Starship Home on Quest 3: One of the best mixed reality experiences so far
Starship Home is one of the most anticipated mixed reality games of the year. Here are our impressions.
Starship Home turns your living room into a spaceship as you travel through space, exploring planets in search of a rare plant species to save and cure. This is the only way to defeat a mysterious blight that threatens the entire universe.
The adventure begins when a package is delivered to the wrong address: your home. It contains the essential components of a spaceship. A control helm with a large view of space, an airlock, a pull-out floor storage unit and various windows.
The interesting thing about this introduction is that you are asked to place these elements on the walls and floor yourself. Rather than having the room set up suboptimally by the game, you have the freedom to shape the mixed reality experience and make it as immersive as possible, depending on the layout of your room. I wanted the helm to be as central as possible and the windows to be positioned in such a way that I really felt like I was flying through space in my living room as I travelled through the universe.
Thanks to this customizability, Starship Home turns the weakness of today's mixed reality technologies - the lack of contextual understanding of space - into a strength.
An accessible and sometimes simplistic game
I also liked the fact that the mixed reality game pulled me into a charming story from the very first minute and took me by the hand. How do I open the star map, how do I operate the airlock and the landing robot, how do I fertilize and care for the plants? I am guided through every step and after a short time I felt like a real spaceship captain and space explorer.
I played Starship Home for about an hour, exploring two or three planets during that time. While the interactions themselves are fun, the game mechanics are a little too linear and simple for my taste: You open the star map, select the next planet, locate points of interest on a digital globe, send out the landing robot, and bring the plant aboard to be tended.
These activities are interesting the first and second time, but I can't say if they're the same the fifth and sixth time. Some reviewers who played the entire game criticized the lack of variety and depth.
A mixed reality journey worth taking
The comic-like art style fits perfectly with the setting and the whimsical aliens and plants you encounter. What struck me as negative was the comparatively low resolution of the mixed reality graphics and the occasional lack of performance. Both affected the immersion.
One question kept coming up while I was playing Starship Home: What does the game gain by taking place in mixed reality? After all, it could be implemented in virtual reality with minor adjustments.
The game does not reinvent mixed reality, and the effect of being set in the real world is subtle but not negligible. Starship Home offers a magical mixed reality experience within the limits of today's technology. It's fun to turn your home into a spaceship, interact with its instruments and creatures as if they were part of the room, and decorate your space with intergalactic flora. I can definitely recommend it to mixed reality enthusiasts.
Finally, I would like to point out that Starship Home benefits from a lot of space and free walls. The immersion of the game depends a) on the room and b) on your creativity. The magic can be lost in small rooms, and it is worth trying different rooms before you start to play. You can only play while standing and walking, so you need some stamina for longer play sessions.
You can purchase Starship Home for $18 On the Horizon Store. Quest 3 and Quest 3S are supported.
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