Earlier this year, we became official backers for CloudHead Games’ virtual-reality adventure The Gallery: Six Elements on Kickstarter. The team have been working hard on their first title and now there’s some exciting news: players can get a glimpse of the beautiful-looking Airworld in a demo.
In The Gallery, players take on the role of an urban explorer who stumbles across a path towards an ancient network of tunnels while spelunking in a modern-day sewer system. These lead to the Gallery, which contains six ancient paintings within individual display chambers, and you must physically enter each painted world to find sacred keys in order to escape. But beware – you aren’t alone.
Although the premise is somewhat different, CloudHead Games’ project is reminiscent of Cyan’s classic adventure Myst in that it tries to capture the same sense of place and atmosphere. Each of the paintings mentioned above represents a core element of life – Air, Fire, Water, Earth, Love and Death – and their individual realities have their own unique rules. This is very similar to Myst’s ‘Ages’ – Selenitic, Stoneship, Mechanical and Channelwood – and the themes will influence the setting and puzzles contained within each world.
The Gallery: Six Elements is being designed for the Oculus Rift from the ground up.
What makes this title different is the fact that it’s being designed for the Oculus Rift from the ground up to take full advantage of the unique opportunities that virtual reality (VR) can provide. CloudHead Games was an early contributor to Oculus VR’s campaign on Kickstarter and invested in two developer kits with the intension of building a game specifically for the device. Though it will be perfectly playable with a standard mouse and keyboard, the developer is including support for the Razer Hydra motion controller to further enhance players’ immersion within their world.
In an announcement earlier this week, it was revealed that Oculus Share is a new platform that lets users self-publish, discover, download and play VR games. Oculus VR say on their blog: “Experimentation, iteration, and actual playtesting are at the heart of pushing VR forward. One of the main goals in building Share was to help developers on all these fronts by creating a centralized community portal for Oculus content. And while it’s simply a sharing service today, over the coming months we’ll work toward making Share an incredible marketplace for Oculus-ready games, experiences, and applications.”
So now The Gallery and Oculus Share have come together with CloudHead Games being invited to submit a demo for launch day. The team have recently been working on the Exploration School, intended to be a ‘small, pre-alpha look at their title; but as this is strictly for backers only, they had to come up with something different for their submission. They’ve succeed in providing players with a small but engaging glimpse of where they’ll be taking us through The Gallery in their Airworld demo.
The team are also continuing their funding drive so, if you missed the Kickstarter back in April but want to get involved, take a look at their website to make a pledge via IgnitionDeck. They’ve explained the reasons behind this: “Being such early innovators in the VR gaming market came with it a price. The fact that our Kickstarter campaign raised as much as it did prior to the Oculus developer kits reaching people is frankly a small miracle! And while that early support have us the seed money to start this project we know we can reach a much broader audience now that VR is in the mainstream… We’ve been working extremely hard to make this a standout experience for everyone and with your help it’s only going to get better!”
We can’t wait to pay The Gallery a visit.
It’s going to be a while before we can bring you a review of the full version of The Gallery: Six Elements, but what we’ve seen so far from CloudHead Games looks absolutely amazing and we can’t wait to pay the Gallery a visit. The Airworld demo is available for download from Oculus Share now, and if you like what you see you can show your support by giving the game a thumbs-up on Steam Greenlight.
