GearVR: Hidden Temple VR Adventure Review

Virtual Reality has the ability to make formerly unappealing games and genres extraordinarily compelling.

Now, that's not a knock on Hidden Temple VR Adventure, it's just an observation that popped up a few times while playing this game.  A few other thoughts popped up while playing, some of the most frequent being, "What am I supposed to do next?", and, "I guess I'm about 1'8" tall, huh?".

Hidden Temple VR Adventure is a VR Adventure inside of a hidden temple.  You, as the adventurer, traverse inside this temple after a terrible rope accident left you trapped inside with seemingly no way out.  The movement is all controlled by looking at little yellow triangle waypoints that usually lead you into and out of an adjoining room.  When inside these rooms, you look around to collect gold and solve relatively simple puzzles in an old-school, pixel-hunt, point-and-click manner.  You can use items, combine items with other items, and...well, that's about it.  There is no button pressing at all, you simply look at what you want to do, and it's done.  You have a small pouch which serves as your inventory, and for some reason you hold it as low as you possibly can so that you must look, like, super down to access it.

I know this might sound negative so far, but I have to tell you - this has been one of the most fun experiences I've had in VR yet.

The graphics are solid, bright, and colorful (especially for being trapped in a temple), and the sense of immersion is, quite honestly, amazing.  There are a few times when you walk through dangling cobwebs, and each time I shunted my head to the side to avoid touching it.  As mentioned earlier, the sense of scale is strange, but not problematic.  It all works fine, it's just odd to be scraping the ceilings with your head.  It's entirely possible this was a design choice to make you feel a bit of claustrophobia, but it just looks a little off.  It should also be noted that this is not a horror game - there are no jump scares or anything like that, which makes me think that this may have been less than intentional.

Growing up when I did, I have experienced many games in this genre (in the middling days of PC/DOS gaming, this was basically THE genre available), and I honestly thought I was done with them.  However, the feeling you get of actually being inside of the game world, to me, makes this kind of adventure game viable all over again.  I could do without some of the more frustrating aspects, like having to slowly scan every room to make sure you don't miss the glint of an object you can interact with, but as short as the game actually is, and as pretty as the game actually is, it makes it less of a chore - at least in these early, pioneering days of VR gaming.