The story and the visuals are calming and beautiful in this forest walk simulation. Narrator's is very soothing and the overall atmosphere is beautiful. There isn't much game in it itself, but that's not really what I was expecting either. Few minor puzzles in the path seems bit pointless and don't really add on to the story, but they don't bother much either.

As a game programmer myself the technical aspect of the game could still use some fine tuning. The performance on GTX1070 doesn't seem to clock full 90fps which is likely due to poor optimization and heavy assets and shaders. Also the on-rails controls with pad (default FPS controller?) feels unnatural for VR experience. Even the slow movement pace can cause motion sickness because of clear sensoral conflict with what user observes and controls and the compromised frame rate contributes to the motion sickness. As it is, the game can be only experienced in small doses if you're sensitive to VR sickness.

All in all it's still recommendable experience and hopefully the devs will address these few minor VR related issues to give a wholesome experience for VR users.

You can view my review & gameplay here: https://youtu.be/nlFnZoNEjww

This is about a 1 hour long walking simulator that feels mostly like a nature walk. It is heavily narrated as you hear the narrator tell you about nature & how it relates to a past relationship. There are very few gameplay elements involved, most of it is just plain walking from point A to point B.

You do have full locomotion and smooth turning. However, your motion controllers are used as a gamepad. I recommend just using a gamepad. I really liked the environments here as they are big & have nice little details like falling leaves or birds flying above you. However, the game is not well optimized. It ran poorly on my RTX 3080. Game is running on the Unreal Engine.

I did like the VOs and also the musical soundtrack. The story did meander a bit and it had this twist ending that some may not find all that surprising. Overall, this is a budget title and it does feel like one. However, I do think people who enjoy walking simulators or nature walks in VR would enjoy this one. Anyone else should probably stay away.

Rate 5.5/10. I actually bought this on release and I only just recently played it. Not bad for the money, but definitely not for everyone.

Please consider joining my Steam Curator Group. You can join here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Oculus_WMR

This is one of those games that really needs a sideways thumb rating.

Optimization is very poor, especially textures, which are unbearably shimmery unless you turn on TAA, which then kills performance and makes everything blurry. Tons of pop-in and bad LODs, which seem to have some kind of depth perception errors on them, so that things look like they're 2 feet away for a fraction of a second, before they snap back into the distance. It looked very nice other than that, especially some of the lighting and water effects, thanks to the Unreal Engine, but it definitely needs a lot more polish to work as a VR title.

Writing... I'm sure a lot of people enjoy this kind of thing, but I honestly found it almost unbearably purple and flowery, just layer after layer of metaphor, purple prose, and trite philosophy, caked on like cheap makeup. "Men love it when you really glob it on" was clearly the guiding principle here.

Also on the writing, despite this being ostensibly a story of love and loss, there's absolutely no characterization worth noting. None. What was Renee like? Let's see. She was female. Shy and introverted. Liked nature and hiking. That's it. What was the protagonist, Kai, like? Male and the same. There is genuinely no characterization beyond that, none whatsoever. How are we supposed to be attached to characters that have about as much personality as gingerbread men?

I got the game as part of a bundle, $2.49 for 10 games. So at a hair under 25 cents, I don't feel ripped off in the slightest. But it only had 1 hour of total gameplay, and did NOT leave me wanting any more. I really cannot recommend buying this at full price, so it has to get a thumbs down rating from me, lacking a "neutral vote" or "wait until it's on sale for under $1" option.

I wanted to but I could not - first of all the lag was so bad, I even blamed the drivers and I updated, but still it did not help at all. This didn't make any sense as my hardware is less than a year old, using HTC Vive and an Asus Strix GTX1070 with 8GB and my system having 16GB memory and SSD disk, the CPU i don't know but it is equivalent.

I gave up at chapter 1 when I arrived at the waterfall and it progressively became almost like a slide show of images, interrupted by the SteamVR pause-menu flashing/fading in the background. I tested other VR-games to see if there were some general issues, but no.

Also I noticed in this game that you float much higher above the ground than you should, this made me even more nauseous in addition to the lag itself.

Otherwise the narrator worked fine the first time, and the music was spot on...

under 5bucks... can that be good.
YES it can and it is. I stop now and wait for an update. Some minor fixes still hold it back but i can already tell that once they are fixed that it is a must have for many people.I start with the stuff that needs to be adressed first:

1st and biggest problem right now: it has only gaze locomotion. Meaning you walk in the direction you look. This triggers more often MS and you can´t look around while you walk without changing your course. Onward style locomotion is needed here.

2nd. It looks a bit blurry. Seen this with many unreal titles and it may be adressed. But i honestly could live with it because it gives a dream like feeling that somehow fits the atmosphere.

3rd i was a bit taller than in real life. an issue that should be easy to fix.

4th running did not work for me (vive-keep the up direction pressed). Not a big deal, why should i run in a beautiful environment like this?

