Transform Your Reality: Unique MR Platformer ‘Demeter’ Now Available on Meta Quest

Atalanta’s ship has drifted into our world. You must help her to understand why she ended up in your game space. The world of Demeter is in danger, and she needs you to save it. Her future is in your hands... quite literally.

So goes the story of Demeter, the latest title from Novelab. Unlike the award-winning French studio’s prior projects, Demeter is a full-fledged game—a narrative platformer, specifically—built from the ground up for mixed reality. In fact, at a couple of playtime hours (three or four for completionists), it’s arguably the most ambitious MR production to date.

We sat down with Novelab Executive Producer of Immersive Entertainment Paul Mezier to learn more.

Paul Mezier: I’m Paul. I’m from France originally. I now live in the US in San Francisco. I’ve been with Novelab for four years now, and prior to that I’ve been full time in VR for about eight years.

I made the jump to VR from the film industry. There are two types of people, roughly two types of people who go to VR as professionals or even as enthusiasts. We have some cinema folks and some video games folks.

PM: I’ve always played games. I have very fond memories of playing narrative games, in particular, as a kid. With my brother, we spent hours next to the family PC playing Monkey Island and playing Sierra titles. I grew up with those point-and-click narrative adventures that I still have very fond memories of.

So this is really where my heart lies in storytelling and bringing people into worlds that they’ll hopefully enjoy exploring and have adventures in. This is what drives me on a personal level, and of course, my personal trajectory has been a discovery as well. I started my career within the tech industry on the business side, and then I decided that I wanted to do something more creative, so I joined the film industry. I progressed little by little, and I was very interested in CG in particular and 3D movies at the time. I was trying to make projects in stereoscopic 3D—movies, linear stories. That’s when I tried Rift for the first time, in 2016.

Like every person who tries VR, you immediately think that there’s something there—that this will go somewhere, that’s for sure. The technology is powerful. It’s visceral, I mean, the sense of immersion—it’s very immersive. It’s all these words that we use every day, but it’s true that it’s very powerful.

So I thought, “OK, this is what I’m going to do. I don’t know how, I don’t know why yet, but I will figure it out.” I first joined some smaller companies, smaller startups, and eventually I joined Novelab in 2020 to grow their original experiences and work with clients and customers.

PM: Essentially, we do client work where we’ll work for IP holders. These can be Hollywood studios or brands as well. We do a bit of branded work, and they’ll come to us and want some experience—it could be a narrative experience or an immersive one. It can be a game. We’ll also talk with video game publishers, for example, and they’ll want to bring one of their licenses into VR.

PM: I think it’s really an evolution. The company has been in existence since 2009, so it’s been quite a long time in the VR industry. At the very beginning, the company was called AudioGaming. It was a spatial audio plugin company. We built spatial audio plugins for the movie industry and others in video games as well, so you can hear some of our explosions in Django Unchained, for example.

This was all spatial. This was all about surrounding the user—giving a sense of presence through audio. Then we’ve added some opportunities—the industry was growing, and one of the co-founders of the company is actually one of the designers of Google Cardboard, Damien Henry. He actually started designing the Cardboard at Novelab and then he joined Google. They made an offer that he couldn’t refuse.

All this to say that the studio, the team has always been about spatial immersive, and so we added graphics basically when it was Gear VR and the early versions of consumer devices. The company’s based in France, and there’s a strong ecosystem in Europe and in France in particular. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with partners and clients that had amazing creative visions, and we’ve been one of the well-kept secrets of the industry. We’ve been one of the studios with a very strong technical background who can execute a vision.

SPHERES, NOTES ON BLINDNESS, On The Morning You Wake (To the End of The World), all of these are story-based experiences. They’re not games, but all of them have won several awards, many awards in the industry. The Venice Film Festival, Tribeca, SXSW, Sundance, the Cannes Film Festival. So we’re really part of the ecosystem that sees VR as an art form, or at least as a very legitimate creative pursuit, and that’s what animates all of us in the team. But most of these works have been done for-hire.

Throughout the years, we’ve accumulated all this experience. We’ve built dozens of headset-based experiences and even immersive installations as well. So we really have a very wide range of expertise in how the user behaves in space and how to take them by the hand and guide them through an experience.

Since I joined, my objective has always been to create our own original stories. And this was the case with Demeter. It’s the first original IP of the studio, and it builds on the years of expertise that the studio has built over the years to culminate in mixed reality, which is something that I’m very excited about as a technology—I think it holds great potential.

PM: That’s how we designed it from the beginning. It started two years ago. Meta approached us for a prototype at the time, just to try mixed reality. It wasn’t even a vertical slice—it was really a prototype for some type of gameplay using mixed reality. At the time, Quest 3 wasn’t even announced, but we did this prototype and it worked pretty well. It was a platformer narrative, but it was in mixed reality using Quest 2. And people enjoyed it, so the Meta team invited us to think of a larger game, and that’s how we expanded it and developed a concept that became the whole story and world of Demeter.

