Recent reviews by hilightnotes

Super high resolution, evolving environments, to soak up and customize. All kinds of options are available, all of which can be turned on or off and adjusted in various ways, for example:
- voiceovers, with options for less or more voice guidance, for a kind of guided meditation or affirming voice experience
- breathing guides, both visual and auditory. Desired breathing speed is also customizable.
- microphone reverberation. My personal favourite, this makes the game pic up sound from your mic and reverberates it in your ears. You can use this for traditional sounds like your own humming or breathing to relax better, or any noises or singing or even playing an instrument while you're in the VR environments!

There's a good chunk of environments, and each one has its own feel. Something I really value is that it's not just a whole bunch of variations on an imagined 'peaceful environment'. They are both more creative and more diverse, reflecting a range of aesthetic space that isn't just limited to positivity. There's a space environment where you gaze into the abyss of space, or a kind of alien cavernous structure that expands and contracts in front of you.

There's one that I guess is like being inside a womb, to me it recalls a very specific space that most people probably aren't familiar with, which is being inside a Haibane Renmei egg! So uhhhh if you ever wanted to feel like Rakka inside the egg at the beginning of Haibane Renmei, now's your chance. Honestly that was really beautiful for me, it's one of my favourite shows and very emotional. So that was amazing for me to experience haha.

There's other interesting and unique environments... and also some more 'familiar' ones, like a kind of peaceful rain and lightning scene, an ocean expanse, and some others.

I highly recommend this app to people who want to sometimes use VR to relax, process, meditate, digest difficulties, etc.
Or if you just want to explore some of the highest quality audio-visual treats that are available for VR.

Polished and beautiful.

EDIT: I realized I should clarify these environments are 180 video environments, not environments you can walk around in. But I think that can give the wrong impression, because people aren't used to VR 180 video like this. These are super high quality and writing the review I forgot about this aspect because my brain just remembers them as VR environments. You can customize the way they are projected in front/around you as well, another of the many customizations that accommodate different vibes

But yeah you'll be remaining stationary while you play this. These are for soaking in!
It's a bit like Tetris Effect theatre mode for those familiar, but more customizable, and with optional meditation features. It's the kind of thing you will be glad you can come back to when you need it, whether that's every day or once in a year.

Beautiful game full of caring design executed very well. It's early access, but what's there is very polished and has its own completeness to it. I also think it's already worth the asking price. I bought it on sale for $12 which was good for my budget brain that doesn't want to spend much money but also wants to be exploring cool artistic/creative VR experiences :p

The gameplay is a jigsaw experience. Which if you've never tried something similar in VR (like Puzzling Places), it is extremely engaging when done well like it is here. I don't think this is even a 'niche' thing, like of course not everyone will love it but I think most people would enjoy it. It's very satisfying, relaxing, immersive, engaging.

The puzzles have a good difficulty to them. I used the hint feature 3 times and felt good about using it but also never felt cheated, like "oh that's an unfair/unreasonable jigsaw connection".

More than just well made jigsaws, this game has character, visual beauty, and emotion. The visual/atmosphere style is unique and beautiful, right from the moment you open the game into the intro sequence. It's for this that the game really shines and stands out as a unique and valuable experience to me.

Highly recommend!!!

Enjoyed and recommend. Bought on sale for $2.79, great price. I think the $7 full price tag is reasonable if you're not strapped for cash, just understand it's a short film (~12 minutes).

The developers/storytellers clearly have experience telling stories in VR. This story is short and sweet, but what really brings it to life is the creative visual storytelling utilizing the VR medium. It's very well done, with beautiful and interesting and fun visual moments that are synthesized with the story.

The english voice acting is a little dull, but not bad, and it does its job.
I actually liked this enough that I watched it twice in a row (back to back), first in English then in Korean (which I do not understand) to hear it in its original language. I expected to just watch the first minute to get a sense of how it sounds in Korean, but ended up watching the whole thing over. I'm sure I'm not the best judge since I don't speak/understand Korean, but it seemed to me the Korean voice acting was more organic and emotive, so for my fellow non-Korean-speakers, I do recommend watching it again in Korean after you've watched it in English! I also suspect the last lines work better in Korean than in the English translation, which comes off a bit sideways.

