And with that marketing in mind, and before the review proper begins, I want to get something off my chest, and I’ll start by saying this: I’m not in good shape.

About two years ago, I was in pretty decent shape because I was making an effort to look good in my wedding photos. But 4 months of furlough followed by 20 months of working from my sofa has put me in the worst shape of my life, and I’m very keen to find an enjoyable way to put that right.

As with so many other health, wellbeing, and so-called body positivity products, the marketing materials for Les Mills exclusively feature healthy, skinny, beautiful people who probably don’t have a resting heart rate as high as 27bpm between them. 

Please don’t mistake this for bitterness. I get that the imagery is supposed to be aspirational. Still, when every single person pictured on a poster, TV sting, or trailer for Les Mills BodyCombat (in all its various iterations) appear to have about 2% body fat and flawless skin, it doesn’t really endear the ‘Les Mills’ brand to those of us who don’t get up at 5 am for a quick triathlon before enjoying a breakfast of kale juice and onion powder. The people behind the Les Mills brand claim to champion “A Fitter Planet” yet seem to think this can be achieved by targeting their range of products at people who are already painfully fit.

All that notwithstanding, Les Mills BodyCombat is a fitness app that can be enjoyed by people of all health levels. Workouts range from 5 minutes to half an hour and come in one of three intensities. A total of 30 programmes come with this ‘one-time-purchase’ version of the product. Although a subscription model is, predictably, on the way, the publishers promise that this standalone version will always be available and will receive free updates.

Concept

You begin Les Mills BodyCombat by entering your personal details; your height, weight, age, etc. This is apparently so that the app can tailor recommendations and track targets. I, however, saw no real indication of how this might be working during my time with it. 

With the admin out of the way, you are greeted first by the painfully enthusiastic Rachael, then the slightly less irritating Dan. Both instructors demonstrate the basic foot positions and boxing motions required to get you started with a lot of enthusiasm and personality. However, as a cynical Brit, I have a violently allergic reaction to being patronised. So getting told I’m “awesome” because I can tell left from right and throw a jab makes me break out in hives.

The basics of the app will come as no surprise to anyone who has played Beat Saber, Box VR, or even Ring Fit Adventure on the Nintendo Switch. You jab, hook and uppercut various targets as they scroll towards you. Barriers to squat under or lean away from are soon added to the mix, along with various other types of target designed to keep things interesting.

There are Sky Punches that let you unleash your inner Emilio Esteves and Battle Rope Punches that let you thrash out at the ground like a stroppy toddler. There’s even a tricky move that has you imagine grabbing someone you’re not very fond of by the ears and smashing their face into your kneecap. This is the only move in the experience that is ‘technically’ difficult; I couldn’t get a knee hit to register at all until I accidentally smacked a controller into my thigh. Even now, I continue to complete this move by kneeing the base of my hand (which is slightly less delicate than a Quest controller). Even though I’m unsure this is the correct technique, it works. When there’s a combo count and high score table in view the whole time, I don’t care that I’m getting the same workout, whether it registers or not, because I want to win!

These score and combo features are by no means unique to BodyCombat, but they are one of its biggest successes.

As you wait for your workout to load, six other torturees appear around Rach or Dan as they encourage you to stretch, shake it out, or otherwise prepare for the rigours ahead. These other players aren’t actually ‘live’. They aren’t enjoying the same class simultaneously, but the presentation does a good job of making it feel that way, and during play, their scores are updated as if they were playing along with you. The little beep that sounds when you drop down a place on the scoreboard genuinely serves to refocus your attention on maintaining a combo and hitting hard to get the maximum points. It’s a small touch, but it works well as motivation.

Interface

It’s audio queues like this that Les Mills BodyCombat does exceptionally well. You always know when you whiffed an uppercut, dropped a combo or bumped into a wall. Little things like this are hugely important in any experience, but when the tempo picks up, and the targets are coming thick and fast, it’s imperative that you don’t have to break focus to see what else is going on. Visual queues are well used too. The targets are a kind of conical drum shape, so it’s always clear how you need to punch them. I particularly like that you can see your shadow on the incoming walls, allowing you to accurately position your body to avoid it. The different effects used to illustrate how well a punch landed are also instantly recognisable and easy to interpret. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but the quality of the execution should be applauded.

Music obviously plays a big part in the experience, and it’s all fairly unremarkable but entirely appropriate high energy workout music. Would I prefer to have been sweating it up to The Clash? Of course, I would. Does that actually matter? I honestly don’t think so. With this type of activity, it’s more important that the accompanying music guide your tempo and rhythm, and the music in Les Mills does that very well.

Dan or Rachael, and usually both, in turns, guide you through each workout in a way that only seasoned fitness instructors can: With enthusiasm, knowledge, gusto, and not one iota of self-awareness. To their credit, for every time this is unintentionally hilarious, it’s twice as often genuinely helpful. 

You are prepped for each new sequence before it arrives and always made aware of any stance changes. Dan, in particular, is very good at imparting tips on maintaining good form to get the best results.

The biggest problem with the instructors is their complete lack of interactivity or branching feedback. This is a shortcoming the Les Mills instructors have in common with those of the subscription-based Supernatural. The sessions themselves are entirely scripted, so they will continue to tell you how completely you’re ‘smashing it’ even if you stand stock still, miss every punch, and let every barrier smack you in the face.

Of course, if you do that, you won’t score well, and that’s when you will get a remark actually tailored to your performance – a ‘You’ll do better next time!’ or ‘So close!’

Functionality

Like those in Supernatural, the fully-scripted instructions are a genuine frustration. Not only do they completely ruin immersion when you’re struggling, but, even more importantly, they don’t capture failure during initial tutorials – and after these have played out, they cannot be repeated. This has left me in the previously described ‘kneeing my hand’ situation when a more interactive lesson or the simple ability to review the tutorial might have helped me understand the correct method. I think it’s safe to assume that slowly giving yourself a dead leg isn’t the proper method.

The menus in Les Mills BodyCombat are another area that could use some fine-tuning. Each of the thirty sessions is available to play at any time. They’re subdivided into groups, and you select the workout you want within that group by moving left and right on the controller thumbstick. This all works fine. However, vertical movement is achieved with the usually reliable ‘grab’ technique of clicking and holding a trigger before moving up and down to scroll. Here the execution is flakey. There is a scroll bar on the right side, but it doesn’t appear to be interactive, so you’re left-clicking and pulling at various parts of the menu in the hope that it will ‘catch’, and you’ll be able to scroll to a different part of the menu.

Other interactions are minimal but functional and easy to use. Clicking a workout will show you its specific moves and advise how you did the last time you completed it. A progress panel details calories burned and where you stand on a self-defined workout goal for the week. There’s also a ‘Level’ here that seems tied to your total score, but it’s not really made clear what this is for or if it has any impact outside comparing yourself to other users.

Frustratingly, there is no ‘recently played’ section. With every workout having a similar, cliched title, this is a sorely missed feature. You can, however, favourite a workout to make it easier to find, and this is very welcome.

Value

The amount of value you will get from this ‘one-time-purchase’ version of Les Mills BodyCombat will greatly depend on how often you feel the need to change up your workout and your tolerance for the same music and instructor’s patter each time you play. The latter is an issue for me, and I would welcome the option to shut them up once I had the hang of a workout I enjoyed and wanted to repeat often.

In terms of content alone, there’s no doubt that you’ll get more for your $30 here than you would for the equivalent value of in-the-flesh BodyCombat classes or Gym membership. The ‘gamification’ of this concept is definitely more engaging than a Youtube video could ever hope to be.

