
bramblevertigen19 days ago
A viable alternative to psychedelics.Look. This is a great game. An innovative, lysergic, highly immersive physics playground puzzler with a sinister undercurrent to it that recreates the feeling of the existential creepiness of the time travel in films like "12 monkeys" with style, wit and despite the limitations of the hardware, pretty impressive results. Somewhat maddeningly, though understandably, Wanderer is also a Quest 2 game with no graphics options to optimise for 3/3s. With that said, I wonder how well the Quest 2 runs this because my 3 seems to struggle a little with it at times. However, the environments are pretty and detailed, some of the visual direction is downright inspired and the game oozes atmosphere. It's Bonelab vs Myst via Quantum leap with a deeply involving narrative and plenty of thoughtful visual and audio touches, detailed physics (The bunny doll is downright magical: The detail and rag-doll physics on the little fella are probably the best I've seen on the Quest 3) and tonnes of interactivity. Now as others have mentioned, the melee combat is kind of bad, but the gunplay is a bit better. Combat is not the game's strong point, but it does serve to break up the puzzles and story that is the meat of the experience and add to the sense of "journey" that the game does so well. There's a lot of good stuff here. Slightly marred by performance problems, but genuinely cool, different and most of all, a great place to escape to with a wonderful sense of mystery and so far, some excellent puzzles to boot. You know what? I was going to drop a star for performance and combat, but... for the bunny doll and and because it may not be perfect, but it is SPECIAL, I'm going to take it as read that somebody who loves this game as much as it's creators obviously do, with such obvious skill and talent, are probably already working on fixes. So it gets a 5 on parole, as it were. Disregarding that, though, it's still more than worth playing in it's current form and does deserve an audience.