Immersive, Engaging, Ambitious, but Unfinished
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TLDR 2-9-2025:
This game currently serves as a wonderful prototype with a lot of potential. But it is going to need more polish and more content before I could recommend it to others. That said, I won’t be refunding the game because I want to support the developer’s mission and wish them the best. I will happily update this review if/when updates come down the pipeline. Cheers!
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First off, I want to say that I appreciate what the developers / creators of this experience are going for. This is a wonderful creation with a lot of potential to wow and immerse users, as well as share biblical truth.
I’m a believer, and I stumbled upon this project while sitting in church a few Sundays ago. I have extensive experience developing VR titles with Unity Engine because of my job, and I was brainstorming a new personal VR project. I thought, “wouldn’t it be neat to see Noah’s Ark in VR and share the story in an immersive way?” So, like all my prototypes, I did a google search to see if any projects like that already existed, which led me to this release. I was so excited to see what this team had put together. I say all this to preface my review, acknowledging how challenging it is to develop and optimize VR games and applications. And because I believe this is a special project that I want to succeed, I want my following statements to be received as constructive criticism, and not aimless complaints.
The Review:
Level Design / Navigation
o Good. I like the progression of the story structured in three distinct scenes, and the narration compliments the path that users take. I am suspicious that the narration is done by an AI tool, which I hope is not the case, but I don’t know that for certain. (Please use real narrators! Some from church’s might even volunteer!) I like that there is some interaction beyond simply walking, like feeding animals aboard the ark and the wood chopping mini-game in the start / hub scene. I do think a bit more visual feedback is needed to help the player stay on the right at times, such as toggleable way points, floor markings, or breadcrumbs. I was also unable to travel back to the hub / start scene unless I completed the whole cycle. Also, I didn’t see a rainbow at the end! Not sure if this is a bug on my end, or if this content has yet to be added.
Gameplay / User Experience
o Ok. Options for both teleport and continuous locomotion are great to see, but I don’t think I agree with the control mappings. I would swap continuous to the left hand and teleport to the right based on intuition, and I would lower the snap rotation amount to 30 or 45 degrees. Some of this comes down to personal preference, so it would be nice if the app at least supported a custom mapping / controls menu. There are a bunch of other quality of life and user feedback items I might recommend adding, but I’ll comment on this in the content section.
Graphics / Performance
o Between poor and ok. I tested this app with both my PlayStation VR2 and my Meta Quest 2 in PCVR mode with a link cable. I have a gaming desktop that more than meets the recommended specs: AMD Ryzen 7 9700x, Nvidia RTX 4070 12GB VRAM, 32GB DDR5 RAM, Samsung 2TB 990 Pro NvME SSD. The app ran ok in most scenes at native resolution on my Quest 2 but struggled to meet acceptable performance on my PSVR2. Lowering the SteamVR setting a bit I was able to achieve a playable experience, but the framerate was all over the place. The worst scene has to be the first main one where you board the ark. In this scene, regardless of what headset or settings I used, I regularly experienced 40fps or lower, which in VR often triggers simulation / motion sickness. I understand that nailing performance optimization is one of the most difficult parts of VR development, but it is arguably more important to do it here than non-VR apps because of sim sickness. I would like to see this improved by any means before I show this app to my friends and family. I would recommend scaling back geometry, terrain, textures, and asset numbers a bit until they can be optimized individually. Leverage back-faced culling, level of detail models, simple skyboxes, and “cardboard” static props to maintain detail without losing so much performance. The lighting in all scenes was too intense, resulting in scene details being washed out. The textures look ok but are inconsistent. Some assets like wood fences look good / almost realistic, but terrain and most animal models look lower quality.
Content
o Ok. As I stated up top, I like where this app is headed, but don’t feel it has enough content and polish to be considered complete. I would have much more understanding here if the game were being sold under Steam’s early access program. As it stands, $18 USD is not highway robbery compared to other VR titles, but without the promise of future updates the app is a hard sell in its current state. The game feels like a working prototype, not a finished release. UI assets seem like placeholders and some don’t even work. I had a white box appear at the end of the final scene, but it was blank. Some 3D models like animals don’t animate or make sound, interactions are missing quality of life features like crouching, contain grip and physics bugs, and seem feature / design incomplete. It would also be more immersive if particle effects were used when feeding the animals, looking outside the ark and other areas. Many of these things could be fixed, updated, or added, but this is a review of the current state.
Conclusion
o This game currently serves as a wonderful prototype with a lot of potential. But it is going to need more polish and more content before I could recommend it to others. That said, I won’t be refunding the game because I want to support the developer’s mission and wish them the best. I will happily update this review if/when updates come down the pipeline. Cheers!