Conclusion

During a session, when things are going well, and you’re in the moment (our friend Dan calls it ‘The Flow’), Les Mills BodyCombat is as good a workout as you could hope to find anywhere in VR. As is the case for many others, it’s vital that I’m distracted from the fact that I’m exercising. Ask me to kick a football around, and I’ll still be playing when the sun goes down, ask me to jog two laps of a track, and you’ll get a very blunt and very negative response. With Les Mills, the activities themselves may not be anything new; the punch squat, combo, repeat loops have been seen many times before, but Les Mills BodyCombat does a good job of providing an entertaining distraction from the effort it requires you to make.

In their presentation, BodyCombat‘s workouts feel very gamey. Still, both games and workouts require you to fail, learn, and build from your mistakes – and that is this product’s weakest area by far.

In the VR world of Les Mills, failure is literally not an option. Because your failures are not registered during the workouts, they are not corrected. This makes it very difficult to learn and improve.

I’ve enjoyed the workouts Les Mills BodyCombat provides, and I will keep using it. I appreciate the lack of a subscription model and how utterly exhausted a thirty-minute session makes me. Still, there is a lot of room for improvement, and it will be interesting to see what, if any, updates are made post-release.

I received a 60-day free trial to evaluate Supernatural, after which Within would charge my credit card $19.00 per month or I could buy an annual subscription for $179.00. Considering that the most expensive purchase price for a fitness game available on the oculus quest up to this point was $29.99, I had pretty high expectations.

When I embarked on my evaluation, to gauge the value of Supernatural, I decided to use a two-pronged approach: for the first 30 days, Supernatural would be the only app I would use for my fitness in VR. I would have to try at least 30 unique workouts. Exclusively using Supernatural as my workout for a month would allow me to judge its effectiveness, apart from the other apps in the VR space.  

After the first 30 days, I allowed myself to choose the other fitness games on the Oculus Quest and would turn to or incorporate Supernatural into my workouts as much or as little as I wanted, but no less than once per week. I was hoping to evaluate Supernatural’s value for an average user. How would I feel about Supernatural when it wasn’t my only option, but just one of the many VR fitness options available? Because Supernatural‘s asking price is so much higher than its competitors, it is fair to assess Supernatural‘s value relative to other, less expensive fitness applications already available without a subscription. After all, a higher price suggests higher quality.

The Basics

Every day, a new workout waits for you in your lobby. You can either choose the new playlist or repeat a workout from the past. At the moment, you can filter the workouts by the trainer, by length, or intensity, but not by the genre (though this functionality will be in future releases). 

Before you begin each workout, you are greeted by the trainer who will demonstrate a very quick set of “warm-up” exercises (two or three squats or arm movements), and then the workout playlist will begin. Each workout is associated with only one trainer. The first song will always be a low-intensity warm-up song. 

I covered the basics in my earlier first impressions review, but the basic routine goes like this: In each hand, you have a bat:  one black and one white.  As each song plays, black and white balloons come towards you from “portals” which change positions every so often, so that you’ll rotate in a circle to hit them. Each balloon has a little transparent cone attached, which indicates the direction you’re supposed to hit the balloon. If you hit the balloon at the right angle, the balloon explodes, and you hear a little swish. Your controller will vibrate. 

If you hit the balloon at the wrong angle, you will hear a bouncing rubber ball sound (like a kickball), and the balloon will go flying off in some direction. Some balloons have arrow trails pointing to the right or left. If you see those, you’re supposed to swing with a full followthrough and turn in the direction of the arrows. If the balloons have comet tails, you’re supposed to exaggerate your swing and follow the tails with your bat. 

Frequently, golden triangles will also shoot out of the portals. If the triangles lean in one direction, you’re supposed to lunge within the triangle. If the triangle is equilateral(?), you’re just supposed to squat. You cannot disable the squats or lunges. 

A workout may have a High, Medium, or Low-Intensity indicator on its tile in the main menu, but you cannot choose the difficulty or intensity of a workout beyond that. The amount and speed of the balloons are supposed to scale down or up to your skill level.   While you can skip the warm-up and cool down, you cannot skip around/re-order the songs within the playlist itself. 

As you play through each song in the workout, you continuously hear a canned recording of the trainer talking over the music in a normal speaking voice. Some of the phrases may directly relate to the song or workout playlist, but most of the dialog is generic. If you play several workouts by the same trainer, you will often hear repeated phrases. Whether you miss all your targets or hit every single one, the voice over is precisely the same. You can lower the trainer’s voiceover volume by half, but you cannot mute the trainer or entirely or turn it off. 

At the end of each song, you will see your score. Supernatural calculates your score by combining your accuracy and “power” of your follow-through. After the final song, a video of the trainer re-appears for a “cool-down”: a minute to about a minute-and-a-half, where he or she will demonstrate one or two basic stretches. One lazy design choice: During the warm-up and cool-down videos with the trainers, your controllers still look like bats, even though you’re not supposed to hit anything. Why? For what purpose? 

After your “cool-down” is complete,  you receive your workout’s score and return to Supernatural’s main menu. Supernatural’s companion app will display any workout you perform along with your score. Still, you won’t be able to compare your current score in any given workout to a previous score within the application. 

In the main menu, you will see a running total of your workout score for the week, along with the scores of any other users you follow on Supernatural’s companion app.

The Lack of Basics

Aside from the backdrops, which remind me of the aesthetic in Guided Tai Chi, and the 1-minute warm-up/cool-down videos, the actual workout experience is nearly identical to Beat Saber, with a few variations, which was kind of disappointing to begin with, but Supernatural is so locked down, with virtually no ability to customize your experience, that justifying a subscription price became very difficult. 

Lackluster Results

After a month of exclusively and earnestly playing Supernatural, did I lose any weight? Did I gain any muscle? Did I lose any inches? Nope. According to my little measuring tape and my fancy-schmancy smart scale, I stayed exactly the same in pretty much every metric. 

I’ll admit, I honestly thought that I would burn more calories in Supernatural than I did in Beat Saber or Box VR. But the truth was in the numbers: the calorie burn rate was, on average, equal with both apps.

Here are some workout results from various other apps, with the final two being from Supernatural, so you can compare.

The reason I probably felt like I was working harder was probably that I didn’t get a break between each song. According to my fitness tracker, Supernatural’s calorie burn rate falls squarely in the center of other available fitness applications on the Oculus Quest. It beats out Guided Tai Chi(duh), burns the same amount of calories as with Beat Saber, Box VR, Synth Riders, or Dance Central, but comes nowhere close the number of calories I burn when I play Pistol Whip, Thrill of the Fight, or Ohshape. 

To be honest the workout was….fine. It was a decent cardio workout. But it was the SAME workout you could get with Beat Saber for a fraction of the price, so long as you lock your wrists and don’t mind EDM. If you do mind EDM, you can use BMBF to add your own custom songs to Beat Saber.

Canned Playlists Only – No Singles Allowed

“But, they’re giving you new music every day!” This just wasn’t the case. When the Supernatural App turns one year old, they will have 365 recorded playlists: one “new” playlist per day. So far, each song has been repeated at least once and usually more than once. In just the first month alone, where all of the content should have been new, there were at least 90 repeated songs, where the choreography was identical. 

I will say this upfront: I don’t mind paying a subscription fee for access to unlimited music…or games. I can imagine a world where I would happily pay $20.00 for access to all the games on the Oculus Quest (OculusPrime???): as far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m downloading more than one game or one album’s worth of new content per month, the subscription has paid for itself, since it would cost me the same to buy the same amount of content. But I already have one music subscription, and that’s not what you’re getting when you subscribe to Supernatural.

