Moss (PS4)

While PlayStation’s Virtual Reality headset can definitely pull off an immersive VR experience, the technology is not quite at the level where it could believably capture the experience of being a mouse, so Moss doesn’t even try. Rather than playing as the mouse as the center of Moss’s story, the player is instead established to be an outside observer and assistant to its adventure, the contextualization for your participation as a video game player actually quite clever.

 

In Moss you are known as a Reader, a being who interacts with the world of Moss without truly being a part of it. By opening a book you are able to observe this fantasy world inhabited by intelligent mice. Originally living in a prosperous castle city, an attack by dark forces forced them to flee, leaving behind the ruins of their old lives as they sought out a simpler and safer existence. By opening the book though, the Reader has cast a magical artifact known as the Glass into the world of Moss, and by chance a young mouse named Quill finds it, the Glass bonding you to the small creature. The Glass unfortunately draws the attention of the evil serpent Sarffog though, and when Quill’s uncle goes missing trying to stop the snake, the mouse must set off on her first true adventure, the Reader there to help her overcome whatever trials she may face.

For the most part the story seems to be here to justify the game’s settings like the ruined castle and the rural town of mice, the game even deferring a full conclusion to its setup until a potential sequel. Instead, the game wisely decides to keep its focus more personal by emphasizing your cute partner Quill. Your relationship with the little mouse as she goes on her quest grows and gets tested, but for the most part the game keeps things positive and adorable in your interactions with her. After completing a big puzzle or tougher area, Quill will happily raise a hand to you for a high five. If you’re stuck in an area for a while, unable to figure out what to do, she’ll do her best to give you hints, even getting a little frustrated if you’re not figuring things out still. In the Reader’s defense though, Quill speaks to you using American Sign Language, which is a nice and well realized touch but not readable by all players. Oddly enough, she is shown to be capable of speech in the segments where a woman narrates the cutscenes like she was reading a book aloud. For the character you spend the entire game looking at and helping though, she definitely earns her place as the star of the show and the little moments can lead to an emotional connection with what might otherwise be just another platform game protagonist. Even though you control her movement entirely, she still feels like she has a distinctly separate mind from you thanks to those personal touches.

 

Moss is a platform game through and through, the Virtual Reality additions not even impacting it as much as one might expect. Using the PS4 controller you still move Quill around areas as if this was a regular 3D platformer, her abilities limited to a sword swipe and a jump. However, as the Reader you do have a few more skills that do keep things from being too basic. Wherever you have your PS4 controller positioned in real space is transferred into the game as a glowing orb that can interact with objects and characters. The main use you’ll find for this is manipulating objects in the environment like dragging stuff around to serve as platforms, opening doors, or rotating large structures to give Quill the entry points she needs. These can make platforming areas mildly puzzling, although some things like rotating objects can be finicky since the controller based motion controls are neither as reliable as pure button use or as natural as something closer to using your hands like a PlayStation Move controller. The much more interesting power the Reader has though has to be their ability to possess enemies. Throughout the game you encounter a few bugs you can control while guiding Quill as well. Using bugs to weigh down buttons, blow up barriers, and fire shots around the environment gives you a few more complex puzzles in the later levels, but even when bugs aren’t present, the game does a decent job of making things challenging enough to stay interesting.

If a level is about jumping around, you’ll need to be accurate and figure out how to get around the area. If it’s a puzzle, it’s a matter of figuring out what needs to be done and executing it in the right order. The only level focus that does truly feel weak is the combat. When it’s time to fight bugs, your options don’t really evolve beyond swinging your sword at them and dodging at the predictable moments they always strike. A few areas will lock you in and have you fight multiple waves of foes before moving on, and these are mostly just slow and too easy. You can even get bug possession involved to make it less challenging, although at least when the exploding bugs enter the picture you don’t just slash them like everything else despite them still being easy to dispatch. Bugs are definitely better as puzzle elements than true foes, Quill definitely more in danger of falling to her death than falling in battle, especially thanks to your ability to heal her by grabbing her backpack for a few seconds.

 

While the battles are dull, the levels do their job well, serving as good stages for the game’s action. There are still areas definitely designed solely to be pretty to look at. While your position in a level’s environment is set, the VR headset allows you to lean in and look around, this ability even getting incorporated into the platforming and exploration. Much like how the 3D slider in Super Mario 3D Land could make the platforms in certain areas clear, the environments in Moss are meant to be looked at with the extra depth, the player able to actually look around objects that would otherwise block your view to find secret paths and little collectibles. Just like Super Mario 3D Land though, you can figure these out well enough without putting in that extra effort, these hidden areas often having some indicator they exist even before you start peering around corners and pillars. You’ll definitely do better by doing it though, and finding a little secret to the side can make some of the more straightforward platforming sections more interesting or involved, especially if the scroll collectible has its own mini-puzzle to solve.

THE VERDICT: Moss has the basics of puzzle-platforming down, but the VR that is meant to elevate the experience doesn’t really contribute too much to the play. The lovely environments and the interaction with your little mouse friend are made more interesting by the freedom to look around or interact with Quill more directly, but building these areas to look nice sometimes means they don’t have much gameplay to them. The levels are decently designed despite the dull combat sections, but besides the enemy possession gimmick, the VR side of gameplay is pretty plain, moving blocks with motion controls doing little to truly enhance the puzzle-platforming. Quill is made much more adorable by the way the VR feeds into your partnership at least, but the short adventure you go on together relies more on its charm and look than what you’ll be doing together.

 

And so, I give Moss for PlayStation 4…

An OKAY rating. Besides the battles being too straightforward to really get into, Moss would be a fairly decent game without the VR. Converting it away from VR wouldn’t even be too hard, since the motion controls are about on the level with what you could expect from a Wii game, but the VR does admittedly add to the experience. Quill would be a good protagonist in a regular game, but posing things as a partnership between the Reader and a character with some autonomy and personality despite being guided by your control sticks makes her more endearing. Along with the detailed environments to look around, Moss gets a lot right about its style, but its short length coupled with a few empty levels means you won’t get as much engaging play or time with Quill and the world around her to fully satisfy. It’s clear the game wanted to keep going based on the sequel hook, but VR development definitely requires a lot more work than if this was a traditional game that would have the time to complete the story and push the mechanics further.

 

Moss is both cute and beautiful, and like most things in virtual reality that alone can wow some players and make it easier to get invested in the game. However, players more used to the hardware will find Moss to be a serviceable puzzle-platformer that does have a few nifty elements to it thanks to VR but lacks the deeper mechanics and level complexity that would really help the game be enjoyable once the wow factor of the VR world begins to fade.