Guided Meditation VR review: relax in virtual reality

Some times ago, I made an interview with a great team working on a relaxation app for virtual reality: Just Relax. Today, I’ve been able to actively try another relaxation tool for VR: Guided Meditation VR. Guided Meditation VR is one of the demos that I loved the most at DK2 times (the good old times of Oculus Share, when VR was so pure, do you remember that?) and so when Cubicle Ninja guys gave me a free key I was so happy!

Guided Meditation at good ol’ DK2 times… graphics was quite good, but not awesome… and doing screenshots resulted in that deformed images. How many memories!

After having installed it, I launched it… ready to feel relaxed.

Initial menus were a bit too fast (not so coherent with the relaxation theme) and were strangely controllable only using left hand (don’t know if this happened only to me or if it is a design choice… but I didn’t manage to change this in any way).

Just Relax (relaxation GearVR app) inter-review

I’ve been contacted by Paul, of Mostly Human Studios, to try his virtual reality relaxation tool: Just Relax. I was happy, because I’m super-stressed due to my startup life, so I just wanted to relax a bit. With DK2 I was a huge fan of Guided Meditation, so I was eager to try its app. But life is a b**ch and his app is not compatible with my phone (I’ve a Note 4 and the first GearVR… I feel so old) so I’ve not been able to try it.

So goodbye to my idea of a review and welcome to the idea of an interview. So I made Paul some questions about the Just Relax relaxation app and his experience in developing it. I found his answers very interesting… in a sense I’m more happy with this article than with a review 🙂

Lantern review

Some days ago, I’ve been contacted from 1C publishing studio for a possible review of one of their games: Lantern. I’ve said to myself “why not?” and so I played a bit with their game… and here you can find my honest review.

Lantern is a relaxing experience for Oculus, Vive and OSVR: you can find it on Steam, where you can download a little demo and then purchase the full game for €6,99, if you want. It isn’t truly a game, but more something that you can play to have some relaxing moments in virtual reality.

When the game starts, you’re provided with a 2D menu that is hard to control with mouse and keyboard: I’ve had lots of difficulties in understanding how to activate the menu entries, because the cursor sometimes disappeared.

The start menu. For me it has been the first puzzle of the game

Once you manage to click on start, a little 2D intro showing an asian girl is proposed to you, just to put you in the right mood for the game that starts little after.

The intro with beautiful drawings and a beautiful asian girl crying

The game environment is a nice low-poly world, where all is gray and sad. The visuals are very nice and I appreciated them. You can control a little lantern to spread the love and make all the world become coloured again. You control the lantern with your space key (that acts as a throttle) and with your mouse (that sets the direction towards which the lantern can move in the space).The control system is interesting and very easy to use, once you’ve mastered with it a bit. Luckily they’ve added little icons nearby the lantern that appear when the user seems struck, just to help the novice user with the controls: I appreciated this a lot.