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As I mentioned on our sister site of The Geek Church, we had a very awesome trip to PAX West 2019 last week. Whenever I go to a conference, it is always a challenge to use the time wisely and play the latest and greatest games on display. Fortunately, I think I had a chance to play the best, and something that is going to be a game changer for gaming: Stormland for the Oculus.

If you are not familiar with the Oculus, it is a VR headset that is owned by none other than social media giant Facebook. I am really not certain what the heck Mr. Zuckerberg wants to do with a VR headset for all of his Facebook Friends, but Stormland demonstrated how effective it is for gaming.

If you know anything about gaming conventions, then you know that real estate on them is costly, and so the bigger companies have the biggest booths. The booth for the Oculus was quite big, and it was needed for these rooms surrounded by Plexiglas. These chambers, about 20 x 20 feet, were completely bare except for the headset and whatever was needed to play this game.

The headset was put on my head, and the two controllers were put in my hands. With my ears and eyes covered, I was practically cut off from the outside world. I found myself in a new world, and it was an alien planet that reminded me of the lush Pandora of Avatar with a little less green and blue.

Now, I have really no idea of the backstory of this game, so I had no idea what the heck my player character was doing on this alien world. Fortunately, I had a guide. There was a humanoid robot who wanted me to follow her, and this was just so I could get basic moves of the game down.

I found out later that this robot was a person in the other room who was giving instructions to me in real-time. The first thing she told me was how to use a trigger to shoot, and that meant that I held my hand in front of me and targeted things as if I was pointing a real gun. I was even able to do a quick-draw move with other guns that I found along the way. Yes, I could pick up a lot of objects along the way.

Of course, what is any game without the power of jumping? In the case of Stormland, there is a jump, and then a double jump. It took me a while to get used to the world, and I will have to say that at the time of playing, there were some setbacks. For one thing, the controller that was able shift the camera did it kind of shakily. Normally, if I’m playing a game with camera controls, the camera moves smoothly. This time, a movement to the left and right was like suddenly turning my head twenty degrees.

There was also one move that I could never master. The game requires a lot of climbing, and you can climb anything, just like in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Putting my hands in front of me shows these robotic hands that are able to grip mountains and scale them by moving them back and forth as if I was actually climbing. Granted, I didn’t feel the gravity of the situation, but just climbing was causing to work up a serious sweat.

I wish that I was able to do this one move in climbing. What you have to do is haul yourself up, and then use this rocket booster to gain a whole lot of height. I tried this so many times, and I just couldn’t do it. It reminds me of certain moves that I do in Super Mario Odyssey that really took a long time to perfect. The worst part was how I kept unintentionally turning on the menu. I must have looked like a complete crazy man as I flailed my arms.

There was one thing that was completely awesome. On the planet where Stormland takes place, there are these fog-covered areas that my player can soar over. By soar, I mean jump and then I extend my hands to get such a boost equal to the Millennium Falcon going into hyperspace. I absolutely loved the rush of this, and when I had to stop, the affect was pretty jarring.

I did notice that there were a few times where someone had to tell me to take a few steps back. I even had this weird grid of a net that appeared in the game that would show up if I stepped outside the gaming zone.

I had this other problem where I had to pick up canisters and open them. It was a weird method of interaction, and I was able to do it.

The rest of my time was spent shooting robot bad guys and evading plants that wanted to kill you for some reason. Eventually, I was told to stop, and when the headset was taken off, I felt like I was transported into another world. It was like Neo when he was disconnected from the Matrix, or that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Inner Light” where Captain Picard had his mind transported into another person on another world and then back into his regular captain self.

In short, this could be my new addiction. One thing about Virtual Reality is that it seems to have highs and lows, but it has never really taken off. Part of it is how expensive it is to buy into it, as even the PlayStation VR costs a pretty penny, not even including the PlayStation system. Also, you need a house with some space to do this, and we just aren’t at Ready Player One levels as yet.

So, what was I doing on an alien planet? Why are there people shooting at me? Yeah, I still don’t know what the game is all about. I feel that it is about a robot soldier who discovers humanity in the midst of some type of war, maybe. Normally, I put the preview video first, but I wanted to speculate on what this game is really about. This is not going to be the last time I report on this, and I want to play it ASAP.