I’ve played Journey of the Gods this week, and I finished it mostly disappointed by it. It’s one of the titles VR fans like to mention when some people ask if there is more to VR gaming that rhythm games, wave shooters and short experiences, indicating this is more a fully fledged traditional Action/RPG inspired in Zelda.
Well, no. Hell, it’s kind of sad some people would refer it to as anything ‘full fledged’, as it indicates how bad things have to be in the ecosystem, at least on the Quest store. To be fair with it, it has some good points like enemy variety, I liked that (there are enemy summoners, chargers, a huge with with vulnerable areas, another that that blinks around, another with a carapace that makes it invulnerable for a time, etc). Art is mostly good, too.
But fully fledged isn’t. It’s a 4-4.5 hours game, not a 7-8 hours like I had heard around.
There is no main character, dialogue, real npcs, plot, or anything like that. The story is ‘you are a hero (god?), stop the bad guy trying to destroy the world’. Literally that’s it, I’m not exaggerating or summarizing.
There is no open world, nor interesting interconnected hub or levels, there is seven discrete, linear levels you unlock one after another, which you enter through your base (just a place where you can upgrade a few items).
There is no economy, trading or even consumables like ammo or potions. There is no RPG progression. There are three things you will use in combat, a sword, a shield and a crossbow, no more weapons (although at least these three have a pair of upgrades each). The sword combat itself is pure ‘waggle the sword in enemies 2-3 times’.
The game have you unlocking a series of godly powers, by the end of the game you win enough of them that potentially they could have made interesting puzzles using them in combination. But that never happens, the game is also underwhelming in that area: there is a single area with puzzles, about moving piles of sand with a single power. I can only think of a single second instance being puzzle-y enough, where you need to attract a big monster in a place to move a piece of scenario like a lever, but to be honest it was a bad puzzle as there was zero indication that the ‘thing’ would move like a lever with weight nor any past experience about the game having an element like that. There is another place where you have to slow down time to avoid rolling boulders but I don’t think that classify as a puzzle?
I think it’s ironic how VR is supposed to be more immersive than traditional games (you can look around, the sense of scale, using your own hands), in practice I can immerse much better in ‘2d’ games than in something so barebones.
Maybe the game isn’t so bad, maybe I had too much expectations. Maybe the problem is a sector of the VR community that feel the need to hype everything VR related so much, to a ludicrous point. Some of the subreddits are tiring, yeah we all want for VR to be a success, but that doesn’t mean you have to post every small positive indication of the market or that every games is a 10/10 experience.
For now, VR shines in unique experiences that are unlike traditional games, like Superhot VR, Beat Saber, Eleven Table Tennis, Thrill of the Fight, or old experiences that shine with new light like any flight sim or a game like Gadgeteer (traditional puzzle game that feels new thanks to the input method), even some ideas from Shadow point, or moments from I Expect you to Die. Again, there is no technical challenges to make something like Journey of the Gods but better, they just need a proper development cycle of 2.5 years or whatever.
