Cloudhead Games, the studio known for pioneering several locomotion schemes during the creation of their well-received VR adventure series The Gallery, have just released a fresh demo for their latest game, The Gallery: Heart of the Emberstone (2017). The demo is a sandbox version of the Coliseum level that lets you get your hands on the game’s unique telekinetic powers before committing to the full game.
While dedicated game demos used to be the best way to find out if you wanted to take the full-priced plunge, in this late age of digital content distribution it seems not all developers commit to creating demos for their games, instead making users rely on refunds to get a taste of whatever it is they cooked up.
Cloudhead’s Heart of the Emberstone: Coliseum is now live on Steam for free, making for an easy way to dive head-first into the game’s magical powers, and step inside some of the game’s imposing architecture while you experience a no-spoilers slice of the story.
The studio says the demo was a way to “break up the monotony of the usual arcade fare in VR with a taste of a bigger adventure.”
Heart of the Emberstone is the second episode in the series after Call of the Starseed (2016). As a successor to one of the first room-scale games in existence, the second episode takes you deeper into the ’80s fiction-inspired universe and flushes out what proves to be a story as rich as the cinematic direction teased in the first. Far from being a one hit wonder, the second episode improves on the experience of the first in almost every way.
Find out why we rated Heart of the Emberstone a solid [9/10] in our review.
