The Tale of Onogoro originally came out on March 17th, 2022 and is currently available on pretty much every VR gaming platforms out there, which includes Meta Quest, Steam, PSVR2 and Pico. I've been playing the Steam version on my end. The game has been developed by Amata, which are also known for making The Last Labyrinth. I did not get a chance to play that one yet, but I did pre-order a physical copy of it on PS5 and looking forward to jump in it! The latest we've heard about the devs is that they've published a flat screen deck building roguelike game called "The World According to Girl". But that doesn't mean that they're done with VR, since later after the release, we've heard some news about the studio participating in a roundtable with the Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. So keep an eye out! Alright, let's look into the game now.
The story of Tale of Onogoro starts when Haru, the shrine maiden of her world, attempts to stop Masutake from obtaining the power of the total nexus to become an all mighty powerful being. Sadly, Masutake brutally decapitated a few body parts of the girl and he started to fun his way through the shrine. Meanwhile, Haru was able to synthetize some body parts with steam technology to regain her form, but she's been chained up by a sealed stone and is currently unable to move at her own will. Coincidently, every 70-some years, multiple universe aligns between each other, and Haru was able to summon you as a spirit to help her on her journey. And that's how the story starts! I know that the beginning is a lot to take in, but everything makes a lot more sense as the story progress and bits and pieces are explained more in detail throughout the campaign. It's honestly a very well crafted one and they've managed to keep me interested for the whole adventure.
Gameplay wise, the best way to describe it is that it's a puzzle adventure type of game. Your goal is to progress through the levels by accomplishing whatever is necessary to unlock the next path. You have 2 interesting guns that you can use to help you through your path. There are a few things that you can do with it. The first thing is, since Haru is trapped with the stone, you need to move her around with you. It never feels like an annoying thing to do because you need her for most of the puzzles. She has an ability where if you place her on the right spot, she can do a prayer to do certain things like opening a fence, making a mechanism move a stone that blocks the path, and activating very useful things that are needed. Your guns can also absorb elements such as Fire, wind, and earth. When you absorb them, you can then shoot them at certain mechanism to unlock and activate other things. There are also enemies in the game that you can shoot at. To defeat them, they need to be shot with the correct element. The enemies can be very dangerous because you have a health bar that you share with the shrine maiden, so you always have to make sure that she's not in a spot that enemies can see her, or else she'll definitely aggro the enemies.
If your health is low, you don't need to worry! Because you can recover your health by holding both your hands with Haru, and you'll heal at a medium pace.
So, with all of this explained, the difficulty of the puzzles are not bad at all! There were maybe a few parts where I had to stop and think a little more, but never in a situation where I had to pull my hair out.
I like the way that the progression is structured. Every time you finish a section, you are then presented your score, along with a total of 3 stars that represents how fast you've completed the level. Getting 3 stars is actually pretty challenging! I shamelly didn't receive any stars in most of the levels. But that's ok because it gives a reason to replay these levels to achieve a better score, so it's a game that you can jump back in for good reasons after finishing it. You can also unlock new cosmetics for Haru by accomplishing certain tasks in the game. Every level also has a total of 2 secret collectibles that you can shoot with your gun, and most of them are not easy to find! I was semi-looking for them, but still missed so many.
The game also have many boss fights! And they're all super fun and unique. I love it because you kind of have to think what you need to do defeat them. It feels like the type of boss you'd find in an old school 3D platformer like Mario or Sonic. I liked that all the levels of all of the bosses felt very different. It shows that the creators of the game had in mind that they didn't want to repeat too many things to make you bored. I had fun the whole time. Although there is a part at around the end where there was a little bit of filler. I'd say for the last part of the game, there was about 40 minutes to 1 hour of things that you had to redo that you did previously in your adventure. It didn't bother me much though because I did have some fun while doing it for the first time, so I kind of still enjoyed it during the second time. And it is a game that took me more than 8 hours to complete, so having 40 minutes of filler in a big adventure like this, it wasn't bad at all.
So the story unfolds as you progress through these levels, there is a toooonn of conversations that you get with Haru, and as it progress, you just keep learning more and more about what's happening, and there are some cool emotional moments in the game. Even though most cutscenes happens with just conversing with Haru, I still find that they did an excellent job and just unveiling the right amount of stuff to keep it interesting. It's something that I was scared about, but it was really delivered well. But if you're a person that gets bored with conversations in VR, you do have the ability to skip the scenes if you want.
