Land’s End has been a long time coming. This anticipated virtual reality (VR) puzzler from Ustwo Games, the developer behind last year’s Monument Valley, was revealed alongside the Gear VR mobile head-mounted display (HMD) itself back in September 2014. The team has remained largely silent since that time, only recently revealing that its title is now on track for a 30th October 2015 release. It’s been a long road for Ustwo Games, then, and one that has seen the team ‘throw away’ entire versions of the experience.
Technical Director Peter Pashley confirmed as much in an interview with VRFocus that will be published in full later this week. “We’ve spent a long time getting to where we are now with our– especially with the puzzle design,” Pashley said. “We’ve spent – I don’t know – we’ve thrown away everything in the game four or five times to get to the current version of the gameplay mechanics and the level design and that kind of thing. So it’s been a long process but we think that what we’ve come up with are 2 main mechanics that really are very well suited to VR.”
In its current form, Land’s End is a first-person puzzle experience in which players explore a series of isolated islands. The title is completely hands-free, with players following a set path throughout by glancing at the next area to slowly leap to. Puzzles consist of 2 mechanics, the first having players guide a line across several points without overlapping and the other allowing them to pick up and drag certain rocks across the landscape.
VRFocus will continue to follow Land’s End closely, reporting back with any further updates on the title’s progress.
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