Even though you’re paying almost double the price of a digital unlimited music subscription, you can’t even choose to play just one song by itself in Supernatural. You also can’t create your playlists with the songs that have already been choreographed.  

When I first opened the Supernatural platform, I wanted to choose one song I liked and play through it (there weren’t too many). I would have preferred to pick through a list of songs and create my playlists and workouts around music that suited my tastes. Of the 60 workout playlists I had access to, there were only five playlists where I enjoyed each song.

I wanted the ability to not listen to music I didn’t like. Even the free version of Pandora allows you to skip five songs per hour. While playing Supernatural, if I chose to roll the dice with the daily workout, which I had to do if I didn’t want to repeat a workout, I had to listen to a lot of music I didn’t enjoy, which just made me hate my workout that day and turned me off from the entire platform. 

Developer Within’s key justification for the subscription pricing model is its extensive (and very complicated) music licensing agreement. Without having seen their contract, I can’t comment on how good/ bad/restrictive or permissive this agreement is. Supernatural’s creators have made it clear that the ability to play a song individually is not going to be a feature of this particular application. As someone sensitive to the complicated world of entertainment law and digital music licensing, I’m sympathetic. But as a consumer, frankly, I don’t care.

Supernatural has been placing a lot of emphasis on the fact that Beat Saber and BoxVR do not have popular music, where Supernatural does. But, if you’re looking for fully licensed pop-music, you don’t have to look further than Dance Central, which provides a full-body workout. Dance Central may not feel as intense but moves your entire body and offers an equivalent total body workout and calorie burn. 

Out of the box, Dance Central comes with 30 popular songs (many of which were also in Supernatural workouts – like Kendrick Lamar’s Humble, Bad Romance By Lady Gaga, Attention by Charlie Puth and New Rules by Dua Lipa). Additional tracks, fully choreographed, are available in Dance Central for $1.99 each.

Ohshape!, Synth Riders, Audio Trip, Audio Shield, and Racket: NX all OFFICIALLY allow users to import custom songs and maps, giving each of those games an almost infinite selection of possibilities. It’s also not exactly a secret that you can import custom songs and maps into Beat Saber using BMBF. You can even use an AI program available for free at beatsage.com to create Beat Saber levels with your own music.

No Save. No Restart.

Restarting a single song seems like such a simple feature that you don’t fully appreciate until you don’t have it. However, if you want to want to restart a song, regardless of whether you’re in the first song or the last song of your workout, you can’t. You can only exit and restart the entire workout from the top. Being able to hit “Restart Song” in literally every other music and rhythm game available on the Oculus Quest is a feature I will now forever look upon with new appreciation. In Supernatural, the absence of such an essential element was glaring. 

You also can’t save your progress mid-workout and come back to it later. I would have appreciated the ability to exit out of Supernatural and go back to a workout after I dealt with some real-world interruptions, but that option isn’t available. 

While I was reviewing Supernatural, I was observing the shelter-in-place-order in my state. I didn’t always have my workout spaces to myself, and occasionally I had to take off my headset to do some reasonably standard adulting. 

Sometimes, the app would take FOREVER to load the next song, and I would be stuck staring at a black screen with what I’ve affectionately nicknamed the “yellow bar of death.” I wanted just to exit Supernatural and come back later. But I couldn’t do that. If I left the workout, I’d have to start it all over again. 

I’m going to tell you a secret about exercise: the benefits of daily workouts are cumulative. If you do 10 minutes of working out in the morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon, and 10 minutes at night, you’ll get the same benefits as you would have working out for 30 minutes straight. My point? If I made it three songs into a workout, I didn’t need to start the workout from the top.   

Saving in the middle of a playlist isn’t available in other music and rhythm games, but those games don’t need it because I can play individual songs. I’m also not expected to pay hundreds of dollars per year for access to those games.   

Squats and Lunges… Whether You Can Do Them or Not.

When I first purchased the Oculus Quest, in addition to seeing its potential for the fitness industry, I also saw VR as a great alternative for people with limited mobility to get some cardio exercise. If you’re disabled or injured at all, there is just no way to play Supernatural safely. For me, there were other reasons why I wanted to disable the squat and lunge triangles: I hated the way they were incorporated.

If executed properly, squats and lunges can be a great lower body workout. You do not need to perform these at high speed, and are far more effective as a muscle-building exercise when you take your time. If done incorrectly, you are more likely to injure your back or knees. 

Even though I know better, though I know the proper form, I caught myself bending my spine to get within the perimeter of the triangles, rather than using my hips and thighs to do a proper lunge or squat. I found the way the choreography often directed me to change directions or reach right before performing multiple rapid sets of squats or lunges made it difficult to place my feet at the proper width and position within the time provided. I imagine that a fitness novice would probably have a tough time keeping up. 

Another factor I don’t think the choreographer considered was the sheer weight of the headset. When you have an Oculus Quest headset on, the weight causes your head to lean slightly forward.  Now, I have a battery pack tied to the back of my headset to counterbalance the weight, but even so, my head always tilts forward slightly.  Proper form for squats and lunges requires you to keep your head level and your chest up, which is already difficult when your arms are flailing in every direction, trying to hit virtual balloons. If you don’t have proper upper body form when you squat, the result is usually lower back pain. If your knees go out past your toes when you bend, you will lose your balance and risk putting too much pressure on your knees. Unsurprisingly, I had both lower back pain and knee pain for several days during my trial of the Supernatural app. 

To be fair: During the videos at the beginning of several workouts and in the canned voice-overs, the trainers are constantly reminding you to use proper form, but the speed of the game makes this hard to implement consciously. 

Every other fitness app that has obstacles for you to dodge also allows you to disable those obstacles from the settings or options menu.  

360 Arena… Whether You Want it or Not

I don’t have a ton of space in my apartment and there were a few days when I had to work out in an area that was about 8’x5’. For every other fitness game on the Oculus Quest, except for Thrill of the Fight, I’ve never had a problem working out in that space. But while using Supernatural, I ended up traveling a lot because of the constant “Turn-lunge, Turn-Lunge.” I hit the walls with my controller/knuckles or came up against my guardian more than any other app on the entire platform. Once, I slammed my hand on the corner of a chest of drawers and screamed like someone was trying to murder me. 

Regardless of whatever difficulties creating a reduced rotation mode would create for the developers, as a consumer, this felt like a huge miss. I can see the benefit of turning to your right or left, and I know that there are people who want to utilize the full capability of untethered VR. Giving me the option of changing the rotation to 180 or 90 probably would open Supernatural to tethered VR headsets like the Oculus Rift or PSVR and would broaden Supernatural’s appeal.  There is no physical advantage 360 motion offers that 180 motion doesn’t. 

Opposite of Personalized

I’ve talked about how you can’t disable or enable features and how you can’t make custom playlists. I think the reason this bothered me is that I immediately wanted to do all those things. 

I wanted to design my workouts with songs I liked, pick my backdrops for each song, change the colors of the bats and the targets, and turn the trainer’s voiceovers off completely. I wanted to choose a warm-up and cool-down videos with the trainer I liked the best, regardless of which workout I decided to play. I also wanted to make the directional cones more opaque so that I could see them better. 

