If you own a PlayStation 5 or a VR and want to test out the VR experience for the first time, don’t jump into games like Forza Horizon or Resident Evil Village. Rather this game is for you guys because it has it all and allows the players to immerse completely into the VR world.
Cosmonia’s High seems like the perfect game to start a PSVR to experience, so much so that I’d happily compare it to Astros Playroom, which comes installed on each brand-new PS5. Cosmonia’s High feels like a great tech demo, with each gameplay feature handcrafted to show off a different feature of VR and why you should love it while still having enough depth and playtime to warrant being a complete game and experience.
The game itself is simple; you are earning credits by completing classes helping students, and fixing the school that has been taken over by a rogue AI system; this generally involves different small mini-games, and each of the 15 or so different rooms that you can explore helping students with issues in their daily lives or collecting various different things as you explore.
So without giving you any spoilers, let’s jump into the game details and understand the question, “Is it worth buying?” and if so, then why. You can also leave a comment at the bottom of the article regarding your views on the game, so let’s get on with Cosmonious High Review.
- Release Date: 31 March 2022
- Creator/Developer: Owlchemy Labs
- Platform: PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows, Oculus Quest
- Ratings: 9/10 (Steam)
- Genre: Adventure game
- Publisher: Owlchemy Labs
- Price: $29.99
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Game Details And Our Thoughts On It
Owlchemy Labs, who are well known for job simulator games, here the character of the player, usually referred to by some variation of the new kid, is the first enrollee from the Prismy species at the eponymous intergalactic institution. The power of constantly adapting to difficult situations is their forte and power as well. They can effortlessly learn a new power when need is, and you, as a player, start with the water spell in the game.
The game gives you superpowers that let you interact with the world in different ways, so you can equip a different superpower to each hand, letting you mix and match and create interesting solutions to problems as you go.
These powers range from shooting water, ice, or fire to building fragile crystal trails that you can connect electrical wires with, even silly things like being able to make objects larger or smaller by bringing your hand closer or further away from them. These powers are used in each main area of the game to help complete different puzzles or challenges and are unlocked slowly, making for a great feeling of progression as you play through the game.
The school is crafted so lovingly, and almost everything is intractable and can be used as you would expect them to be. You can eat food you find or feed to the small little blob-like creatures you discover on your journey. You can speak to each and every student and teacher and find out more about them or get hints on what you should be doing next. You can bring objects from one side of the school to the other to interact together, and this is all really cool.
However, the game doesn’t ever really lean into these ideas. It’s all there ready to be explored and played with if you want to, but the superpowers, for the most part, give an easy excuse or way around some of these other creative ways of solving puzzles which feels like a cheat and something that shouldn’t be in the game or at least not at the early stages of the story like the new game Unheard.
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Final Thought And Conclusion
The game itself looks amazing on the PSVR 2, it’s bright and colorful, and the world feels alive and lived in. The players never got motion sickness or felt any real VR Jankiness, while the teleport controls were fast and easy to use, and unlike the original PSVR with only one chord, the freedom of movement to look around everywhere worked wonderfully like action RPGs.
There were a couple of times when players complained that their hands were not tracked the way that they wanted, and even making some long basketball-style shots worked rather well. Other interactions in the world felt natural. From pressing buttons to swiping images on tablets and turning knobs, everything just clicked right away and was super intuitive for players.
With a game this well constructed to be a giant toy box, it seems nitpicky to complain that there’s little challenge in the game. The vibe is geared towards the player creating their own fun, and it nails this completely. Still, it wouldn’t have hurt to have a few more complex puzzles, even if they were optional, to provide some extra satisfaction along the way.
However, a more serious concern is the nature of movement in the game. It’s become the norm in third-wave VR to be able to teleport by pushing a stick forward and then rotating it to choose the direction you face when you land Cosmonius High employs only half of this, only the first part where the rotation aspect is absent and sorely missed and because of this above-mentioned reasons we give the game a solid 3.1/5 at OtakuKart.
Cosmonious High is an easy recommendation to anyone new to VR or PSVR 2 if you’ve been playing VR since the beginning, a lot of the wow of how interactive everything is may be lost on you, but the puzzles, world, and characters are a lot of fun, we can’t speak to how similar this is to other Owlchemy Labs games but being the first game from them, we really enjoyed the formula they bring to the VR genre, and we can all wait for the next entry they make.
Our Rating: ⭐ (3.1/5).
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