So Let Us Melt

★★★★★ I liked this one. It's a story not a game BTW. So go in with the right expectations. I liked the story.

★★★★★ This is more of a narrative experience than a traditional game (something it shares with The Chinese Room's other output). You experience the point of view of a terraforming robot as it floats around and within a planet being made ready for human habitation. There is minimal interaction in the experience. Just some light pointing at things and tracing paths with the handheld device. The goal here is that a good story, beautiful visuals and great music all combine to make an emotionally rewarding experience that sticks with you after its finished and makes you not miss the lack of interactivity. So, do The Chinese Room folks, who did this so well in Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, manage it again? Mostly. The story is interesting and moving, but the limitations of the medium rob the graphics of a lot of its impact. In this sort of game you're mostly just looking at the scenery, so it has to be good and having to fit on a phone led to too many compromises (and too few polygons).

★★☆☆☆ I became excited and bought this instantly. I really want to support VR since the early 90s when it was heavily featured in pop culture. The most positive thing I can say, is that, the music was top-notch, and had a very cinematic quality to it. The longer I played, the more I became dissatisfied. The moment I started hating it, was when I realized it wasn't a game at all. You don't control movement, you don't even select a diverging path. The game consists of flying with these cutesy characters and every hundred yards or so, you use the controller to draw a very rudimentary shape, as if you were holding a wand. There is no puzzle to it. Just drawing a circle, zigzag, horseshoe. To top everything off, the scenery looks magical in the screenshots, but inside the "game", it is extremely underwhelming, blurry, and amateurish