Star Student: Owlchemy’s Super-Powered School Sim “Cosmonious High” is Out Now on Quest 2
Jocks and nerds, cheerleaders and band kids, class clowns and people who can shoot fire out of their hands. No matter what high school archetype you identify with, there’s a place for you at Cosmonious High.
…As long as you’re an alien. Almost forgot that part.
Cosmonious High is the latest game from Owlchemy Labs, developer of the acclaimed (and extremely funny) robot-museums, Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator. Robots are so 2019 though. This time you’re a Prismi, an alien who can control water, fire, wind, crystals, and more. Take classes, make friends, and try not to get involved in any high school drama. Easier said than done, right?
Pick up Cosmonious High today on Quest 2—if you’re ready to learn what “Chemosophy” is, of course. And in the meantime, we sat down with Andrew Eiche, Owlchemy’s COOwl (Chief Operating Owl) and Cable Slinger, to talk about departing from the so-called Simulator-Verse, making bouncy ice cubes, and how VR has changed since the release of Job Simulator in 2016. Read on for more details!
Cosmonious High is an alien adventure game where players take the role of a Prismi, a rare alien species that can adapt to any situation, who crash lands into their first day of high school. The school is troubled by mysterious malfunctions and chaos. As a Prismi, players will unlock a variety of alien powers to restore Cosmonious High to its former glory while also taking classes and making friends with their quirky classmates.
Cosmonious High is the biggest world Owlchemy Labs has ever built. We’ve filled the school’s halls with living characters and vibrant visuals for players to enjoy.
The game features eight unique powers that can be combined to create more ways to interact with the world. We didn’t announce all of the powers, we want players to experience them for the first time in-game rather than a trailer. There’s some cool ones that will surprise you and we encourage folks to explore Cosmonious High to unlock them all.
Each power in Cosmonious High helps you solve puzzles or complete assignments, but also allow you to just have fun and be creative. For instance, the Water power allows you to put out fires, but it can also be used in Chemosophy to create new fluids that affect the environment in different ways. Using the Water and Ice powers together makes ice cubes. Wind power creates a cyclone of air that can be mixed with fire to create powerful fire balls. Crystal power is used to create sculptures but also as a means to connect broken wires around the school. Powers can also affect the characters in the game, you can see this in our Powers Reveal Trailer where we created a giant Fren head! The possibilities are endless.
Cosmonious High has a storyline to follow, but that doesn’t mean it is a linear game. There’s a lot of systems at work that make the world come alive and we encourage freeform experimentation. Each classroom has tons of activities, as well as extra credits outside of the main story. Everything comes together to create a game that has high replay value since different interactions with the world will lead to different results.
We knew from the start we wanted to develop a new IP. We love the Simulator-Verse, and after 4 years of working in it we were looking to do something a little different. When we first developed Job Simulator we made a ton of different types of jobs. We realized early on that the best Jobs were the ones that people knew well, like the convenience store clerk! One of the jobs that came very close to launching was Teacher. The job was very fun and we saw tons of potential with it, but it didn’t make the cut due to time.
As we were thinking about what would eventually become Cosmonious High, we started to coalesce around the idea of Aliens in School. This was an opportunity to dig further into school and really expand beyond what a “job” could be in a game. Setting it in an alien high school allowed us to inject our humor, art style, and not be bound by the reality of earth. We could make proxies for science, art, and gym while still having our own unique in-universe take on these familiar classes.
Without getting too deep into details, it’s possible to read your own mind. It definitely takes some pondering to understand how to capture that, but it’s there!
There’s a lot of systems at work that come together to create unique situations. Devin, our CEOwl, was testing something a couple weeks ago and created edible bouncy ice cubes that the blebs (cute little alien creatures that change if you interact with them) thought were food. Cosmonious High has a lot of systems that create emergent gameplay experiences—even our own team is still finding new ways the world will interact with players!
We could write a textbook on everything we’ve learned over the years!
VR development has definitely changed since we started. The Quest is a device we imagined would be a decade in the future, but we have it now! Moving from PC-focused development to standalone has been both great and challenging. In 2015, we were worried about external cameras and if you were using 180- or 360-degree tracking. Now we get to focus more on the actual experience than working around the hardware.
Cosmonious High is a big step from what we did in Vacation Simulator! We’ve really opened up the space players can explore. We have also created highly interactive characters that required a variety of systems to ensure they felt real in VR. We did things with our fluid systems that we had previously said were impossible!
We also focused deeply on world building and on creating something fully-realized. It feels great to be in the school. We talk about it like it's a real place and chat about the characters as if we know them personally.
We have some really cool stuff in store, but aren’t quite ready to talk about it yet. We’re still just as committed as ever to VR though, and are ready to push the next set of boundaries!
Ready to head back to school? Pick up Cosmonious High on Quest 2 today!