Lovely experience.

This is a beautiful, quiet, highly immersive adventure.
As another user mentioned it is reminiscent of Journey in some ways - in great ways. But unique too. Any fan of journey will be glad to pick this up if they take the time needed to get used to it.

And indeed you must get used to it. I was looking forward to this when it released then saw the initial negative reviews, and being on a very tight budget I was dissuaded on spending the money to buy Winds & Leaves. Fast forward a couple months, to my delight I won a free key from VRGrid.

I recommend this even at full price. If this game sounds up your alley it probably is. It's a really wonderful game. (Edit: I've since completed the game. I loved it!).

Detailed review follows.

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First, the elephant in the room. The negative reviews - all based on initial impressions and relating to controls/motion sickness - are understandable. About that:

The opening 'tutorial' is built-in to the game world in a way I *theoretically* appreciate. But it's not accessible enough for a game that already has a challenging on-boarding process. If the devs have the funds to rework the tutorial, I would highly recommend checking out the tutorial for the game Déraciné on PSVR. This game has one of the best tutorials of any VR game I've played, and it also does it in a way that's 'in-world'. Devs: pick up Déraciné, learn from this tutorial. A better tutorial has the potential to drastically improve the on-boarding process for the player.

The controls of Winds & Leaves are actually quite thoughtful and well done, but it takes time to realize this and acclimatize to your unusual equipment. On-boarding issues:

- You have some choice of how to position your tools, but the choice is provided to you before you really understand what you're doing. After my first 1.5 hours I discovered that if I go to the 'calibrate' menu option, I can easily reposition the tools to my liking. It would be better if the game initially places your tools for you, then tells you to go to the calibration menu to change it.

- Climbing feels like a mess until you understand how to consistently initiate climbing. For the first hour I kept trying to climb and it felt like half the time it didn't work. This is because I was holding both grips and trying to 'lift up'. Instead I would just move on my stilts. The trick is to initiate with one controller, grip and lift. This initiates climbing. The climbing is unusual but works really well once you get used to it. You can easily maneuver around a tree and it's quite pleasant.

- It's only about 45 minutes in or so that you learn you can adjust the height of your stilts to change your movement speed. Too late!! Not only is this knowledge helpful for movement, it's also helpful for grabbing items. Once you get comfy with this you can easily lower yourself to the ground to pick up dropped fruit, or raise yourself high to grab fruit off lower branches. Overall it helps one grab precisely, which can otherwise be a little frustrating.

- A tutorial segment that better encourages you to try the different movement settings may be helpful. I'm feeling happy with the roomscale 360 setup, but there's extensive options that allow you to pick from several different rotation methods. The existence of these options are not obvious at first glance, and I suspect that some users don't realize that all these rotation choices exist. Also to the devs: I suggest an additional smooth turning speed of 'very fast'.

- I pretty much never ever experience motion sickness in VR, but I experienced a little in my first 30 minutes with this game. After that it went away. (I don't use any comfort options). Again a better tutorial might help the player tolerate this adjustment period and successfully acclimatize without quitting!

- On Reverb G2 grip and trigger were flipped, adding confusion. I have created a public binding to fix this for any G2 users, but of course ideally this would be fixed by the devs (to be fair to the devs, I have spoken to many developers who have a miserable time trying to get G2 controls to work properly. So I blame HP and Valve for this issue!)

The above on-boarding challenges are magnified because the game already takes a kind of Dark Souls approach to putting you in the world. Not in the sense of mechanical challenge - what I mean is that you learn about the world and how things work by experiencing the world, intuiting things, and trying things out. (For example, learning how your time speed tool works, learning about soil and how to understand the various hint images, etc). That's all great, I like this approach, but because of the messy on-boarding process it's inhibitive in that first hour.