From the beginning, it has always been mixed reality. It comes from the excitement and the joy of playing with small figurines, as kids, and making adventures and stories in your own world, in your room. We take those figurines, and they go through all these adventures, and we make them jump from the table to the bed, and then they fly through space, and this is what we wanted to reproduce here with Demeter. That’s what we wanted to emulate.

PM: What we wanted to do was to really nail the mechanics, nail the MR aspect, nail the generative aspect. It’s very important. The initial ambition originally was to have a full game that adapts in real-time to your environment. We had to tone it down throughout production because, of course, you shoot for the stars and then you land somewhere in the middle.

I think the result still speaks for itself, but originally, what we wanted to do was say, “OK, I wear the headset. The headset sees my environment and recognizes my environment, and then my table—and then the gameplay will be different for everybody.” Every single player would have a different play-through because the topography of my room, the geometry of my room is different than my neighbors and my friends, right? So, this table would become a mountain, and then the character would jump or climb down from that mountain onto the floor that becomes a beach or the sea, and then the character would traverse this to my wall which becomes another mountain, and they would climb my wall.

The original vision was to have all of these react in real-time and then it would blend seamlessly with the immersive world, the 3D world with your reality—with physical reality. Now of course, this is highly complex on a technical level. With mixed reality in particular, you have to build from the lowest common denominator. I have one couch, two sofas, two chairs, and one table in my room, but my neighbor may have two couches and a table that is smaller or taller, and a bar and the room will be different. So if you’re planning to have one challenge for the hero in your game, they will run through one puzzle and then you need to help them figure out the solution to the puzzle or fight some enemies within one island, for example. Well, what do you do if the player has two tables, or the opposite? If you’re planning for two challenges but the player only has one item in their space, then how do you build a reactive world that adapts to everyone’s environments?

PM: The original intention was to have everything fully procedurally generated. This was not possible with the resources that we had. Demeter is one step towards that, but we’re not there yet for this production.

Basically, there’s a certain number of gameplay blocks—we call them islands—that will spawn onto players’ environments, topographies, and then the game generates paths between those islands. We have a certain number of gameplay blocks that will appear in people’s rooms and then the paths between those islands will depend on everybody’s spaces.

My table will suddenly link to my wall over there, but the path between those assets will differ from everybody else’s, so everybody will see the same number of islands, but the way these islands appear will differ for everybody. This is what we had to come up with as a solution because you have to account for the variety of rooms. We had to build a simulator, a room simulator, and of course a room in the US is very different from the rooms in Europe or in Asia. You have some heights, you have room sizes, you have an amount of furniture, and then people might play in their living rooms or in their bedrooms or in their kitchen, so you have to anticipate all of this. And also the furniture—people’s furniture will move.

Take my chair: How do you know that this object within the player’s room is here to stay and won’t move, and you can use it for the gameplay and it will come back between play sessions? That’s the most important thing.

PM: Usually, the furniture won’t move within one play session, but if the player comes back to the game and to their save files two months later or one week later, maybe the room or the topography has changed. Well, if that table or that chair was one island or the key island in the game and then suddenly this chair has moved, how do you account for this? We’ve also really thought about accessibility. We tried to incorporate as many features as possible to cover everybody’s range of mobility. And you can move the islands yourself if they spawn in places that are not accessible.

The game has fallbacks. If, for example, the game was designed to leverage one table for gameplay and for some reason the player doesn’t have the right size or shape of things that we had thought about, the game will generate an island that adapts to that player’s empty space and generates a in-game pedestal to support the island. Everybody should be able to enjoy the game, regardless of their furniture and room sizes and house sizes.

PM: I’m looking forward to the reactions of people to the closing scene. We’ve spent a lot of time on it, and it should wow people. I think it really shows the potential of mixed reality as a narrative medium as well as a format. I think people will be very impressed by the opening sequence. Everybody is like, “Wow. OK, I get it. This is really cool.”

People are really surprised that the game happens around them, and we try to surprise them—not at each and every turn but, you know, very frequently within the game, you’ll play in front of you and then suddenly you realize that there’s something behind you. We try to keep the player on their toes with this.

But to answer your question, the best reaction is the memories that people build with the game and within their environment. Our hero, Atalanta, was on my couch, and I was really just talking to her—and she’s very talkative and very funny. So when I take the headset off, that memory lingers some times. People really enjoy building those memories within their own world.

PM: I’m very proud of the team. We can be very proud of the work that we have achieved. The team has a very wide-ranging set of expertise. We have our Game Director, Fabrice, who has a PhD in theoretical astroparticle physics.

PM: He’s been designing immersive experiences (real and virtual) for over 20 years. This is the aim that we always keep in mind as a team is: Where should the player pay attention at this exact moment? Where do we want them to pay attention? What emotion do we want to tie between the player and the game? Because we can surround the player with all sorts of things, but they need to focus on something. And then, with a sleight of hand, you just make something else appear while they were looking away.

