Moss is a puzzle platformer VR game. Like a lot of VR games, it’s strength it in its charm, novelty and sense of presence where you are actually in the game. The story is about Quill, a mouse who journeys on to save her uncle. This is told in a storybook fashion. This feeling is further enforced when you are brought into the world for the first time and realise that the scale is perfectly suited for a storybook adventure. Thanks to that scale, everything, including Quill, is very cute.
You play as Quill and as far as her abilities goes, they’re very simple. She is able to jump, which also extends to climbing blocks and shimmying on ledges. She wields a sword used to strike enemies and that’s basically it. While the game has a lot of platforming, her jump will take a bit of getting used to. It feels inaccurate and you can easily miss ledges, requiring you to try again.
The graphics, also with the presentation of the rest of the game, makes it feel like a storybook fairy tale. The game looks great and Quill is unbelievably cute. It’s one of the best looking games for the PSVR. The unique thing here is that while you play the game using Quill like any other third-person game, you are also an entity in the game, played through first-person. You, as the player, exists in the game and Quill is aware of you and will actually interact with you. You also have the ability to interact with certain objects in the world, which is where the majority of the puzzle elements come into play.
The puzzles are simple, the ones in the early levels only require you to move blocks in order to allow Quill to pass the gaps and obstacles. Interestingly, the game opts for a passive VR experience, and it is one of the most comfortable games to play in VR thanks to that if you are easily subject to motion sickness and nausea. The camera is fixed at all times, and the screen blacks out in order to show the next area. The flipside of this is that it can feel restrictive and slower paced when compared to say, Astro Bot (although that game was released later), which has a similar set up of first- and third-person.
The combat is very simple. Quill can swing her sword into a short combo. She can dodge, which is executed through pressing two buttons at the same time. Considering the number of unused buttons, it would have been better if that was mapped to another one instead. She can take three hits before you have to repeat the section, but you can actually spend a few seconds to heal her back to full health if you find the chance. Thus, the combat ends up being quite simple and is mainly focused on recognising the enemies’ attack patterns.
So while the puzzles start off easy, they soon get more involved, with the player having to interact with the environment, moving platforms, controlling enemies and placing objects. The tracking of the controller isn’t too great. As soon as it doesn’t detect all of the light of the controller, the tracking is iffy and starts drifting. Considering other games don’t have this problem, it’s kind of annoying. This becomes more of an issue (but not a fatal one) in later levels where you need to control enemies in order to solve puzzles, and make combat easier, but you need to stretch and move around you, making it easier to get out of range of the camera and hide the light of the controller.
The final set of levels, which act as the final boss of the game, was intense thanks to its use of music and typical platformer chase sequences. It slowly builds up the tension and anticipation, and you don’t know what is going to come next, feeling both dread and excitement at the same time. However, the actual final strike against the boss was somewhat disappointing as a result, as it didn’t live up to the build up.
There is free DLC which is downloaded as a patch to the game, titled The Twilight Garden. It is not a standalone piece of DLC, rather, it is built into the story in the form of three portals that you need to find through the game. Once found, it transports you to the titular location and you have to solve various puzzles to obtain better gear. It’s a surprisingly substantial DLC, especially considering it is free, as it adds new and more inventive types of puzzles that doesn’t just recycle assets. It adds in a new combat ability that may seem overpowered and gimmicky at first glance but will come in handy throughout the main game as well.
So as if to make up for the somewhat anticlimactic final strike of the story boss, the boss of the DLC is much more typical for a platformer. It’s a full battle and while the boss reuses an enemy design, it was fun and frantic. It’s tougher than what the rest of the game was but that isn’t saying too much since the game is pretty easy on the whole. This is where the generous checkpoints come in as well, so you never feel cheated out of time if you make a mistake and die as you aren’t forced to lose a lot of progress to restart from the very beginning.
The game is definitely on the shorter side, at three to four hours long on your first playthrough. That includes the time taken to think about each puzzle, and to play through the DLC. If you do a second run, you’ll realise how quickly you can blast through each section. However, it’s not about the quantity but rather the quality and Moss delivers on that front. It’s a good valued package all in all. There are plenty of collectibles scattered through the levels though, and a chapter select to help you get to those places a bit faster.
Overall, Moss is a great VR puzzle platformer. It doesn’t use the VR gimmick to its full potential since with some minor retool, it would work find as a non-VR game. However, its strengths lies in its charming protagonist and whimsical fairy tale feel. The difficulty is just right since it is not too hard but still presents enough of a challenge. Thanks to its relatively shorter length, it never outstays its welcome while still making you feel that you’ve gotten plenty of value out of it.
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