IN SHORT, for anyone who's just bought this, prepare yourself mentally for that first hour of getting used to everything and feeling clumsy and frustrated with controls and possibly even a little motion sick. You will get through it, and it's worth it.

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SO.

What about the actual GAME???? Is this a decent game, a good game, a great game...?? Is it worth dealing with the messy first hour?

In my opinion this is absolutely a great game, and totally worth dealing with the messy first hour.

Immediately when I booted the game I was greeted with beautiful sounds and a gorgeous visual experience

Everything is designed fantastically to create one of the most immersive games I've played in VR. (And I've played a lot of heavily atmospheric games). The sound, the visuals, the art design, the spatial design, progression - everything works really really really well. This is a very pleasing, immersive, quiet but engaging adventure.
Because of all that, the game world feels like a real world. I don't mean the art style is 'realism', it's not and doesn't need to be. I mean that it feels like you're in a world that lives and breathes and has a real presence to it.

It's also really wonderful that you can climb some special tall trees and look up all across the world. Again it just feels like a real place, and being able to do that really enhances that feeling.

As of writing this I am 2 hours in and eager to keep going (I gather it's a 7-8 hour adventure from a quick google, which sounds like a great length).

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Quick note on performance:
My system has a laptop 3080 GPU, which is probably a touch worse than a standard 3070 GPU, a bit better than a 2070 GPU.
I get full 90fps with the following settings:
1) in-game quality set to Medium
2) vr performance 'mod', https://github.com/fholger/vrperfkit/releases/tag/v0.2.2. Foveated rendering didn't work for me. I used FSR, with renderScale of 0.64, sharpness of 1.0, radius of 1.0, applyMipBias false
3) Steam SuperSampling set to 140%

Looks great and plays great. If you don't want to worry about step 2 than just play with the in-game quality and SteamVR SuperSampling to see what works best for you. The game looks great on all 4 quality settings, and there is a noticeable performance improvement on the 'low' setting if you need to use that.

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This is a very high quality game, beautiful and unique, marred only by its frustrating on-boarding process. In my opinion the control system is thoughtful and well done... if only you take the time to get really comfy with it (about 45-90 minutes depending on the player).

I hope that this review breathes some life into this game's sales. There's a large amount of people - people who enjoy games like Journey as the obvious example - that will really love this game and find it to be a breath of fresh air.

I would love to see this game reduced to $20 to make it more enticing for people to buy, just because I know it's one of those 'hard sells'. But I do think it is worth the $30 asking price. It is impeccably designed and gorgeous besides that challenging on-boarding process mentioned in every review.

Song in the Smoke is an excellent game, and well priced for $30.

It may soon list here that I've refunded the game. That is because I'm counting pennies and decided I can't justify spending the money right now. My situation is anomalous (compared to most PCVR users). You should buy it for $30. I very literally only drink tap water and never ever buy prepared meals, so I'm allowed to say that!!!

I thoroughly enjoyed my first 1.5 hours with the game, even despite some controller binding issues with the G2 (this is a solved issue - it's expected these will be fixed in a patch soon, but also I've made a public binding for other G2 users that fixes the problem, so just select my public binding if the patch hasn't come yet).

The game looks beautiful on the G2. It runs well. The crafting was engaging, the world was immersive, and felt like a world I wanted to spend more time with and learn more about.

I only got a small abstract introduction to the story. So I can't comment much about what I feel about the story.

The devs have been adding patches regularly since the game released on PSVR a couple months ago.

Song in the Smoke seems like a polished, immersive, lengthy & replayable (from everything I've heard), interesting adventure survival story game made for VR. It got some stellar reviews on PSVR and it seems to me this is for good reason.

I highly recommend it.

A fun, unique VR climbing & crafting game. Successfully creates an immersive and mostly cohesive experience. Climbing system feels great, good sense of progression, terrifying sense of heights (careful looking down...).