Fabrice also comes from exhibition, game and theatrical design. We’ve made several location-based installations as well. We’re really used to thinking in terms of space and how do I, as a user, behave in space? You don’t want to suffocate the player in a space that is too narrow. You don’t want the space to be too wide as well. You need the player to feel comfortable in the space that you’re building—not threatened either.

Moreover we wanted to create an original story, a narrative that will bring the player and its reality into the story. We do not want to just create a platformer, but have a multilayered narration that is playing with the player's emotions.

You can play with that dramatic tension, but you always have to be aware of it and you always have to be respectful of the player’s space as well.

PM: We can even expand to productivity, education, fitness. When I made the jump from linear media immersive media, I thought, “OK, this is the future. There’s something there.” And I think there’s a similar leap between virtual reality and mixed reality where suddenly I’m not isolated in my dream world, in my game. I’m in my space and something is happening to me within my space.

PM: It’s very hard to explain, but it’s part of my daily life and it just enriches my life and experience.

I’m not lying when I say that I am extremely bullish on mixed reality. It has a lot of technical challenges, but I think the experience, the consequences of the experience for the user, is so much greater. We’ll see lifestyle applications, cooking applications. We will see productivity applications. We will see work experiences as well. But on entertainment use cases, since this is what we focus on mostly, the possibilities are limitless. We already have a lot of ideas, and we’re working on some exciting things.

I think the next generation, the people who will come to VR and immersive entertainment who will now buy a Quest headset and who come to VR or to immersive entertainment through mixed reality, I think they’ll really be blown away compared to what it was only a few years ago with 360-degree videos or anything. I can’t wait for what the next generation of designers, creators, and artists will come up with as stories and gameplay because I think it opens up such a wide range of possibilities.

PM: It’s a lot easier. People can enjoy it with their families, with their friends. It’s becoming a lot more social and easy and comfortable to enjoy and to play within my house. And even people of older generations like my parents, for example, can enjoy it. It’s a lot less daunting. It’s a lot easier for them to access because they can still see me and they can still interact with me. I’m still there for them.

PM: We’re working on some things. We’re really excited about entertainment, and our DNA is in storytelling. It can be games, but we really like story-based games. We have a few things that we’re cooking, that we’re working on that use your full environment and we’ll keep on working on this. There are some things that I can’t talk about, but yeah, entertainment, basically: How do we bring the next generation of entertainment within your space? That is something that we’re really excited about.

PM: For those of us who are convinced of VR and devices like Quest, we have no doubt—we’re enjoying the technology and we have no doubts. We just want to share it with the world, right? We just want to tell people how great it is. And we want them to join us within the games that we enjoy because we want to share the excitement and the pleasure that we have, you know, playing those games. Some people say it has taken some time for VR to take off, but keep in mind that, when you know what happens behind the scenes, it’s a huge undertaking on a technical level. The progress and the engineering that goes on behind the scenes is just mind-boggling.

I’ve always been patient. People may think that it takes a long time, but actually the groundwork that has been done is tremendous. I find it exciting from the advances that have been made.

And I want to invite all the young generation and the first users of VR and MR now to share their enthusiasm with the world and with their friends because I have no doubt that this is, if not the future, then it’s a future. And on a creative standpoint, it is limitless and it’s absolutely amazing

I really invite all the creative spirits and anybody who wants to build in VR and MR to get their hands on a game engine to try building things because it’s very exciting and I just want them to start experimenting. It’s very gratifying to be able to impact your world in this way. We’re at the forefront of an amazing wave of technology, and I just want to invite and encourage everybody to join in because it’s really exciting to be part of this movement.

PM: Yeah, exactly.

PM: For a first-time user to jump into MR or VR with Quest 3 is amazing. You get to play all the Quest 2 catalog, you have all the VR games in better definition, and now you can access games with Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta).It’s amazing what it affords, what it allows the player for the price of a console. If people are coming into immersive entertainment with Quest 3, I think they will be really blown away with the amount of value they can get and joy they can get out of the device as compared to the previous generations.

PM: Demeter runs on Quest 2 and Quest 3. On Quest 3, you have the full-color Passthrough, so the game almost seamlessly blends into your world. It’s an amazing experience. On Quest 2, you have the grayscale cameras, so of course it’s not as immersive, or at least it’s more obvious what the game is. But we were very careful to build with Quest 2 in mind because that’s what a lot of players own as a device.

PM: Exactly. So that’s what we wanted to build it for as well. But on Quest 3, people will have that much of a better experience, because the graphics are better, but also because the device itself runs a smoother experience and it really becomes part of your world. And that’s amazing.

I want to add a special thanks to all the 30+ team who worked on the project. They all add their own expertise and creativity to create the final game. From art to technical dev aspect, game design, narrative design and audio, all brought their best to create what Demeter is now: a unique MR game, the first of its kind.