In Moss, players can reach out, touch, and interact with the environment while guiding Quill through her journey. As a character within the world, players will work together with Quill to solve puzzles, overcome obstacles, and conquer any danger that comes their way,” said Danny Bulla, co-founder and design director of Polyarc. “As gamers, we’ve been conditioned for years to hold a gamepad in our laps when playing games, letting our thumbs and fingers do the controlling. It has been a great experience to create an immersive game that encourages players to reach into and interact with a tactile world.
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Now this is one of the best, if not THE best, VR games. You control Quill with the left thumbstick and use the A and B buttons to platform, push levers, and swing their sword. But then you can use your hands to interact with puzzle elements and use head tracking to use your perspective to view the level. It's not a sidescroller as you use your own head's position to move the camera. It's a clever design and an excellent use for VR hardware. I recommend the game for these reasons as well as for just being a cute adventure with a small mouse :D
Moss is a wonderful game, with a nice short story and simple combat that will not challenge you very much but looks great and feels great.
One of the best uses of VR. A pretty standard action platformer but with a fun albeit straightforward narrative and most importantly, the scale it plays with is so fun. Not to mention the interactions with the environment. Very short and I hope there's more to it too but all of it is so nice. Fairly decent music, a wonderful little redwall style civilization, excellent backgrounds and immersion and you can pet Quill. Need I say more?
(Review from 2021) Surprisingly well-designed VR game! I really enjoyed Quill’s personality in her movement and her fluidity when you move her around. The diorama setup works really well in VR and there was sufficient detail. It’s less hard than I was expecting: the no-deaths trophy is a little intense but is easier to get than I had expected. There’s some good interaction with the DS4 although the camera I find loses track of where I’ve placed it if I go a little too far off centre
I really should play more on my Oculus Rift. We're at the point where we're starting to see a lot of fun gaming experiments come out of this design space, and I've barely explored any of it beyond what my father has shown me.
Moss is an adorable story about a mouse going on a big adventure. As someone who read a bunch of Redwall back in middle school, these types of mouse-hole adventures are 100% up my alley. I think it's really interesting that there isn't any spoken dialogue or chatter from the characters, just narration to help the player along. Actually, I didn't catch during my playthrough that Quill communicates through American Sign Language - a really cool detail.
It's a neat design choice that the player does not role-play as Quill, but instead as an omnipresent entity beyond the parameters of the story who guides Quill. It's easy for this design device to go wildly off the rails - see Pac-Man 2 - but it's well-implemented here. Actually, it presents a good solution to the usual concern with virtual reality, where it's hard to find that happy medium between full immersion and not-making the player ill. Helps as well that the player still controls Quill, they're just not presented as her within the narrative. With Quill beseeching the player for help, it's hard not to grow attached to the little hero.
Moss isn't a complicated adventure (but then it shouldn't be, given it's VR), but it does a great job immersing the player into its experience. There's gameplay merit to taking your time and looking around, but even without that, I loved being able to poke around and examine each diorama-like screen of the game. The player is both considerably larger than Quill but also considerable smaller than their human size, so being able to look at (for example) the leaves on the riverbank dipping into the stream, then being able to reach in and futz with them - that's the quiet little experience I love getting out of VR.
I played this back when Moss was a solo act ending in a cliffhanger, but now that Book II's out, I might owe it a revisit, in case Book II doesn't bring you up to speed.
Moss is an adorable story about a mouse going on a big adventure. As someone who read a bunch of Redwall back in middle school, these types of mouse-hole adventures are 100% up my alley. I think it's really interesting that there isn't any spoken dialogue or chatter from the characters, just narration to help the player along. Actually, I didn't catch during my playthrough that Quill communicates through American Sign Language - a really cool detail.
It's a neat design choice that the player does not role-play as Quill, but instead as an omnipresent entity beyond the parameters of the story who guides Quill. It's easy for this design device to go wildly off the rails - see Pac-Man 2 - but it's well-implemented here. Actually, it presents a good solution to the usual concern with virtual reality, where it's hard to find that happy medium between full immersion and not-making the player ill. Helps as well that the player still controls Quill, they're just not presented as her within the narrative. With Quill beseeching the player for help, it's hard not to grow attached to the little hero.
Moss isn't a complicated adventure (but then it shouldn't be, given it's VR), but it does a great job immersing the player into its experience. There's gameplay merit to taking your time and looking around, but even without that, I loved being able to poke around and examine each diorama-like screen of the game. The player is both considerably larger than Quill but also considerable smaller than their human size, so being able to look at (for example) the leaves on the riverbank dipping into the stream, then being able to reach in and futz with them - that's the quiet little experience I love getting out of VR.
I played this back when Moss was a solo act ending in a cliffhanger, but now that Book II's out, I might owe it a revisit, in case Book II doesn't bring you up to speed.
It took a while to warm up to the story and characters. Moss feels like if Astrobot Rescue Mission was more of a story platforming game with light puzzles. They both share basic combat with surprisingly dangerous enemies. Which does keep the game from feeling devoid of challenge. The platforming can also be a little finicky and difficult at times.
The final boss fight and ending were alright. It didn’t explain the story behind the Arcane, the giant serpent, and why they wanted the glass relics. It was anticlimactic and teased that a sequel was coming. Not a fan of games that do that.
The highlight of Moss is the beautiful, detailed dioramas and the animations for all the characters and enemies, but especially Quill. She does little dances to celebrate solving puzzles/combat encounters and there are a bunch of specific animations for different attacks if you aim in different directions. She was a charming character.
The final boss fight and ending were alright. It didn’t explain the story behind the Arcane, the giant serpent, and why they wanted the glass relics. It was anticlimactic and teased that a sequel was coming. Not a fan of games that do that.
The highlight of Moss is the beautiful, detailed dioramas and the animations for all the characters and enemies, but especially Quill. She does little dances to celebrate solving puzzles/combat encounters and there are a bunch of specific animations for different attacks if you aim in different directions. She was a charming character.