Wabi Sabi Games has brought an experience to the Oculus Quest that is not easily replicated on other platforms. It feels like you are playing a game designed for touch screens, but with the immersion of VR.
Last Labyrinth is part of Oculus’ Quest launch lineup, coming out day 1 along with Beat Saber and Creed: Rise To Glory. The game is a single-player, seated experience that takes advantage of the Oculus’ touch controls. The game includes a minimal story and requires no score attack skills to enjoy it. It is unlike any other Oculus Quest launch title in both how it plays and what it’s trying to achieve.
The main mechanic centers around using your hands to rotate the environment around you. The game starts off in a dark room with nothing but a table, chair, and portrait of the family standing several feet above it. You can pick up items on the table to inspect them closely or throw them into other realms that only exist when your hand hovers over them. Other than that there are no additional user interface elements anywhere in the game. It’s a really interesting way to communicate information, but I’m not sure if it works well in practice.
For example, the main conflict of the game is convincing an apparition that there is nothing wrong with its family portrait. The player needs to find a key under the chair and then use it to open a door elsewhere in the mansion, but you can’t see this until you pick up a toy duck in the other room and bring it back to this one. The duck toy will begin quacking when your hand hovers over it, which is how players can tell if an object in the world has a use.
The main mechanic of rotating the environment around me was not as immersive as I had hoped. It felt like an alternate control scheme on a console game and didn’t enhance the experience in any way that made me feel like I was putting my head into another world.
The one plus is how well low poly models work in VR. The cinematography used to make objects disappear as they got further away from the player felt like it was playing tricks with my mind. The way the game uses perspective to trick you into thinking objects are closer than they appear is also really well done.
The environment around me was filled with beautiful lighting and interesting design, though it doesn’t feel cohesive or grand enough to be a “labyrinth”. It feels more like several rooms in a home.
Recommendation: play it if you enjoy unique control schemes and want to try something different from the other Quest launch titles available.