Hands-on with Living Room on Quest 3: Kid-friendly mixed reality
Living Room turns your room into a living mixed reality sanctuary. We played it on Quest 3.
Living Room is what you would call a cozy game, one that avoids violence and stressful situations and instead focuses on the creative and relaxing aspect of video games.
Your task is to create ecosystems in your room, populate them with flora and fauna, and make them grow. A tutorial takes you by the hand and guides you step by step through the game.
At first, you create a landscape on physical surfaces like a desk and shape it to your liking with simple terraforming. Later, you can also create floating islands in the middle of the room.
The next step is to decorate the ecosystems with plants and populate them with animals. The selection of flora, fauna and biomes is very limited at the beginning, but is constantly expanded as the game progresses.
Living Room really brings your room to life
You must take care of reproduction yourself by picking up two animals of the same species and placing them on a separate island called the "breeding grounds". The offspring will inherit the genetic traits of their parents. In the ecosystems themselves, you have to be careful which species you combine. If you put sheep on an island with lions, they will surely be eaten.
I can't say for sure how deep these ecosystem mechanisms go due to my relatively short playing time, but Living Room doesn't seem to be an overly deep and complex game.
One of the best features of this mixed reality game is that you can give names to animals from your ecosystem and turn them into pets that will romp around your house and dig up treasures. You can even pet them.
In addition to the normal mode, there are two other game modes that I didn't try out: a challenge mode with, according to the developer, challenging puzzles and demanding scenarios, and a creative mode in which you can design ecosystems to your heart's content.
Well implemented mixed reality
I liked the mixed reality implementation of the game, as you can place the ecosystems anywhere in the room and attach the task board and a shelf with important tools and books to the walls wherever you want. Anyone who enjoyed Starship Home will feel right at home in Living Room.
Later, you can unlock decorative items to transform your room into a colorful mixed reality sanctuary. Thanks to the save function, they should be in the same place next time.
The graphics are basic and, in my opinion, a bit too basic. I would have liked to see more detail in the landscapes, flora and fauna. After all, Living Room was developed for Meta Quest 3 and 3S and does not support older Quest headsets.
The mixed reality game made a solid and appealing first impression on me. In terms of gameplay and graphics, I would say it appeals more to children than adults, and is a good introduction to the magic of mixed reality for the former. The game's mechanics are conveyed solely through graphics and text, and the texts are available in several languages.
Living Room can be purchased in the Horizon Store.
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