Red Matter (2018), the sci-fi puzzle-adventure from Vertical Robot, is slated to launch on Oculus Quest on August 15th.
Set in fictional universe featuring two old Cold War rivalries—the NATO-esque Atlantic Union and the very Soviet-sounding Volgravians—Red Matter puts you in the space boots of Agent Epsilon, an Atlantic Union astronaut. Traveling to an abandoned Volgravian base on one of Saturn’s moons to investigate a top secret Volgravian research project, you unravel a tale that’s much larger than your handlers led you to believe.
As a sort of retrofuture adventure, it makes for a fun mix of 70s and 80s era tech, like old CRT monitors and analogue switchboards, and places a patently Soviet style of brutalist architecture into the far reaches of the Solar System, answering the question: What if the Space Race never stopped?
While Vertical Robot was able to squeeze in some pretty impressive visuals into the PC VR version (developed in Unreal Engine), the Quest version of the game promises to retain fair degree of the original’s visual finesse, something the studio says was done by using a modified version of Unreal’s mobile VR shaders.
Some of the mobile-specific optimizations (detailed in the video below) include parallax corrected reflections, multiple lightpoints, improved glass, raytraced line reflections, improved fog & sun reflections, and glass refraction.
In the meantime, check out why we gave Red Matter a solid [8.3/10] in our full review when it launched on Rift last year. The game has since been released on Steam with support for Rift, Vive, Index and Windows VR headsets.