I wanted a list of songs AND a list of premade workouts, if that’s how I wanted to go that day. Supernatural recently implemented a change that would allow you to see an indicator of how many songs remain in your workout. Still, you don’t have the option of a countdown timer, which is one feature that I find insanely useful when I am on a time crunch and is a feature I appreciate in BoxVR and Guided Tai Chi. 

You can’t customize any of those things in Supernatural.

The only personalization available is on the main menu page. You can bookmark any workout as a favorite so you can jump right to it. Since they’re planning to have 365 workouts by next April, I imagine the “Favorites” feature is going to come in handy for subscribers. 

Supernatural‘s creators appear to want it both ways: they want to make an app with broad appeal, but they’re actively preventing users from adjusting the application to suit their individual personalities and limitations. With no options to make Supernatural feel like my own, it just feels generic. 

Where’s The Party?

I talked about the lack of any sort of multiplayer mode when I did the first look at Supernatural back in late April. At the time, I complained that Supernatural would require additional household users to each pay for their own individual accounts, even when sharing the same headset. The creators of Supernatural have since stated that they are working on supporting multiple user accounts for one headset without having to buy additional subscriptions. After experiencing Supernatural for a full two months, I think some kind of online multiplayer or interactive party mode would have gone a long way towards adding in some of the competitive elements I felt were missing. 

There is a weekly leaderboard on the main screen, where you can see the compiled scores of other users you follow in the companion app, but that’s as social as the VR aspect of Supernatural gets. There don’t appear to be any plans to add a multiplayer mode to the Supernatural platform.

I Still Don’t get the Companion App

After my first impression review, I felt that maybe I hadn’t given Supernatural’s companion app a fair shake. I didn’t see much point to it after I synced my phone to my headset, which I think also served as a way to sync my fitness tracker’s data with the headset, though Supernatural doesn’t support my Fitbit and I had to track my workout using Fitbit’s platform.

So, I redoubled my efforts to “get it”. 

I followed as many users as I could within Supernatural‘s companion app. I checked in on the companion app as often as I remembered, occasionally giving a thumbs-up to stranger’s workouts. Since I didn’t actually know any of the people I followed, the social aspect of Supernatural’s companion app fell a bit flat. 

The only function Supernatural‘s companion app served was to remind me which workouts I performed and what my score was. If I performed the same workout multiple times, the app did not track my progress or compare my new score for that workout to previous times I tried that workout.

Since I was trying to avoid repetition during my evaluation, Supernatural‘s companion app helped me keep track of which workouts I performed. If I hadn’t been reviewing the game, once I synced my headset, I probably would have forgotten about the companion app entirely, since it’s not otherwise even mentioned and all of my fitness data is available on my Fitbit’s app. 

Removed Gamification. Removed the Fun.

Only a week into my 60-day trial, I internally started to make excuses for why I didn’t need to work out that day in Supernatural. I found myself getting bored during my workouts and wondering how many songs were left before I could stop and get out of this damn headset. As soon as I hit the 30-day mark and was “allowed” to play other games, I almost always chose another game over Supernatural every morning, going back to Supernatural only a few times per week.

Why wasn’t I having fun? Why was I subconsciously trying to make excuses to myself to get out of playing every day…even though working out with Supernatural was ACTUALLY MY JOB? Why was I getting bored in the middle of workouts? 

As a reviewer, my job isn’t just to look at a game and say “hey, this is fun,”  or “hey, this is not fun,” but to give you a solid justification for my perspective. I agonized about understanding why Supernatural wasn’t fun. What made me look forward to playing Beat Saber, Ohshape!, Dance Central, Pistol Whip, and even BoxVR, where I had to essentially guilt/force myself to play Supernatural after the first few days? 

When I used other fitness games to workout, I usually had to force myself to stop playing so I wouldn’t be late to class/work. Why was this different? It just didn’t make sense …but I knew it was true. 

Ultimately, I figured it out. 

To market themselves as a fitness application, the creators of Supernatural deliberately excluded gamification elements. Where ordinary games have levels/campaigns you play through to gradually build yourself through practice, Supernatural has one intelligent response system called “dynamic difficulty,” where the balloons appear less frequently as you start to miss. You can’t “die”, but you also can’t practice just one song to improve. You can’t play just one song at all. And you’re not supposed to want to.  

The feedback you receive from a traditional game is instant so you can immediately gauge how your actions impact your results. If your behavior wasn’t successful, you die or earn fewer points. You immediately learned how your behavior impacted your performance and you can adjust the next time you play. 

Game developers are geniuses when it comes to tweaking what’s referred to as a “feedback loop.” If a game is too simple, you’ll eventually lose interest because there is nothing to learn and your improvement is capped at perfection. If a game is too difficult, you’ll eventually lose interest because constantly losing is just depressing.

In Supernatural, the motivation to play is supposed to be intrinsic to you. You are “playing” because you want to get fit, or because not playing would mean wasting 20 bucks per month,  which is enough motivation for some people but isn’t enough for me, at least not when I could get a nearly identical workout elsewhere for a MUCH lower price and the physical results are identical to those achieved using those other, much less expensive applications. 

There is nothing in Supernatural for me to defeat, nothing to build towards, no achievements, and no real challenge. Frankly, Supernatural feels more like a participation trophy. The app is simply not built to challenge you.

“But you have the trainers to give you advice and feedback!” Do you? The trainer’s voice-overs are static recordings and do not change. There is no branching logic to control what you hear from the trainers, so they’re just talking at you. 

If you’re not following through in the proper form, you’re not getting advice personalized to your experience designed to help you improve. If you’re a fitness novice, the only way you’d know you’d done something wrong, is if you felt that bad kind of pain. 

If I went to a personal trainer, with the sole purpose of getting fit, and he gave me one game to play with a limited set of rules over, and over, and over again, set to different music, played a tape of his voice over the music, and didn’t correct my form, I’d probably ask for my money back… even if it was a decent workout. 

The only element of Supernatural that gives you any kind of feedback is the score display you see at the end. You get a score based on your accuracy and your “power,” but that score isn’t really helpful as a metric. 

The score tells you how you did overall, but that doesn’t help you improve the next time you play, since you are unlikely to repeat that workout again. You don’t really know how your individual movements affected your score. You only know your final result.  You’re unlikely to want to “practice” any one particular workout; after all, there is a new workout every day. 

With any other app on the Oculus Quest, the fact that I wouldn’t want to play every day is not a reason to forgo buying an app or game completely. After all, who wants to play the same game every day? You buy a game and play it every once and awhile. I don’t pay a substantial monthly fee for any other game though, so not playing every day doesn’t feel like lighting a twenty-dollar bill on fire.

The Underutilized Coaches

Like many, when I first entered into Supernatural, the gorgeous backdrops filled me with joy. When Leanne Pendante appeared to walk me through calibration and the proper form for a squat and lunge, I immediately saw the potential for what Supernatural had conceptualized: an app that offered personalized trainer feedback could be a runaway hit and offer something no other platform did. Once I saw what the trainers’ involvement was on a daily basis, I was really disappointed. 

My biggest issue with the trainers here is where they could have been useful. The warm-up and cool-down videos were far too short to be effective and added no real value. To me, it felt like the trainer videos were there just so Supernatural could point to them and say, “We have trainers! We are just like Peloton!” 

Those interludes before and after Supernatural’s music workouts could have been utilized so much better. The trainers could have provided a meaningful bodyweight strength workout to supplement the cardio.

The trainers could have provided meaningful sets of stretches targeting each muscle group, with a duration sufficient to help you maintain and increase flexibility for your entire body, during the cool down instead of a meaningless 30-second demonstration, which is incapable of preventing injury or soreness. Before and after you work out, you need to give each part of your body a full stretch. This can take 5 or even up to 10 minutes, but it’s worth it, especially when you’re doing strenuous exercise. 