I tend toward's games that have story and emotional focus. Bean Stalker has neither, but this is one of the few more 'game-y' games that I've enjoyed (and it can get you feeling things like fear, relaxation, and determination at different times!).

The developers seem committed to the game, although I think their goals are different from what I'd like to see grow (they're focused on adding multiplayer last I heard, which I don't care much for. I think they should focus on polishing what they have, adding new areas, and improving the role-playing aspect, for example adding a female character option and better voice acting and world building).

Bought on sale for $14, would recommend.

Paper Beast is one of my favourite VR games to date. I originally played it on PSVR, hence my short-ish play time on PC. I loved it so much that I decided I had to own it on PC too, so that I can return to it some time I feel like it, and also to share with others, and just to support the devs.

This is a wholly unique abstract story adventure, with puzzle gameplay. It's memorable and impactful. It has great music and great visuals... great atmosphere.

This is a must-play VR adventure. $20 is a great price.

I love this 'game'. I bought it first on PSVR and then bought it again for PCVR, on one of its steep (but relatively frequent!) sales for ~$5. It amazes me how well it's made, what I imagine must be a totally unique engine. They did a really fantastic job of making a creative and expressive music 'DJ-like' experience that really empowers the player, whether or not they have any technical music knowledge/ability. And still there's enough expressive capability here for someone who's very musically experienced (like myself) to have a blast and be expressive.

Over the past couple years I've continually come back to Electronauts from time to time, for short sessions to unwind or feel good or chill or otherwise have some highly accessible and painless 'expressive time'.

Definitely buy this, you can catch it on sale for ~$5 every couple months or so!

A shining example of what an educational VR experience can be. Buzludzha VR goes above and beyond, with beautiful visuals and some fun mechanics that make this feel like a fleshed out title that even provides a sense of adventure. As I made my way through the 'main exhibit', I was surprised at the introduction of simple but effective mechanics all along the way that made this a really fun and engaging experience. Like... there's climbing and a helicopter ride!!

Definitely recommend this, $12 is a good asking price.

Just now remembering to write a review for this lovely game!
I think I bought this on a small sale for $15.

Maskmaker is an excellent game. It's polished, beautiful, unique and memorable. It runs well, not super performance intensive. It's a story adventure game with minor puzzles and a lovely 'mask mechanic'.

Some may have played this dev's previous title, A Fisherman's Tale, which is a highly reviewed short, innovative game.

Maskmaker is a more fleshed out title. It carries the same storytelling prowess and structural soundness that A Fisherman's Tale had. But Maskmaker is very differentiated from A Fisherman's Tale. It stands strong on its own. It's a solid 4+ hours longer than A Fisherman's Tale (about 5-6 hours total) and takes advantage of this length to build this adventure in an impactful way.

I felt it was a perfect length, really. The adventure has some really incredible story beats that were some of my favourite moments in VR and took me by surprise. A Fisherman's Tale was known for its highly innovative and unique VR mechanic. In the case of Maskmaker, the central mechanic of mask-wearing is really wonderful and effective, but doesn't have that same inspiring impact. But that moment still came for me in Maskmaker, just not through the 'mask mechanic', which made it that much more unexpected. And in this case it wasn't just a 'wow' factor, but it really had visceral impact. I don't want to spoil it and also I should say that maybe not everyone will be impacted the way I was, but for me these certain moments elevated Maskmaker to be a really great game.

Despite my lavish praise, Maskmaker does have some flaws and some areas where it could be fleshed out just a bit more. But, ultimately these disappointments are minor and what's here feels like a complete and polished experience.

Maskmaker is a great game that carves out a unique and memorable place for itself. It carries forward all the excellent development that was apparent in A Fisherman's Tale, but Maskmaker expands the scope of this dev team not just in length but in substance as well. Maskmaker has more to say, and succeeds in saying it, leaving a lasting impact.

Highly recommended!