard teleportation to climbing and gliding. Even that in itself is fun once you get the, er, hang of it.

STONECRAFT

The app really wants you to feel like you’re physically sculpting material, and have fun while you’re doing it. There’s some lovely feedback when you are carving and creating – little chips of ‘stone’ chitter off as you carve, with appropriate sound effects. The whole thing is delightfully tactile, and a world away from the refined sterility of Gravity Sketch. The flipside of that is that, in comparison to its peers, SculptrVR can feel imprecise and a little low-definition. You probably aren’t going to be making precisely modelled Warhammer figures to 3D print with this. Well, not unless you have far steadier hands and infinitely more patience than the likes of me. This roughness is mitigated a little by the scale at which you can work on things, and then resize them. Just bear in mind that you’ll be working with virtual clay or stone rather than laser-cut steel.

ART ATTACK

SculptrVR allows you to import objects or images and can export them for further modelling in other apps or 3D printing. But as much as SculptrVR will support an organised and technical approach, it also really wants you to let your hair down, particularly with friends. The multiplayer element is fantastic, proving a universe of possibilities for both creation and silliness. 

Using SculptrVR, art collectives can join each other in virtual spaces and create imaginative vistas. You could also just use it to threaten your mate with a giant dildo you’ve made, before gliding away and blowing up the castle he spent the last hour building. A friend of mine, an artist and photographer, is using SculptrVR to painstakingly recreate Vermeer’s ‘The Milkmaid’ in three dimensions. My five-year-old son was able to make Spider-Man’s head on his first attempt. Kids love playing with this as it’s like having infinite amounts of Play-Doh, as well as rockets that they can launch at creations. People always talk about the educational possibilities of Minecraft in schools, but SculptrVR points to an even more interactive and involving virtual future. 

THE REVEL IS IN THE DETAILS

This review, rather like the app itself, is light on explanation of the various tools on offer, and a little low on detail. This is because I wholeheartedly believe that if you think you’ll like SculptrVR, then you probably will. There’s very little that I can tell you about it that you won’t glean from the fun video on its page on the Oculus Store.

The best thing you can do to maximise your enjoyment of it is to throw yourself into it and explore it directly. (We’ll be doing a couple of ‘Let’s Play’ videos for this and other titles soon and in which will go into some of the tips and tricks for getting the most out of it). That said, there are a few people to whom I wouldn’t recommend this title. Those who like guided instruction or some direction to their VR experiences would be better served with something a little less free-form, perhaps. Most, however, will be addicted to it given the tiniest of tries and, for a relatively low price, it is an essential addition to nearly everyone’s Quest library. 

The app is easy to use for all ages and abilities, and capable of some impressive results if you spend some time mastering it. SculptrVR proudly takes its place alongside Gravity Sketch and Tilt Brush as another essential creative app for the Quest.