There were some cool-downs that were completely tone-deaf to how the Oculus Quest is actually built and used. A few different trainers told me to bend at the waist and hang my head down. They would demonstrate this. Were they serious? Hang my head down? With a top-heavy $500 piece of equipment attached to my head by a flimsy strap? If I obeyed, the headset would slip off and break. If I just stood there, I was wasting my time. If I half-listened and bent at the waist, but angled my head so I could still see the trainer and keep my headset from slipping off, I’d be risking a neck injury.  

During the actual playlists, I can see what Supernatural was trying to do with those voiceovers: motivate you like a spin class instructor shouting over the music as they pedal alongside you, screaming at you to “GET UP THAT HILL!” This is not what Supernatural’s trainer voice-overs feel like. The voiceovers just feel like a recording of someone talking over the music, constantly breaking your concentration, and mostly just served to undercut the advantage of Supernatural‘s music license. 

The trainers could have been visually present, in front of you or next to you with you during the workout, showing you the proper form, and helping you get the most out of your cardio workout – in a manner similar to Audio Trip’s Dancer, the characters in Dance Central or Guided Tai Chi’s transparent masters. At least then they would be doing something other than ruining your concentration.

A Subscription Model Which Alienates Casual Users

My overall impression of the Supernatural app as a workout application or as a game is that the platform was simply mediocre: not great, but not terrible either. 

I’ll be honest: if Supernatural was a standalone app that came with 30 songs and a few playlists, and cost somewhere around the $30.00 range (or maybe a little more for the music licensing), would I buy it? Yes. I would. I’d buy it because it would add a little variety to my workout. I might not use it all that often in its current state, because I really didn’t like the lack of personalization or that I had to commit to an entire playlist when I didn’t care for so many of the songs.

For me, Supernatural would be an alternative to BoxVR: a game I turn to when I really don’t want to think or need to enjoy my workout and just wanted to go on autopilot. I would be a casual user. If I was allowed to create my own playlists, I’d probably have a mishmash of genres and intensities thrown together and have a bunch of 10-minute playlists I’d just incorporate into a larger workout regime composed of several games I already play which keeps me from getting bored. I probably wouldn’t use the warm-ups and cool-downs at all, since they were so ineffective.  The limitations of Supernatural would bother me, a little, but I doubt I would have found them nearly as offensive if Supernatural were just a one time purchase.

There just isn’t any room in Supernatural’s current pricing model for someone like me: someone who thought the app was okay, but didn’t intend to use it all that often.

I suspect that the $19.00 monthly subscription fee was introduced with the premiere of Supernatural specifically to invite the idea that Supernatural was a premium application, deliberately induce a sticker shock, and make $179.00 for the year seem like a bargain by comparison. 

The problem with a yearly subscription is that you pay upfront. You could decide to cancel your monthly subscription after 6 months (only paying $105 to own no content). You don’t get a refund if you choose to cancel your yearly plan. 

There is no world where I would consider such a high monthly or yearly fee for an application I intended to use for, at most, two or three days out of the week for about 10 minutes at a time. That would be an obscene waste of money. For the price Within is asking, I’d have to be pretty damn certain I would use Supernatural every day, which I wouldn’t, because ultimately, it doesn’t give me what I need from a workout. There is just no room for a casual user in the current pricing model.  

Currently, Supernatural is 7x as expensive as its closest competitor per year. If you subscribe for 2 years is actually 14x as expensive. After paying more for Supernatural than any other non-enterprise application on the quest, you don’t actually own any part of the platform. If you stop paying at any point for Supernatural, you will be locked out of recorded, static content you should have the option to buy. You could put $200, $400, or $600 into Within’s pockets, and in the end, you own nothing. You walk away with nothing but results you could have achieved with other apps on the Oculus Quest,  for a lot less money.

I have a couple of solutions to Within’s pricing model issue that would be practical, profitable, and satisfy a larger user base: Within could create a downloadable base version of Supernatural for casual users who previously chose not to subscribe. This downloadable version could contain a limited number of their already existing pre-recorded playlists and this version of Supernatural would exist outside of their subscription application. Each month, additional DLC packs of previously choreographed music would be available for $30 per month, or users could purchase the individual playlists.  

For current subscribers who feel new daily content adds sufficient value, the subscription model would still be available. 

Would Supernatural lose subscribers? Maybe. But that is my point: if more users would jump ship because they can now purchase what you’re forcing them to rent, your model is probably the wrong one to start with.

How to Make Supernatural Worth the Asking Price

I gave Supernatural’s workouts as much effort as I could since I believe they deserved a chance to win me over as a customer (almost always scoring from platinum to triple platinum). I can tell you that I found their workouts to be far too easy and nowhere near physically challenging enough for me. 

To be worth a subscription fee like the one they are charging, Supernatural needs to stop relying on their music license as a justification. Music is not the real draw of their application. After the first 100 workouts, honestly, how much more variety do you think you’re going to need? The pretty backdrops will not be the draw of their fitness application, even if they are stunning (they are). A Beat Saber clone workout alienates more potential customers than it entices. 

For me to want to fork over a $19.00 per month subscription fee or a $179.00 annual fee, I would need so much more out of Supernatural than they’re offering. Instead of relying on music, Supernatural should embrace different forms of gameplay and embrace their coaches. 

Recently, Supernatural uploaded one meditation session. This was after my 60-day evaluation completed, but I think that was a step in the right direction.

Supernatural should offer a full fitness experience that doesn’t just calibrate to your body but also continuously assesses your fitness level, flexibility, and capabilities and then build an entire program around your goals. As you become accustomed to the program, the workouts need to become more challenging and the workout itself needs to change, because, in real life, that’s how you get where you need to go when it comes to fitness. Also, doing the same style workout every day is just…boring. Supernatural should also offer fitness advice beyond cardio and the slight muscular workout currently on offer. After all, cardio is only one element of fitness.

Of course, first, Supernatural needs to add in the very basic functionality to their existing workouts which is currently absent:

• Ability to choose to play an individual song.
• Ability to create custom playlists.
• Ability to customize the lobby background, possibly from a gallery
• Ability to choose workout and song backgrounds, possibly from a gallery.
• Ability to choose a background other than outdoors, if you find the backgrounds distracting.
• Ability to choose any trainer for any workout or individual song.
• Ability to customize the targets, in particular, make the directional indicators more opaque.
• Ability to choose the color of bats and targets.
• Ability to mute trainer voice-overs
• Branching logic to trainer voice-overs based on performance, so that the trainers’ comments give meaningful feedback to the user to help them improve.
• Ability to rearrange songs within any given playlist.
• Ability to skip or repeat songs within a workout.
• Ability to restart a song without having to restart a whole workout.
• Ability to save a workout currently in progress.
• Ability to see past scores for a workout or song with the VR app, so the user has a way to assess their improvement.
• Ability to enable real-time scoring, so users can adjust their performance based on feedback
• Ability to manually change the intensity of any workout or song.
• Ability to adjust the difficulty of any given workout or song
• Ability to download songs and workouts local headset to reduce latency
• An offline mode if users are unable to connect to the internet, or if the user’s connection is slow.
• Ability to disable the squats and lunges.
• Ability to change the arena from 360-degree mode to 180 or 90-degree mode if you’re working out in a small space.
• Online multiplayer capabilities.
• Local multiplayer mode for multiple users to switch off during personal challenges.
• Additional support for popular fitness trackers.
• Additional fitness capability and support outside of VR.

