The creators of the beautiful, haunting mobile puzzle game Monument Valley want to take players on another scenic trip — this time entirely in virtual reality.
Creative agency Ustwo's next game, Land's End, will take players across picturesque landscapes inspired by some of Earth's prettiest places. Much like Monument Valley, which won an Apple Design Award in 2014, the game looks particularly stunning.
Land's End is all about exploration. You move at a leisurely pace through striking scenes by finding the next available point and focusing on it. Once you've locked on, you're transported there at a comfortable speed — a compromise that lets a VR experience like Land's End work without a controller.
"When we first got our hands on a Gear VR kit, we spent two to three months trying to find a way for people to move around this world without feeling sick," said Peter Pashley, technical director of Ustwo Games. "We wanted an experience where we could explore the landscapes comfortably, where people feel like they were making choices and moving at their own free will, while not be too hard to control and not too on rails."
Through the game's five levels, there will also be some puzzles to solve, though gratification seems to be more important to the user experience than truly stumping those playing. Ustwo Games' lead designer Ken Wong told Mashable that balance emerged after testing the game on all sorts of people, especially those that don't normally play games.
It turns out that when you have really, really smart people, they often don't use their full brain capacity when they are relaxing with a video game. They want to enjoy the sights and get through it and see this wonderful world," Wong said. "Making good puzzles has a lot do with intuition, where people are using pattern recognition. People see things that are out of alignment, they'll want to align them."
The team spent about a year working on the game and experimenting with virtual reality in leading up to Land's End, which was first demoed last September at the Oculus VR developer conference. Since then, Pashley said the team has kept learning.
"Really the biggest surprise is everything you think will work in VR probably won't," he said. "The way many people react to things in VR is different than how you'll react. We all have really unique brains, and the way our brains process VR is different for everybody."
Land's End comes to the Gear VR on Oct. 30.
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