‘Demeter’ is an Intriguing MR Platformer for Quest That Actually Reacts to Your Room

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Meta announced a new mixed reality platformer for Quest called Demeter that uses your furniture and walls so you can solve puzzles and challenges, tasking you to guide a pint-size hero get back to her world.

Developed by Novelab and published by Meta, Demeter is slated to launch on Quest 2/3/Pro next month, giving you not only an intimate background for the game’s narrative to unfold—it is after all a mixed reality game—but also bringing along with it procedurally generated environments that adapt to your room. Many VR games with MR modes more often than not only allow for passthrough views, which doesn’t necessarily use your physical environment to the fullest.

Novelab says this allows you to tackle “levels and challenges in real time that adapt to the environment you are in,” letting you guide the tiny protagonist Atalante to climb, jump, fly and run using your walls and furniture as you explore the game’s narrative.

Image courtesy Novelab, Meta

“For the first time in history, humans will be able to interact and play with a miniature fantasy world that adapts and reacts to their actual physical environment,” the studio says on the game’s website. “Everyone’s experience will be different: because my home layout is not the same as my neighbor’s, I will not play the same game as them.”

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You may recognize the name Novelab from their work on a host of award-winning XR narrative projects, including Notes On Blindness, SPHERES, and On the Morning You Wake. Since 2021 the studio has been developing original games and IPs for VR, AR and other new media.

Demeter is set to launch on the Quest Store on January 25th, 2024—priced at $20. There’s currently a 10% off pre-order deal, bringing the game to $18.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • kakek

    Making quest 3 only titles would mean effectively killing the quest 2.
    Wich is a bit of a problem for a 3 years old videogame device. No other gaming plateform gets outdated that fast. Console have a life cycle more than twice that long. Even GPU don’t refresh every 3 years.

    Phones do. But then the game remain compatible with older phones.

    At a time when VR is still strugling to reach a wider audience, that seems a pretty bad idea.

    Beside, I think you overstimate the power gap between XR2.1 and XR2.2, the same way people overestimated the difference between Q2 and Q1.
    Basically any game that ran on a Q2 at 90HZ and full resolution could run on a Q1 at 72HZ with slightly lower graphics. The first Q2 exclusive ( RE4 ) was effectively “ported” to Q1 by hackers without any real problem.
    And any game that could run on a Q3 at 90HZ would run at 72 HZ on a Q2. See Assassin’s creed : it’s still using ASW on both headset. If the Q3 had the power to make do without , they would have.
    The only leeway the devs really have for better game is making games at bare minimum resolution and framerate on the Q3.

    • philingreat

      and the PSVR2, apart from only offering exclusives for PSVR2, is not even downward compatible, you can’t even play PSVR1 games

  • Ardra Diva

    Drop Dead: The Cabin’s AR mode, “Home Invasion” is jawdropping and showed me that AR is gonna be huge. Had the same feeling as the first time i saw VR.