Now, I understand that I basically just called for a total re-development of their platform if Supernatural wants to be worth their asking price. But, if Supernatural wants people to buy in, they should do more than provide one gameplay type workout that is nearly identical to a game available elsewhere for much less. Frankly, for Supernatural to be worth what they’re asking, the gameplay would need to be more entertaining and unique, and the results from using it would have to be better than the ones I can get for a one-time purchase $30 from several other available games.

However, I think that the current design model and a guarantee of new daily content makes actually improving this platform incredibly difficult since the developers and choreographer would have to develop new content while also making these necessary updates to all of the currently available workouts, which will become more difficult as time goes on and their library expands.

Conclusion

Supernatural is a fitness app with an identity crisis. The stunning natural backdrops, which is an aesthetic almost identical to Guided Tai Chi, imply relaxation but the intense, club-style music attempts to fuel your adrenaline which seems out of place with the soothing surroundings. The trainers attempt to motivate you, but non-intelligent feedback and lack of progression are dishearteningly unmotivating. Supernatural’s daily updated content implies that you will never be bored with their platform, but with the static gameplay, I struggled to see how I would progress as an athlete over time using this platform and quickly got bored with it. Because the developers are putting out new content daily, it’s also almost impossible to make improvements to past workouts.

Supernatural wants to be a fitness platform and not a game but made a game its primary workout. Supernatural wanted a game to be its primary workout but removed the elements that make a game fun enough to return to day after day.

Supernatural’s current model also presents a unique problem: As their push for new content grows, any improvements to the Supernatural platform will be harder to implement. An example: one feature I would like to see is the ability to choose the level of difficulty or intensity in any workout playlist. If I’m a beginner, I wouldn’t want to be locked out of workouts that were too difficult. I would want the difficulty level static so I could practice and improve. With a limited set of songs, making a change like that would take time, but wouldn’t be insurmountable. As Supernatural’s library grows, the ability to roll out such adjustments to their platform becomes more difficult. 

So, is Supernatural worth the subscription fee? Rather than equivocate, remain neutral, and encourage you to try it for yourself, I’m just going to flat out say “no.” 

When evaluating Supernatural based on entertainment value and tangible benefits vs. the cost of a subscription, at the end of my trial period, I was left disappointed and unconvinced that Supernatural had anything more than minimal added value, especially when stacked up against other fitness applications available on the Oculus Quest. 

As a virtual reality workout, Supernatural does not provide any activity that you cannot get from other applications (or games) available for purchase on the Oculus Quest.  

If you really need to pay money every month just have the motivation to workout, I suggest investing in one game for $19.99 per month as a reward or as an incentive. At least then, you’ll also own something. 

Space Invaders

Titans of Space PLUS is an elegant guided tour of our solar system, stopping at planets, moons, and a few major asteroids. You are placed in a miniature spacecraft, with large windows that let you take in some epic views, accompanied by a dramatic orchestral score. At each stop, you can view some key facts, apply map layovers showing the terrain, and spin the globes or hold them in your hand for a closer look.

A shortened, 20-minute tour focuses mainly on planets, while the longer 35-minute tour hits all the stops. After viewing the solar system, you’ll visit a few giant stars that are thousands of times larger than our Sun. Or more precisely, those giant stars will come to you, and you can get a glimpse of what our solar system would look like with a blue supergiant like Rigel at the center.

Keep Your Hands Inside The Tour Bus

Some of the stops on this tour are more impressive than others. When you reach Saturn, for example, you can actually exit the craft and jet around the rings in zero-G, which is a truly inspiring feeling. Often, though, you’ll be patiently reading scientific bullet points, like you’re stuck inside an epic, immersive PowerPoint presentation.

Titans of Space PLUS is a lot like an enjoyable IMAX movie at a museum. It’s educational, a bit jaw-dropping at times, and worth the price of admission. Once you’re done with the tour, though, there’s nothing else to do except take the ride again.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy

If you’re looking for a little more range in your space apps, consider purchasing Star Chart as well, which also shows you constellations and some VR scenes set on Mars and the Moon. Like Titans of Space PLUS, Star Chart has a guided tour of the solar system called the Orrey, but it’s not as majestic or insightful as Titans’ experience.

The two apps together, though, are a decent first attempt at a comprehensive, interactive space tour that both educates and enthralls. Neither app has it all on its own, so any potential armchair astronomer might consider purchasing both.

KINGSPRAY GRAFFITI | NEWBIE vs EXPERTS

For this review, we’re changing things up a bit, as I’m lucky to know a community of excellent local graffiti artists who are masters of their craft, so we’re going to let a couple of them have their say on Kingspray Graffiti.  Ravesh D. and Lukas had never used VR before, so we had an hour before firing up Kingspray letting them get a feel for using the Quest, which more than impressed both of them. Once they’d both started to get their heads around it (and I initially had to promise them we’d come back to Superhot to get them to change to Kingspray), they gave this title some serious attention.

I’ll convey their individual thoughts on the title, and then offer my own notes and score by way of our ‘official’ review.

It’s the Feel

You have to get good and be good to get a good result. But the thing is I must have spent aw man, a lot of money on cans to get good. A lot of money. And that’s not having the other stuff too, like all the tips and the pearlescent sh!#. Hundreds of colours and finishes here, it’s @!#*ing crazy, though. I’m trying stuff on here that I have never tried out there. I can’t afford it! And you move around just like you’d expect. For me, it’s the feel. You forget you’re using the control things and just… It tricks you into thinking you’re using a can, and it acts just like it. Obviously, the shape of the can’s different, yeah, but I mean the feel is the same. And the menu sh!# isn’t complicated, it kind of acts like you’d expect. Obviously, in the real world, you wouldn’t have a million colours or whatever.

IT’S GONNA STAY @!#* ED UP

Ohhhh, the drips, man. It’s just what it should be like. And no undo thing. If you @!#* it up, its gonna stay @!#*ed up until you spray over it, I like that. If you’re starting out with graffiti, you going to get used to that real quick – because it’s costing you a lot of time and money. I wish I would have had this, man. You know, four years ago. It feels natural and real. It’s a bit @!#*ed up you can’t spray on some of the bits, like in the subway train bit. There’s some places the paint won’t take at all, like the computer is like, blanking you. So that’s weird. It reminds me of the fact I’m not actually doing it. But man this is @!#*ing crazy, I need one of these. I wish it did this thing where you could smell the cans, that paint smell as it comes out, though! That’s the only thing I would say is really missing.

THE ZONE

I mean I was saying to Rav, you run out of things to say because it’s real. You don’t think when you’re spraying ‘oh this is real, this is blowing my mind’. You just get into the zone with it. You forget you’re in there. I just concentrate on what I’m doing. It’s so awesome, I can’t say. I love that you can just walk around, you can pick a spot, and have at it, yeah? It’s so much freedom, and no-one’s gonna have a go at you for it. 

ALL YEAR IN THAT VIRTUAL THING

If it was me, if I was really picky, I’d say let me head out with a few cans. Just pick the cans you want from the shelves and head out then. So you’d be picking up the cans from your bag or the floor, you know the colours you had. That’s when it makes me feel I’m in the virtual world, the menu and the picking colours from a wheel. It’s like an app then, not the real world. But I get to use a hundred colours at once here. Makes me look better than I am. I normally do monochrome, black and white, two or three colours. It’s how I learned because it’s cheaper and it’s less to carry. But man, I could spend all year in that virtual thing, seriously, because you can just let your mind run free with it. All over.

