While it might ultimately feel more like an elaborate tech demo than a full-fledged game, Living Room is still worth experiencing for anyone interested in seeing the potential of mixed reality gaming
Living Room represents an intriguing step forward for mixed reality gaming, offering you the chance to transform your living space into a vibrant wildlife sanctuary. This game takes advantage of the Meta Quest 3's & 3S's mixed reality capabilities to create an experience that feels both magical and intimate.
The premise is straightforward yet captivating: you're tasked with creating and maintaining miniature ecosystems within your actual living space. The game starts with a comprehensive tutorial that introduces you to your primary tools - a paint gun for creating landmasses and a trowel for shaping terrain. These tools are intuitive and responsive, making the process of island creation feel natural and satisfying.
The core gameplay loop revolves around building and populating these floating islands with various flora and fauna. Each island can host different biomes, from lush jungles to frigid arctic landscapes, and each biome comes with its own set of creatures and plants. The freedom to mix and match these elements is where Living Room truly shines. Want to create a tropical paradise next to your coffee table? Go for it. Fancy turning your desk into a snow-covered mountain range inhabited by polar bears? That's entirely possible.
The ecosystem management aspects add a layer of depth to what could have been a simple sandbox experience. Animals need food to survive, predators will hunt prey, and species can breed to create new generations. There's a delicate balance to maintain - introduce too many predators, and your herbivore population might get decimated. Forget to provide enough food sources, and your animals might starve. While these systems aren't particularly complex, they create enough engagement to keep you invested in your miniature worlds.
One of the game's standout features is the ability to select any animal from your ecosystem and transform it into a room-scale companion. These supersized pets can interact with your space in charming ways - they'll dig for treasure, play fetch, and respond to you with adorable animations. It's a feature that bridges the gap between the game's miniature ecosystems and your actual living space, creating moments of genuine delight.
The game's progression system revolves around completing various objectives and challenges, which reward you with "Happy Points" - the currency used to unlock new animals, plants, and decorative items. While this creates a sense of progression, the objectives can feel repetitive over time. You'll often find yourself completing similar tasks with different variables, which might test some players' patience.
The game offers three distinct modes: the standard campaign with its progression system, a Challenge Mode with specific scenarios to tackle, and a Creative Mode that removes all restrictions for those who just want to experiment freely. This variety helps cater to different playstyles, though the core experience remains largely the same across all modes.
Visually, Living Room adopts a cute, stylized aesthetic that prioritizes clarity over realism. The animals are adorably cartoonish, and the various biomes are distinct and colorful. The mixed reality implementation is particularly impressive - islands and decorations feel properly anchored in your space, and the lighting integration helps sell the illusion that these digital elements are part of your room.
Where Living Room struggles is in maintaining long-term engagement. While the initial hours are filled with discovery and delight as you unlock new creatures and biomes, the gameplay loop will become repetitive once you've seen most of what the game has to offer. The ecosystem management, while functional, lacks the depth that might keep more strategy-minded players invested for extended periods.
However, this might be missing the point of what Living Room sets out to achieve. It's not trying to be a complex management sim or a challenging strategy game. Instead, it succeeds as a relaxing, creative experience that showcases the potential of mixed reality gaming. There's something undeniably special about seeing your living space transformed into a collection of miniature wildlife habitats.
The game particularly shines as a family-friendly experience. Its intuitive controls, gentle learning curve, and non-violent nature make it accessible to players of all ages. Watching children interact with their room-scale pets or carefully design their first island can be just as entertaining as playing the game yourself.
The decoration system adds another layer of personalization, allowing you to place large-scale items around your room that persist between sessions. This feature helps create a sense of permanence to your virtual sanctuary, though it might have benefited from more variety in decorative options. The recent holiday update added some Christmas decorations, which is always a nice touch.
Despite its limitations, Living Room represents an exciting glimpse into the future of mixed reality gaming. It successfully creates a bridge between virtual content and physical space, delivering moments of wonder that would be impossible in traditional gaming formats. While it might ultimately feel more like an elaborate tech demo than a full-fledged game, Living Room is still worth experiencing for anyone interested in seeing the potential of mixed reality gaming. It does not revolutionize gaming, but it offers enough unique moments and creative freedom to justify giving it a try, even if just for a few hours of wholesome entertainment. Thanks for reading!
The game was reviewed on a Quest 3 via a code provided by PR. Living Room is available on Meta Quest.
