684 - Moss

VR is a strange beast. If you are into playing video games and you are looking for an immersive experience, you will probably want to try VR. There you will find the most immersive, transporting experiences. Games that will place you inside their world and press your own out to the margins. The best VR games make you feel like you are some place else.

But that’s usually where they end.

You might feel like you are in a different place, inside a particular games world. The sense of immersion can make playing a game more active. Standing and using your whole body can boost your heart rate and trigger feelings that you just won’t get from playing a game on a screen. Some games can even give you a pretty good workout.

There is an active element to video games that hits differently than watching passive entertainment. There is all the drama on screen, of course, but there is also this sense that you still exist. You are part of this piece of entertainment. Probably the most important part. The player is not the audience of a video game. You are the motivation. The impulse. You make the game go. Press Start is an imperative of the medium.

VR games take this to an extreme. Not only are you, as the player, the driving force for a video game experience, in VR you are literally the center of the world. When you put on a headset and sync up controllers, you become the focal point of whatever world you are entering. In a very real sense, the world revolves around you.

Most VR games take that as a given, and then fully fail to acknowledge it. It is the very rare game that engages you so fully that you forget that you are standing in an empty space with a set of heavy screens strapped to your head and speakers over your ears. Extreme immersion is possible, but there is an extremely steep hill to climb before you get there.

Moss, at its core, is a capacity action game. An adventure game with a main character that you direct with control sticks and button inputs. You make Quill, a small mouse adventurer, run around levels, jump up ledges, and battle enemies. The same sort of things that you have done in countless character action platformer games. Think Mario, Spyro, Sonic, Ratchet and Clank. If you have played any video games you have been here before.

Moss could have been a game that was only ever played on a regular screen. It could have been like any other character action game. Beautiful to look at with a fun diorama aesthetic and snappy intuitive control. Probably not a standout in the genre, but certainly a solid entry.

Moss is a VR game.

Moss puts you in the game. Not you, as in you control a character as a player. You. The embodied you. You exist in the same space as the action that Quill is engaging in. You can see yourself reflected in pond water and you can interact with the world directly. Sure, you appear as a masked god-like figure in the world, but it is you. And Quill can see you too.

Instantly this changes how you play this game. Moss is not a game where you control a character. Moss is a partnership. You and Quill are in this together. You move objects and platforms around so that she can more easily reach them. You stun enemies so that she can dispatch them. You interact with puzzles so that she can pass through locked doors and evade traps. Quill will wave at you and communicate with your through gestures and sign language. You can give each other a high five.

Through this simple change of context, Quill becomes real. The world becomes real. Because you are real.

Rather than putting you in control as the master of this world, in Moss you become part of the world. You are welcomed into it, and you get to share it. Climbing the hill to create immersion becomes effortless. This isn’t a world made for you, this is a world that you can step into. That you want to step into.

Quill is one of the best game protagonists that far too few players have gotten the chance to meet, but that doesn’t stop Moss from being one of the Best Games.