TUNES AND VIBE

Did I say about the music? Oh man, I thought I was going to just slide on Spotify and use my own playlist or whatever, but Kingspray Graffiti has some tracks I never heard before that are @!#*ing A, and they aren’t even in a genre really or anything. Usually, when they do ‘street’ stuff like this you get some guy from EA, some office guy, sat in his office thinking ‘we’ll put some NWA on yeah?’ and that’s it, but this is all over the shop! It’s great, and I wasn’t expecting it. It’s so chill, the tunes and vibe of it, I wish it could be like that more often outside. 

KINGSPRAY GRAFFITI | DOC SAYS

I’m not a professional graffiti artist by any means, but I find Kingspray Graffiti every bit as wonderful as Lukas and Rav do. It’s a liberating and extremely well-executed title, with a huge amount of attention to detail. Everything feels convincing and slick, and there’s a pleasing array of environments to explore and spray away in. The graphics are very impressive, and the sound is acutely observed and immersive.

A special mention must be made of the soundtrack. There’s a lot of really excellent music on Kingspray Graffiti that suits the title perfectly, some of it entirely unexpected. It’s presented as different ‘radio’ stations, so there are different moods, all of which are surprisingly likeable and groovy. 

Editorial note: Sadly, the Scrcpy capture of the Kingspray Graffiti session with Rav and Lukas didn’t work out, but they have both agreed to record another and bring some graffiti artist friends along with them… So look for another 6DoF Kingspray feature soon!

 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. 

You’re standing near the edge of a cliff above a gently flowing river. Above you is a clear blue sky. In the distance, a waterfall cascades down a steep granite slope. Birds chirp around you as gentle music plays. On either side of you and in front of you, Tai Chi masters are encouraging you to mirror their slow, controlled moves. You do, almost exactly. The four of you move in perfect synchronization as a woman’s disembodied voice reminds you to control your movements and relax. All too soon, your time together is done. You feel relaxed and balanced.  This is how I start and end most days thanks to Guided Tai Chi. 

Guided Tai Chi is not a full-on Tai Chi tutorial designed to turn every player into a Tai Chi master. Likely, a real Tai Chi enthusiast would find this app lacking, as it focuses on the relaxation and meditation aspect of Tai Chi, rather than Tai Chi a martial art. The entry bar is relatively low, and the instructions are easy to follow. To play, all you do is select a five-minute “Flow” guided program or three-minute “Arcade” challenge. 

The Five-Minute Flow

In the guided program, you select from a long list of inspirationally titled programs and the scene you want to practice in, then you’re transported to the relaxing setting of your choice to begin your session. 

Your hands are represented by two orbs. Your left hand is a black orb, and your right hand is a white orb. Your goal is to keep these orbs in the center of their circles as they move. There are thin black and white tracks that the circles will follow, so you have an idea of what to expect. 

Helping you through the motions are two footprints on the ground to show you where to place your feet. You also have transparent Tai Chi masters on either side of you and in front of you to imitate. You’ll also see a timer counting down your session and a transparent image of the footprints as an additional guide in case you don’t want to look down. None of the moves require much coordination or balance, except for one that requires you to lift one leg for a few seconds. You do have the option not to see the foot guides, but I find them useful. 

One frustrating aspect of the guided program is that the transparent masters are all facing forward, and they’re only somewhat transparent, which makes it a little challenging to see precise hand movements. Of course, you can look to the side to see this detail, but keeping turning my head from side to side was a little distracting. 

As you follow the movements of the transparent masters, soft spa-type music plays, and a disembodied woman’s voice gives you encouragement, affirmations, and advice. As the session comes to a close, the woman’s voice thanks you. I thought that was a nice touch. 

One five minute session is very relaxing and almost feels too short. If you do more than three sessions, your arms will start to burn. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can choose to do a sixty-minute “world tour,” which consists of 12 random five-minute programs and scenes, which feels to me to be too much. I found myself wishing there were a few 10-15 minute continuous programs to choose from, just for a little more variety. 

Arcade Challenges

The developers of Guided Tai Chi are aware that their app is being used on a VR gaming system and added the arcade mode as a little mini-game. Here, you can pick your three-minute challenge and your scenery (or choose the random option), but as an added bonus you also get to select from a list of slightly more upbeat, rhythmic music. 

See Also

Best of the Quest | The Newbie Guide

By Omar Kamel

In Features

Once you make your selections, you are again transported to the scene you chose, but there are no masters to follow and no nice lady to encourage you kindly. Your goal is once again to keep your orbs in the corresponding circle as they move, but this time you’re playing for points. Every few seconds, points are added to your overall score, which is pictured right next to the timer. The longer you keep your orbs in the circles, you’re rewarded with a points multiplier that increases every 10 seconds or so. The points multiplier appears in the center of your orb so you can keep track of it as you play. This function is quite sensitive: if your orb veers out of the center of the transparent circle for even a second, bye-bye multiplier. 

At the end of the short three-minute challenge, you see your score relative to other players. I’m not sure if the game is stroking my ego or if I’m somehow a Tai Chi natural, but I usually come in the top three most of the time. 

I do enjoy this mini-game within Guided Tai Chi. The length was just right, and it requires a lot of focus. I really only found that I had two small gripes. The first was that the multipliers were different for each hand, so if your left hand messed up and you lost your multiplier, each hand would show the score pop up, and their multipliers increase at separate times. Maybe I have OCD, but this drove me nuts. More than a few times I found myself deliberately tanking the other orb just so both spheres would score simultaneously OR I would just restart the challenge altogether. What? Don’t look at me like that! I’m competitive, even when I’m trying to relax. 

The other thing that bothered me is that the points for each hand would pop-up next to your orbs every few seconds. I found this distracting, and sometimes losing that focus would reduce my ability to keep my hands moving in line with their respective paths. 

Longevity

Guided Tai Chi is more of an app than a game, even though it does have the one game-like setting. This isn’t a game you’ll get addicted to and need to play for long hours at a time. But it is incredibly relaxing, almost like a meditation quick fix. I find myself using Guided Tai Chi every day for just that reason. 

I usually start and end each VR session with one or two of the hundred guided programs. After sweating with Beat Saber or slaughtering Ninjas in Ninja Legends, its a great way to wind down and transition back to the real world. There have also been times when I’ve been incredibly stressed out and found myself putting on my headset ONLY to do a session of Tai Chi. 

While there is a wide variety of programs, I have to say that there isn’t much variation between them. There are only 20 different hand motions, and there is no real skill level progression, which the more I play, the more I want. If anything, Guided Tai Chi made me interested in finding a local real-world class to explore the martial art of Tai Chi for a bit more challenge. 

The Scenery

Eventually, users might find the limited number of scenes tedious: there are only about ten. There is some playful variety. There is a delightful underwater setting where you are placed at the bottom of the ocean surrounded by cute cartoony sea creatures. There is one scene where you are placed on the giant chessboard in central park. Personally, I would have liked to see some nighttime or twilight scenes, especially when I was playing in the evening. 

While these scenes are undoubtedly beautiful, they also vary in artistic quality. Some aspects of the scenes are very realistic. The skies and running water are so well rendered that they are almost like photographs. Other elements are more cartoonish and obviously computer-generated. The grass on the mountain tops or in the gardens, for example, are rendered in angular, unnatural straight lines. There were just one or two grass objects drawn and then copied repeatedly. While I don’t think I would have minded consistent cartoon quality scenes, the disparity between the realistic elements and the poorly rendered ones becomes painfully apparent when they are juxtaposed in the same scene and takes me out of it just a little bit. 

