‘Wall Town Wonders’ Review – Maybe a Little Too Casual for Today’s Mixed Reality

Wall Town Wonders feels like a casual game from the future, when all-day AR glasses are the norm, and you can manage your growing town of tiny Sim-like inhabitants as they fly around your room in hot air balloons and live out their tiny lives as you live out yours. While visually captivating, the depth of gameplay isn’t enough to keep my attention for long, raising the question whether the genre is simply too early for the current generation of XR headsets.

Wall Town Wonders Details:

Publisher: Cyborn
Available On: Quest 3/3S
Reviewed On: Quest 3
Release Date: November 21st, 2024
Price: $20

Gameplay

As you’d expect from a casual game, difficulty is very low with Wall Town Wonders, which comes part and parcel with the relaxing vibe it wants to create. Most of the early fun is in popping your head into the various buildings to see villagers go about their tasks, like observing a tiny chef busily prepare a pizza, or following two villagers zipping around on a bi-plane in your living room.

After ramping past the tutorial, which takes about an hour, I found that a good portion of Wall Town Wonders centers around its various mini-games, which are doled out when you unlock new structures. You’ll do things like defend a vertical farm from skittering bugs that you have to shoot with a mini-crossbow mounted to your wrist, fish at the pond on your floor, and guide airplanes around your room with your hand movements.

A bulk of the time though you’ll be waiting for your villagers to dispense various resources, such as wood, money, and food, which are automatically produced by your inhabitants. The gameplay loop is heavily centered around filling out your basic building types and upgrade existing structures, making for over 100 buildings to browse through. You can also repaint and reposition buildings to your liking, letting you design a unique setup around you. The end result is a visually impressive collection of neat set pieces that integrate dynamically, which really brings your room to life with the bustle of activity.

At the same time, you wouldn’t be off base saying the game “plays itself”, as villagers have a level of autonomy in completing their tasks, letting you choose when to engage, or simply watch your new vertical villagers mill about like fish in a tank, or ants in one of those plastic ant farms. You can interact with villagers, help them mine, farm, and explore your room as you build new structures, although these are typically presented as mini-games, take it or leave it.

It didn’t take long though for my attention to wane, and wish I could just ignore the town and get back to something more engaging while their activity swirls around me—which makes me hesitant to pop back in beyond the three hours I played over the course of a few sessions. The mini-games are meant to be the engaging bits during these resource wait times, but I felt they were little more than random chores to complete.

Immersion

I’ve always loved virtual dioramas; they can feel so lifelike because they shrink the level of detail, making everything feel more dense and vibrant. The cozy like little European village motifs sprung to life on your walls is a recipe for “awww”.

For all the advancements in virtual desktops and XR productivity environments, I’m not writing this review in-headset. Like you, I typically only have a few hours at the end of the day to pop into my favorite games and social apps—but hardly ever during work unless, you know, I’m reviewing something.

I can imagine a near future when display resolutions are high enough so I can type as comfortably as I do on a monitor, and all-day comfort lets me forget I’m even wearing a headset—key limiters for these types of casual ‘pick-up, put-down’ games.

I would love to play for a few minutes, and go back to something else, like you might on your smartphone, but for now Wall Town Wonders feels like it wants us to forget these very real XR hardware bottlenecks, as its random collection of mini-games and meditative fish tank vibe feels just a little too casual for dedicated play sessions in Quest.

I’m not saying you won’t click with Wall Town Wonders. Players of games like The Sims or Townscaper will take my experience above and suggest I’m the problem, not the chill and stupidly charming Wall Town Wonders. Fair enough!

Objectively though, Wall Town Wonders relies too heavily on point-and-click laser pointers for interactions, giving you a few precious moments to pick up villagers for one-off exploration missions, or automatically spawn gadgets from your wrist to do things like shoot arrows at bugs, or water plants with a watering gun.

It also tries to prioritize hand-tracking input from the start, although all of these precise point-and-click interactions made me default back to controllers for ease of use. Its laser pointer-centric UI does make it ‘easier’ to interact with your town from afar, but it also feels like a missed opportunity to create more immersive gadgets than the random assortment of single-use gadgets it gives you during mini-games.

Comfort

The sheer number of buildings available forces you on your feet, tasking you to constantly peruse all of the open wall space available in your room. Although you could play seated, you’ll more than likely be wandering around.

While you can keep most buildings at head-height for ease of use, there are a number of ground-facing activities, which can be straining on the neck if you’re particularly sensitive. That said, Wall Town Wonder’s key innovation is putting the village at a more comfortable position on your walls, which feels so much better than leaning over a tiny map, or having to constantly reposition the virtual world for a better look. I would love to see more town sims take this approach in XR in the future.