The Journey

[h1]The Journey VR is a poorly executed VR scifi experience.[/h1] This is more an experience than a game, like most VR titles right now. It has more than its fair share of technical issues. It's also not necessarily a bad experience, though. It can be interesting and worth your time, but I cannot recommend it at its base price. Read on for more about my experience with this experience... heh. On the upside, the game's concept is interesting. It even starts as a nice story-telling experience - once you get past the main menu - and it is simply an interesting backstory you want to learn more about. You are given a vague backstory about aliens wanting to study a human's biology to avoid meeting the same fate as the human race. It's a bit of a farfetched premise, but it could be fairly believable with a little more explanation. Unfortunately, you probably won't get much further into the game than the initial lab environment due to awkward controls and headache-inducing environment design. For starters, when you get close to the panel in the first room, it shuts down and everything goes dark. The game tends to go pitch black very often, and it's hard to tell if it's frozen or just taking its time to progress the story. For example, I waited 20 seconds in pure darkness, listening to a voice ramble about stuff I already knew, wondering if the game's visuals broke. I looked at the PC monitor to be sure it was supposed to be a blank screen. When a scene is loading, you are sent back to the SteamVR environment, which ruins the immersion just a bit, and the waiting times are a bit long (though not as long as The Lab). The main menu UI is hard to target due to not having a UI laser pointer, something almost every other VR game has implemented and something I consider to be standard. This confused and frustrated my spouse, who was the first to try the game out. Worse yet, the main menu is its own scene that can be very easily and very accidentally reloaded in the middle of the game, losing your progress. I'm not sure why it was implemented this way, but when I simply wanted to pause the game and see if there were locomotion options (there weren't), I sent it back to the main menu. This caused me to have to restart the story... though that wasn't really much of a setback. [h1]Minor annoyance alert! Chair model is poorly implemented.[/h1] What really ruins it for me is the fact that the chair never lines up its height to the ground level of my SteamVR calibration... which means I sit inside the middle of the chair and everything seems taller than me. It's solved by standing up, but I'm given a chair, so I feel like I'm supposed to sit down. Once you're in the human body, navigation becomes your biggest problem. I couldn't even figure out how to get down the throat. Nothing seemed to do anything to the red orbs which were all over the body's insides. I just kept trying controls until I ran out of options, which didn't take long. Overall, the experience seems half-assed to me. It wasn't given the right amount of love. For $10, I expected more, much more. Only buy this if it's discounted, and even then, be prepared to want a refund.

On the upside, the idea is pretty great, and its fun and interesting to float around while clicking on nodes to learn about specific functions of the human body. It definitely gave me pleasant flackbacks of watching the movie "Inner Space" as a kid. On the downside, the controls are hard to get used to, and certain scenes are hard to see what is going on, or where you are going because its so dark. Its hard to understand where the perimiter of your ship is, so you end up hitting the wall a lot (which causes your ship to spin around for the most part, which sometimes leaves you confused as to where you are because its so dark) and it runs pretty bad on low on my GTX 980 in certain places (I run almost every other VR app on medium/high settings [I have over 70 of them] very well without hitching or stuttering, but this one seems to do it in places I cant understand, because there doesn't seem to be too many things it needs to render. I haven't yet made it too far into the game because the mechanics were too frustrating to continue playing. Needs some kinks ironed out still, but I'm sure they'll get there eventually. I'll keep checking back in with the game since I bought it over the course of time and I will edit my review as necessary. 5.5/10 - Just good enough to earn a positive review, but not good enough to warrant it being anything too special or memorable. ***2018 UPDATE*** It appears they've stopped working on this game in 2017. No updates for a very long time.

A great game! So i played it for a bit and i think its a great experience wich lets you study our body as you go. The leves are well designed and while you explore the human body and learn new things you can have fun with toying with the mechanics but the most imprtant thing this game was not made by some big company no it was my made by small studio and this is their first game so from my point of view i think this is pretty impressive what they made. Until now i didn't have any problems with the game (the controls are a bit strange at the begining but after a bit you will get used to them) All in all this is an amazing game and i hope this guys will bring more amazing content to steam. Keep up the good work ! 10/10

The Journey is absolutely fantastic. I've been playing this game with my HTC Vive and the immersion in the spaceship is inimaginable! Great work guys! For those who have been playing this game for 10 minutes playing where Brainly is and where the lab is, you forgot to play further! Vive Controller keys are written in the spaceship so, it's cool! I m now in the small circulation zone blocked for the moment. Probably it's a key or something that I didn't try. I will play it soon! I rate it 10/10!

Can't really say anything positive except for maybe the current low price of 0,99 EUR? But even then, I feel like this is just a waste of time. The in-game menu is so bad, low-res textures of body, terrible controls when flying the ship, weird industrial textures in ship, lousy text-to-speech, annoying sounds, .... It would take ages to correct all this.

Who got the stupid idea to say “let’s develop a game in which the ship spin wild around the moment you touch the walls”? Also there is no teleport option in the entrance room, without the big cockpit later its only touchpad movement and I can still not handle it fully. The menu is crazy with the falling and jumping on the ball. The start of the game is confusion till you sit in the ship. Then it is bad. Every touch of the walls spins your ship and without an indicator you fly back. The Quiz on the end is fixed in space (first I thought it’s a mirrored text and I am on the wrong side. There are so many bad decision and I wonder why. Feels like no one ever tested it in VR or knows game design and or education. A quiz in the middle of the exploration kills all the fun in the education. A good education game takes you by the hand to bring you into it, than it helps you to find your points of interest and provides information. Here the information’s are punched into your face with a long text. Show don’t tell is the point. I hope future education games will make it better. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUsejpujkX4

It's a cool immersive game that also teaches you anatomy. I really like this game's view on the educational field. I appreciate that the information is presented in an engaging atmosphere and it truly makes you learn something or else you cannot pass to the next level. The controls are a bit weird, but you get used to them. And I also read that they'll update it soon. I can't wait to see what they'll create next. 10/10

feels buggy and wierd

I would not recommend this with its current control method. The controls feel alien and backwards, they are not as intuitive as ones i'm used to in other VR games. The contols are so bad I got stuck in the back of the throat within the first 10 mins. I will be seeking a refund.

[h1] Experienced on the Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers [/h1] I actually spent .99 cents USD on this a while back on July 2017. I finally got around to playing this. Was it worth it? Nope, I would have been better never playing this game and leaving it in my backlog. I would have been better never having spent these .99 cents. C'est la vie. This is a great concept game, with very bad execution. As many people mention in the reviews, the controls are horrible and indeed they are. I questioned my sanity several times. Where am I going? Is my ship moving? Should I keep going? What am I doing? The answer to all those questions is losing my sanity. This may be an educational game about the human body, but it's really an educational game on patience. How much are you willing to put up with to learn some tidbits about the human body. It may very well be a cleverly disguised psychological experiment. How far will the rat go to get this promise of a cheese in the face of many reasons to quit? A true test of the Sunken Costs Fallacy. [i]You come in through the mouth and hopefully leave in the butt hole if you're lucky. And I saw things, things that shouldn't be seen. Yes, turds. Talk about PTSD. Neil Armstrong may have gone to the moon and risked life and limb for human discovery, but I saw things that no man should see in VR.[/i] Rate 3/10.