A Gentle Workout

No experience is required to try Guided Tai Chi. While you may become more adept in the balance and control, the app as it is right now is limited in terms of skill progression and might become too simple over time. 

All that being said, there is an unexpected benefit of the game: The strength workout. The slow, controlled motion in Guided Tai Chi is similar to isometric holds. This benefit becomes a lot more evident if you do more than two five-minute sessions in a sitting. If you actually make it through the world tour, you’ll actually sweat from the effort. If you do at least two short programs four or five days per week, you will notice some new muscular definition. I wasn’t expecting that to happen, but it was a pleasant surprise. 

[Editors Note: It does feel a bit weird to do Tai Chi with both your hands tightly held around the controllers rather than open and relaxed. The easiest way around this – is to use one of the controller grips available for the Quest (the Mamut grips, the AMVR grips – which we favor, or the Orzero grips), any of which would allow you to play with open hands while retaining full tracking – it’s also a great way to support our site with no additional cost to yourself!]

Conclusion

Guided Tai Chi simultaneously encourages you to move and to relax. Beginning and ending your time with a short five-minute Flow session is a great way to transition from virtual reality back to the real world and give your body and mind a break from some of the adrenaline-fueled adventures and vice versa. This app really shows the potential for a class-based fitness game, like Yoga or even a proper Karate class, even if Oculus doesn’t yet track foot placement. 

Sky High

Star Chart contains four main sections, each with varying degrees of interactivity. The first, Sky View, is a 360-degree, planetarium-like view of the night sky. As you gaze around and point to stars, constellations are overlaid with 17th-century illustrations by Johannes Hevelius of mythic creatures and heroes.

At first glance, it’s pretty neat, but for those who want to linger and learn more, there’s a surprising lack of depth. Which classical myths inspired these constellations? Which features stand out to the untrained observer? Even the most basic lessons about the Big Dipper or North Star aren’t imparted here. If you’re an amateur stargazer, there’s only so much you can learn. A guided tour of the night sky like you might experience in any planetarium show, would be a great addition. Maybe the developers can hire Patrick Stewart for voice-over narration since he’s already been featured in Shadow Point.

Sky View does let you select a planet or star and get a readout of some basic facts, like its size, classification, position in the sky, and distance from Earth. But really, this is far less information than you’d get from Wikipedia, and Star Chart doesn’t bother to translate any scientific abbreviations. Assuming those who download Star Chart are already curious, wouldn’t it be beneficial to educate us a little more explicitly?

Set A Course

Explore mode is a bit more free-form since you can zip around the solar system for a close-up view of distant planets, moons, and other objects. But that also means you won’t be able to visit far-off features like the Horsehead Nebula or dive into the Milky Way. I don’t expect every star, or even a significant percentage of them, to be available for tours. That’s a scope far beyond what Star Chart promises. However, a best-of celestial experience, just to open peoples’ minds to the wonders of the universe, would go a long way.

The Eagle Has Landed

The third mode, Moments In Time, is another example of a great concept with lackluster execution. Here, you can stand next to the Apollo moon lander, the Mars Curiosity rover, the New Horizons probe above Pluto, or take a window seat on the International Space Station. It is undoubtedly a thrill to put yourself in these virtual locations. You can pretend to be one of the few people who have walked on the moon or inhabited the ISS. In the Mars and Pluto scenes, it’s even more breathtaking to go where no person has gone before.

Graphically, these diorama views are quite lovely, but they lack a lot of motion or interaction. If you’re going to stand next to a replica of the Mars Curiosity rover, why not also be able to watch it roll, drill, and take samples? Why create a static model of the Apollo lander, without also recreating Neil Armstrong’s iconic first steps on the moon? Couldn’t we watch the Earth spin beneath the ISS, instead of being stuck on one view of the Sahara desert? These scenes, which could be hugely dramatic in VR, become strangely static instead, like vivid textbook photos without a sustained sense of presence or purpose.

Billions And Billions

Lastly, Star Chart offers an Orrey, a not-to-scale replica of the Solar System, like the one you might have made out of ping-pong balls in school. In this version, you can ‘walk around’ and feel quite omnipotent with your God’ s-eye view of the Earth, Sun, and nearby planets. The main draw of the Orrey is the tour, a guided flight over the planets complete with voice-over narration and fun facts. These additions are precisely what the other modes lack.

If you were hoping that Star Chart would serve as a VR version of Cosmos – both highly educational and entertaining – then it lacks far too many features to even come close. You’d have to come to Star Chart pre-equipped with a degree in astronomy to make use of a lot of the more detailed information. At the very least, you’d need a willingness to do your own research outside of the app. For casual users, Star Chart should add more narration, interactivity, and storytelling. With a universe of infinite potential, Star Chart feels disappointingly stuck on the ground.

There’s a delightful children’s book by seminal illustrator Quentin Blake called Angel Pavement. In it, a pair of rather gobby angels give a street artist a pencil that can draw in air. The resulting 3D doodles come to life in a colourful way and delight everybody who sees them. Google’s astonishing Tilt Brush is the VR equivalent of that concept, and it represents a significant milestone in the history of this new medium. Its release on Quest, alongside Gravity Sketch, makes Oculus’ little wonder something of a must-have for creatives and designers of all kinds.

THE VIEW BELONGS TO EVERYONE

This is not to say, however, that Tilt Brush has nothing to offer the casual user. It’s almost ridiculously easy to use, and its accessibility and sense of fun mean that there’s no barrier to entry. The very idea of drawing in mid-air in 3D space is obviously brilliant but can be grasped immediately by anyone wearing the headset. In the many sessions I’ve had introducing the Quest to friends, family, and colleagues new to VR (VRgins?), it is Tilt Brush that is universally adored. It entrances all who use it. The sense of childlike wonder it engenders in the user can’t be conveyed, it has to be experienced.

There’s no real barrier to entry here – if you can use your hands, you can create in Tilt Brush. You can draw with pure light, in any colour imaginable. The simple but powerful controls are perfectly easy to (literally) grasp; the palette with tools and colours in one hand, brush in the other.

It’s an excellent fit for the Quest controllers and feels effortless. You can create solid 3D shapes, scenery; daub rude bits on a snowman, or create trippy, pulsating tendrils of neon and then set them on fire. Tilt Brush rises to meet the imagination of the user and provides a creative platform for those who might otherwise feel they can’t draw.

FEEL THE NOISE

Worth special mention is the efforts Google have gone to to make Tilt Brush a convincing sensory experience, rather than an abstract one. Not only are many of the brushes animated, but everything makes an entirely appropriate sound with positional audio. Draw past your ear, and you’ll hear your selected tool move past you – be that the scratching of a pencil or the synthy pulsing of the neon tube brush. It seems like a small thing, but adds so much delight to the experience, and is another reason just to let go and have fun with it.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Tilt Brush is already being used by artists to create incredible works, many of which can be explored in the gallery section. If you’ve experienced Vader Immortal (and you really should), then you will have experienced the part in which exposition explodes all around you, an animated 3D storybook. That was created in Tilt Brush, and only hints at the possibilities.

Tilt Brush legitimately represents a new way of creating art. It transcends age and ability, yet also provides talented artists with a unique platform to showcase and even transform the way they create. Tilt Brush is already being used in many different contexts; art installations, schools, and also for new forms of art therapy. Most importantly, it represents a massive amount of fun. It’s liberating and expressive, and its appeal is universal.