Ma[PSV]Rch is already a success.
I chose Moss for my second game because it is one of the highest rated PSVR games and a game that I got excited about as soon as it was announced. I bought it soon after release and I don’t really know why I never got around to playing it. I could blame it on the inconveniences of the VR headset, but it’s far from the first game I’ve bought for full price and not touched for years. I’m trying to get better about that.
Getting into VR was better on days 2 through 5 than it was the first night. I was right that you do get better at adjusting the headset and I was able to get it situated pretty easily, with headphones in place, in about 30 to 60 seconds. I am getting a sense for the location of the camera and getting used to the grainy look of the screens and the whole experience is just better as I adjust to it.
Moss itself was a revelation. It came out a year after the headset, when I wasn’t really using it anymore, and the level of polish and production is much higher than most of the games I messed with. The game starts you in what looks like a cathedral set up as a medieval reading room. The game’s cut scenes are presented as illustrations in a book that you use motion controls (on the Dualshock 4) to turn the pages of, and you return to this room to view them listening to narration while you view slightly animated pictures on the book’s pages. The opening chapter tells a pretty cliché story about a kingdom of mice overrun by an evil snake and a sprite champion who gives his life to help the mice survive after they abandon their castle and flee the kingdom.
The game proper starts when Quill, the adorable mouse protagonist, finds the relic left by the vanquished hero and awakens you, the “reader”, to act as her guardian. You control Quill through the left thumbstick and the controller face buttons but you have a separate floating blue orb that is controlled through motion control and you use a shoulder button to interact with objects in the world. Quill can run around, jump, dodge, and slash stuff with her sword (as well as pull levers when necessary) while your orb can do things like hold enemies in place, heal Quill, move blocks around, break certain items in the world, and pull or rotate some items. These controls work in tandem so you might run Quill up a staircase that you then rotate with the motion controls so that a ledge on the staircase lines up with an area you want her to jump to. It’s intuitive and it mostly works well, and being able to grab enemies or heal Quill during combat adds a combat wrinkle that I don’t remember from any other game.
The game is a Zelda-like. Visually it is set up as a series of static diorama type scenes, sort of like what you would see in a natural history museum displaying an animal’s natural habitat, but showing little fantasy mouse houses and ruins instead. You look down on the action from a roughly three quarters perspective and, of course, have full free head movement. This means that you can poke your head into the level and then look up at hidden bits of ceiling, or around a corner to find a hidden passage. Elements of the room often obscure your vision and it feels like you’re meant to interact by moving your head around to get a better view, which is incredibly immersive and makes everything feel real. The graphics are fantastic; not the highest poly count or texture quality but with a sense of solidness, for lack of a better word, that makes the game’s world feel like an actual place. Using motion controls adds a tactile sense to the proceedings and there were times when I reached out with my actual hand to touch stuff, which, of course, was not actually there, just because of how real it all felt. The game also intentionally puts objects in the foreground or hides things to try and force you to treat the virtual space as if it were real, and it works! It is by far the most convincing VR space I’ve seen on PSVR, and I really loved being in its enchanting world, like stepping in to a young adult fantasy novel.
Moss is not, of course, perfect. Taken purely as a game it is good but not special. The puzzles are kind of obvious, combat is simple with low variety of enemies and none of the complexity of Zelda’s gear, and you’re often asked to kill a stream of the same 3 boring enemies in endurance arenas that aren’t even that hard to endure because you have unlimited healing (if you can get Quill into an area where she’s safe to stay still for a few seconds.) It can be tough to judge jumps and the game can be finnicky about collision detection and other similar things. This is especially true in the ending sequence, where I died far more than in any other part of the game. In general it feels like the best parts of this game are the aesthetics and the world and while the gameplay is not bad a little less emphasis on challenge would have made it even better. It’s not that it’s a difficult game, it’s that the time spent fighting the same enemies over and over, or retrying a jump until you get it right, is not nearly as enjoyable as the time spent taking in the sights and sounds of the beautiful world the developers created.
Speaking of sounds, the music is decent, though nothing special, and the voice acting is mostly fine, all done by a single narrator who does voices for the characters like an audio book reader when there’s dialog. There are a fair number of speaking characters, including Quill, and I wish that she had been a silent protagonist, not because the voice actress is bad or annoying (she’s perfectly fine) but because her animation is so good and makes her so adorable and believable as this little mouse heroine that hearing a human woman’s voice speak for her kind of spoils the illusion. When she grins up at you (again, you have presence in the world and characters acknowledge you) or does a little dance after completing some challenge, she is just heart melting. One of my favorite game protagonists ever. When she’s chatting with her uncle or the queen of the sprites she’s just another game character. Not a bad one, but not nearly as special as her character model and animation.
My main complaint about Tetris Effect was that the gameplay didn’t really mesh with the VR experience. Moss marries the two perfectly. You use your head to look around corners and find hidden little scrolls. The game relies on a motion control and controller simultaneous scheme that’s much more intuitive in VR. The diorama set up is incredibly immersive in VR and creates a real sense of place and scale (there are obvious human sized objects mixed in with the little mouse weapons and such.) Even the cut scenes play out in a way that only really works in VR, making you feel like you’re reading a book in an actual library. It’s astonishingly immersive.
Moss isn’t just my favorite VR game I’ve ever played, it’s one of my favorite PS4 games. Marrying the exploration and puzzle solving of a top-down Zelda with the immersion of VR is perfect for me, and recalls those days of childhood wonder looking at recreated habitats through panes of museum glass, except that now the dioramas move and live and play out an adventure. This would have been mind blowing to me at 10 years old, but even close to 40 it pulls me in and makes me happy. This is the VR experience I wanted to have when I bought the headset, and while I know that not many more like it exist on PS4 (or in the PC world at this point) it makes me excited for VR and its future in a way that I definitely wasn’t before I played it.
It’s a short game, clocking in at around 3-4 hours, and there’s not much to it (it ends on a massive and explicit cliffhanger), but it feels like a game that was built around the limitations and strengths of current VR tech. It’s probably better on a more advanced headset than the PSVR, especially since at times it asks you to reach pretty far with your motion controls and my camera kept losing track of my DS4, but even with the technical limits I really loved the experience.
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