Get ready to suit up and head out into space once more: the visually-stunning Homebound is hitting the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive very soon.
Sweden-based Quixel, best known for its high fidelity graphics creation tools, recently confirmed that its very own VR experience will be releasing on February 16th via Steam. That’s a little later than we had anticipated; the developer was originally planning to launch it late last year. You can watch a new trailer for the experience below, which showcases the game’s remarkably sharp visuals, achieved with the help of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4.
https://youtu.be/NxOnQK2yzn4
Tonally, it has to be said Homebound looks similar to another beautiful VR game, ADR1FT [Review: 6/10], and its focus on survival in the aftermath of a massive accident is almost identical to that game too. That said, Homebound looks to be at least a little different to Three One Zero’s title, which was often likened to ‘Gone Home in space’. It’s split into three levels, for one thing, lasting around 10 – 30 minutes in total.
It’s a short experience to say the least, then, but Quixel has assured UploadVR that it will have a “low price” for those worried about getting their money’s worth. There will be some replayability to it too: the game will feature a time attack mode, letting you revisit its three levels over and over again to try and beat other player’s scores, and secrets will be hidden within each environment.
Hopefully the extra development time has allowed the developer to refine its motion control support; we found them to be a little imprecise when we took a look at the game last September. Overall though, we thought the experience was very promising, catching that harrowing sense of isolation that VR can give you with ease.
We’ll look to bring you full impressions of Homebound when it launches in two weeks’ time.
