The Gallery Episode 1: Call of the Starseed Review

The Gallery is a virtual reality game that launched in April 2016. It was developed by Cloudhead games.  Call of the Starseed is the first episode in whats meant to be a four episode series. 

Call of the Starseed begins on a beach. Your name is Alex and you are looking for your twin sister Elsie. This is where your journey begins. The gallery is an exploration and adventure game with puzzle solving. To move about the environment you use the touch pad and a compass like pointer appears on the ground. You move your head and release the touch pad to jump to the next area. You can walk around a little bit if you have a big enough room but you will teleport to move around most of the time. I got quite use to this and it seems to be a common way to move around in VR games. Once you have the head set on you are in another world. You often forget where you are in relation to your room. Call of the Starseed is very immersive this way from the way your hands move in front of your face to the visuals and sound. You can pick things up to examine them, throw objects and interact with them like putting popcorn on a camp fire to pop.

The puzzles in this game can be quite hard to work out if you don't look for the clues. For example I spent a long time wandering around underground tunnels until I pulled my torch out of my backpack and shone it at the walls where there were markings.

The game uses the unity engine and the visuals are quite impressive. The acting is good but the story is quite short and leaves you wanting more. At the moment it is one of the best games available for the HTC Vive. 

I give it 8/10