REVIEW [imagine a thumb up] (Can not post review on Store Page?!)

[Fuinelen]

For some reason I can not post a review on the store page. Took me long enough to write this, so I'll post it here instead :P

I think I remember a pre-version of this on the DK2 and back then I thought the concept was quite interesting. When it came out for SteamVR it was an insta buy for me, as I am a sucker for good looking and immersive environments. Sadly I was quite disappointed : scaling was often wrong, with objects looking way too big and the viewing position generally too high. The quality of the textures and objects variied between nice and "oh .. a Jackson Pollack!".
But the dev listened to the criticism and the newer environments are much better, with a couple of breathtaking ones ("endless night" being my current favourite) Teleportation came in, along with other goodies (the new visualizer is actually very nice!) and my earlier complaints are void. There is still no interactivity, but it's not "game breaking"

The actual guided meditation part is astonishingly *good*. I used to look down on meditation as "new age mumbojumbo" (I'd have used the Penn & Teller word, but I'm trying to keep it clean:P,), but just doing the "exercise" as being told whilst ignoring any mention of shakras any energy points (not that there are many of those here, thankfully) sensibly reduced my stress level and left me calmer and more focused, so I try to do a 5 or 10mn session whenever I have the time. I am quite sure the fact that my mind was tricked into thinking I wasn't in my room helped a lot.

There are multiple categories of different meditation types using different speakers, and each one has multiple lessons in different "session length" (2, 5 and 10mn sessions), so if you don't like a speaker or its style you can still try another one.

Audiowise the environmental effects are convincing, the music tracks are okayish, and the meditation tracks are clean. I would love to be able to choose background music tracks from my local drives, but that, again, is no game breaker.

All in all, if you want something more utilitarian, are not a "meditation pro" and could use someone telling you how to breathe correctly and how to relax then you should definitely give Guided Meditation a try.

Also : if this is indeed the same as the old DK2 demo, then -> where are the "old japanese tea house" and the "finish wood during a storm" environments? those were awesome!