Starship Home Review – Gardening across the universe in Quest’s most immersive mixed reality game

Spaceship house is not just a clever and infectiously charming sci-fi gardening game with elements of regular ship management. This is probably one of the best current examples of how mixed reality creators can break away from the usual Quest 3 tricks and create something that’s actually worth playing in your own living room. Read on to find out why I think you’ll love this big little MR game.

Spaceship house Details:

Available on: Task 3
Release date: September 26, 2024
Price: $20
Dcreator: Being

Game

Many mixed reality games struggle to find a reason to exist, with the early gamer group relying heavily on the peace of mind of doing “X” in their own room. This has led to some pretty low-hanging fruit that has given MR games less prestige than they probably should, especially considering that headsets like the Quest 3 and the newly announced Quest 3S hope to act as more than just an obvious upgrade path for Quest owners 2 . For Meta to bring MR to the masses, it needs to be more than just an optional mode in new VR games or, for all its benefits, a more convenient way to grab a drink from your desk.

Part of this is due to Meta’s historic (currently changing) stance of preventing developers from accessing Quest cameras, limiting their ability to create games that will better digest your room and provide the level of detail that MR games need to turn your home into a backdrop for truly fascinating experiences.

Working within the same constraints, it seems that indie studio Creature has really hit the nail on the head Spaceship houseoffering components to turn your living room, office, or bedroom (hell, it can even work in the bathroom) into your own spaceship, and you do it in a way that finally feels like it’s on equal terms with VR gaming. In short, I love it and I think you will love it too.

IN Spaceship houseyou must collect plants infected with the evil Plague and restore harmony to the universe. These are the basics of the gameplay loop, although there are some surprises along the way that I won’t reveal.

Thrown aboard your own office spaceship, your task is to find plants scattered throughout the galaxy, traveling to alien worlds.

Free-spirited space explorers, beware: Flying the ship is essentially an adventure on rails, requiring you to reveal the planetary coordinates on a 3D map and press the large “START” lever on the rudder. This is not No man’s skyDespite everything. It’s a laid-back, fairly easy game that’s more about exploration and fun, room-scale interactions.

Even though you’re on rails, launching your spaceship to the next location requires a lot of interaction. You will need to charge your ship with energy drops that you will find in a tank built into the floor—before setting off on your hike. You’ll also need to scan the planet from orbit and back to the surface below using a drone to discover its unique biome. Throw your ever-present robot buddy out the airlock so he can get to the planet and automatically collect them.

Taking your plant back to your ship, you must now rid yourself of its evil Infestation that has taken over the galaxy entering their dreams. Yes, these plants dream of strange things and even have personalities.

Each dream is essentially its own mini-game that creates a fun one-off puzzle, like deflecting raindrops off the ceiling with little springboards or squishing plague-ridden snails with your hands with extended tentacles – all in different shades of technicolor.

Now it’s time to plant the newly healed plant and tune it to the appropriate frequency. Because baby, these plants can sing.

Then it’s your job to feed them and make them sing happily. You can do this by pulling one of the small, soft buds out of the terrarium and spraying the goo onto the plant. You will also need to repot the plants from time to time so that they can grow and eventually develop into their final form.

It is important that your plants are happy. I killed so many orchids IRL that I should be blacklisted – even one or two cacti – but remembering what fertilizer they need and when to water them isn’t as onerous as I thought. It’s more like a fun mini-game in itself, where the plants reward you with a catchy melody that syncs up in the chorus while everyone is busy making the right corrections. If only real plants were so straightforward in their constant expectations of me.

Then simply continue exploring the galaxy to find the source of the Scourge.

In total, it took me about three hours, but you can easily play longer depending on your individual speed, as none of the action is frantic, allowing you to sit back and tend to the plants at your own pace and organize them by the type of care they need.

And yes, I am in love with this game, even though it is very laid back and even a bit repetitive at times. It’s just so damn cute, weird and full of surprises. Granted, there’s a helpful alien bud who interjects a little too much for my liking, but I understand why they interject. There is much to do spaceship house, and you’ll definitely need help not only learning the ropes, but also keeping track of all the many tasks you need to complete along the way.

My only wish is Spaceship house they were a bigger universe and a little more off track. I want more (virtual) plants, more control over my ship, and maybe a little more organic exploration in general. Still, I couldn’t help but nod along to the catchy, plant-like beat of my game, and I diligently tended my home’s new intergalactic garden in a way I never would have with a ragtag bunch of wasting houseplants that had survived for some unknown reason.

Burnt botanical site, Spaceship house is definitely the first mixed reality game that absolutely captured my mind and put it at the top of my library for more gaming sessions yet to come.

Dipping

While all the fancy gadgets are inside Spaceship house can be easily placed in a virtual ship, even adapted to the space of your room, I still maintain that the MR passage is necessary to the experience thanks to the game’s clever modularity.

At the beginning, the game allows you to open various control panels, portholes, storage compartments and airlock wherever you want. The room is oriented around where the helm controls and main window are, although you can easily remove the panels from the wall and change the orientation mid-game.

Having these portholes dotted throughout my home office – which is consequently also a full-time shoe store – really sells the illusion that you’ve boarded a little escape pod from reality, while also serving as a “new” environment to house my growing collection of plant companions and gadgets .

Colorful overlays also set the mood for any meeting, and the constant changes in shades of blue, red and purple give it a cool sci-fi feel. In plant dreams, you always see a new, strangely colored overlay that mentally transports you away from the ship, but still somewhere distinctly reminiscent of home, because the dream mini-games use the actual layout of your rooms as a background.

Diegetic interfaces are also everywhere, which means that the only screens you read are information screens about these unique plants, which therefore have their own personality. Hit the plant and it may even look at you with distrust or curl up in a ball and writhe in pain when you forget what fertilizer it needs. So be nice.

And while Spaceship house anything could be thrown into a VR game, and its intelligent modularity allows rooms of almost any size to be transformed into a suitable gaming space, which in my opinion is a bonus and certainly not a marketing gimmick.

Comfort

As a room-scale game, you don’t have to worry about artificial movement beyond the rail-based exploration your ship can do. However, it is always a comfortable experience because your room is a solid base for all locomotion.

Quest 3’s mixed reality experience is pretty good, but it’s still in its infancy. Better, clearer and faster forwarding would improve everything from a long-term user point of view, Spaceship house included in the price, although the game cannot be faulted. It really comes from a desire to bring all the gadgets and immersion the game offers closer to my eyeballs and therefore closer to reality.

While you can play while seated by placing all controls at chair level, some of the mini-game interactions and accessing ship lockers require a fair amount of moment range, making this a mostly standing-room-scale game.

Starship Home Comfort Settings – September 26, 2024
Turning
Artificial turning	✖
Movement
Artificial movement	✖
Attitude
Standing mode	✔
Sedentary mode	✖
Fake crouching	✖
A real pony	✔
Availability
Subtitles	✔
Languages	English
Dialogue sound	✔
Languages	English
Adjustable difficulty level	✖
Two hands required	✔
Real pony required	✔
Hearing required	✖
Adjustable player height	✖