Thats really all. Now we come to the good stuff:
It is a walking simulator. The narration (philosophic/poetry-yes i know that sounds bad but it really isn´t) is AAA. The man who does it sounds like the one from some Manowar Songs. The surroundings are just beautiful, rich and peaceful. It feels like you are inside a philosohical poem dream. It is also not just a 10 min. flick. It really gives you something special. Once the issues are adressed i will continue to play(its worth waiting) and update my review along the way.
Buy now and get the 10% discount or just buy it at full prize what is still insanely cheap for what you get.

I tried playing this on two systems: one with a Radeon RX 580 GPU, that slightly exceeded the minimum specs, and another with a GeForce GTX 1070 that slightly exceeded the recommended specs. I used a Rift CV1 on the Radeon system and a Rift-S on the GeForce system. I used Touch controllers for both. As other reviewers have noted, the performance is terrible. This was true even when I lowered the graphics settings. Everything was jittery during movement, especially when using the joystick to turn. If the developers added a snap turn with blink, this might be a small improvement. Another issue is that the locomotion follows the direction of the HMD. In what is more or less a "walking simulator," it's natural took look around the environment while moving forward. Given the limited peripheral vision of most HMDs, this requires head movement. Trying to walk a straight line, while taking in the sights, is like failing a field sobriety test. If I had played this game in my early VR days, I probably would have puked from motion sickness.

The graphics are glitchy, but the environments are detailed, artistic, and well designed. I only wish I could have appreciated them more. The poor performance just made the whole thing feel like a barely tolerable struggle. I started closing my eyes whenever I had to use the joystick to turn in-game, to avoid the awful feeling of dizziness. It's rather funny when I consider that a quiet game about a lifelong love story turned into a white knuckles, teeth gritting, all-out fight to avoid nausea. I can tell that a lot of work went into the scenery, though, and I was determined to try to see everything. For some inexplicable reason I steeled my will and powered through- perhaps too stupid to recognize the sunk cost fallacy and too lazy to figure out the Steam return process. Fortunately, I bought it on sale. I really wanted to be able to recommend this. My reason for trying it on a second system was in hopes of being able to offer a qualified thumbs up. Alas, it was not to be. I don't know if this game would perform well on a top of the line GPU, but it definitely didn't work for me at the recommended specifications or with lower graphics settings. I'd be willing to look at other games from these developers, but I'll be paying a lot more careful attention to what's written in the reviews. If there are negative comments about performance, I'll be sure to take heed.

It seems to me that this could be a great experience if a few things were improved, but as it is I can't recommend it.

The visuals are gorgeous but don't seem well-optimized. It seemed a bit juddery in parts and the visuals often seemed too jagged or out of focus. The voiceover was very pleasant to listen to, but the content of what he was saying often seemed overwrought and pretentious to me--it seemed like the author was trying too hard. I would have strongly preferred a teleport option but instead it was very slow (too slow for me) free movement through the environment. Sometimes the program would move me without my consent (not OK!), for example when I wanted to stand in one spot and look around, I would start moving in the direction I was looking. Other times it seemed to suddenly rotate my viewpoint (again, without me using the controls). This would probably be very nauseating for some people.

Mostly I wanted to explore and move through the story, but at certain points there would be gamelike elements, e.g. jumping from rock to rock while attempting to avoid falling to your death. I found those elements frustrating because I was moving so slowly and found it hard to gauge when to jump--the frustration of one such section was too much for me and I quit and uninstalled the game.

If the gamelike sections worked better for me (or could be skipped), and if the program would only move my avatar when I tell it to move, I would love to play through the rest of this.

Use TAA anti-aliasing-filter or it will look terrible!

What a beautiful experience. Absolutely mesmerizing and wonderful. This is a work of art through and through. I really loved the story and message, I was deeply moved.

I did get a bit queezy here and there due to stuttering and I am not prone to VR sickness. For some reason the movement wasn't smooth, but I don't think it was the framerate, because if I turned the graphics down it would still stutter when moving. Standing still and looking around there was no stuttering. Hopefully that can get fixed if this is still being worked on. (My PC is at the reccommended spec)

The tesselation type stuff seems to get drawn in too late in many places giving you weird warping and shifting rocks or branches popping in at your feet. Seems like it could use some load distance tweaking.

You should have the TAA enabled by default in the options, because it looks so much better with it on, even at medium compared to max MSAA. It didn't seem have that big of a hit on performance either. For the VR version most people will have a good enough GPU to use TAA.

Played on a HTC Vive Pro
This crawling simulator (a 2 year old child moves faster) has on the surface good music and voice narration. The graphics on the VR version are terrible unlike the normal version which has reasonable graphics.
The snail pace of movement is worse than everybody has gone to the rapture and while i could deal with it in that game due to their being so much to explore this game was barren by comparison.
The only thing redeeming in this game is the aurora in chapter 4.