System: Valve Index & HTC Vive
Price at Time Of Review: £3.99
Comfort Rating: Yellow (Mild Movement)
Genre: Adventure
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: U
Description: Archipelago is a navigable VR comic containing 65 characters and 6,787 lines of dialogue. It is intended to be a family-friendly story world, suitable for all ages. It is NOT A GAME. You are placed inside a comics world as multiple stories play out in real-time around you. Unlike other VR story experiences, you are free to move around (including flying) as the story plays out. You can choose to follow any of the characters as they go about their lives on a series of islands.
Review: The game takes place on an island with 65 different characters (and a few animals) and each of those characters has a storyline. Imagine a storybook where you could get bored of Snow White moaning about everything and go off and follow what the Dwarfs are up to, it’s just like that a storybook in which you choose the story to follow along with (or not).
Getting about is a fairly slow process, using the Oculus Remote you can walk in whatever direction you choose (including up or down, just about wherever you look) and if you want to tag-along with a storyline you can just follow along behind, choosing what you read of the story and what you are looking at. Missed a part of the story? No problem, you can simply reverse or forward the 30-minute timeline as you choose. Every character’s storyline is 30 minutes which gives the game the claim to fame that it has over 6 thousand lines of dialogue to read (no voice acting here). Each one is very different and there is even some light adult humour thrown in for good measure.
I need to have a little moan. You see, most of the untested “Gallery Apps” (A broad, less-filtered collection from VR creators.) on the Oculus Store have been Steam VR remixes and not many original concept titles. Luckily Archipelago has restored my faith in the category as a whole. It’s not just a concept idea, it’s a very good concept idea. It’s the perfect storybook for kids before they go to bed and I have been using it to read a story a night to my little boy as we follow along with a character’s adventure (me in VR, him watching the screen) We have been doing this for a week now and still no sign of running out anytime soon of storylines to follow. Graphically it won’t blow you away, but the sheer size and complexity of this game are much deserving of some respect. Truly a unique idea in a sea of many familiar ones.
