Castle Rock Beach — A Virtual Environment Like No Other (Review)
The world’s in a crazy place right now. Well, as of the date this is being written, anyway. I recently had the pleasure of trying out “caves rd”’s new virtual environment. This one is a model of Castle Rock Beach, a location in West Australia. And I have to say, he did a great job of creating this!
This environment isn’t much different from Matt’s other works. Find a camera, find locations, take pictures, move on. If you’re boring, you can just focus on doing that. But if you want the full experience, then you can take in the beauty of this breathtaking scene. The camera even comes with built-in controls. You can control contrast, brightness, and other things I’m not enough of a nerd to know. (Exposure, maybe?)
After finding all the photos you need to take, make your way back to the post board, and at the hill, you’ll be facing the beach as it slowly fades into a gorgeous sunset. A scene like no other, to be honest.
Keep searching, and you’ll find yourself a drone you can fly around and take pictures with! You don’t get the same camera controls, but that’s fine. You can fly absolutely anywhere and take pictures of whatever you want. No limitations. You can get some really amazing shots with this. Hey, maybe I should bring a drone with me when I go on vacation again!
If you have $5 on hand, you can also experience this virtual environment in VR! Full support for Oculus and SteamVR, on both the itch.io and Steam versions, it seems like a no-brainer. Well, hold on. I do have a few itches about the VR version I gotta scratch.
If you REALLY want to visit Castle Rock Beach in VR, then this is definitely the best way to do it. You will need a very powerful PC, though. My build is very high-end, but even I could barely keep at 80fps (recommended for Rift headsets) throughout the experience, often having to fiddle with the settings and end up with worse graphics than before. It’s very immersion-breaking.
The developer has said the VR version is NOT the recommended way to play this game, so this is all pretty understandable. Doesn’t mean it’s not bad.
Loading times in VR are also pretty horrid, but that may be due to me running the game on a hard drive instead of a solid state. You’re free to test it yourself and get back to me.
I will say the locomotion is MUCH better than his previous environment for Iceland. In Iceland, there were many times I felt I was going to keel over and vomit. Castle Rock Beach was much smoother. The locomotion, very smooth. The graphics? Not so much.
I’d recommend keeping anti-aliasing OFF for VR. It doesn’t make much of a difference, and it may even help your framerate. You’ll also find that anything more than ten feet in front of you is almost impossible to make out due to the extremely low quality and very rough edges. Thankfully, you won’t be doing much reading in this game.
All in all, the desktop version is an easy 10/10. And it’s free! Did I mention that?
The VR version is, unfortunately, somewhere around a 7/10. Not a terrible experience, but Google Earth VR is probably better for casual players.
I’d still recommend paying SOMETHING for this game, as I think it’s too high quality to be free. Matt definitely deserves your money for this — there’s so much love in this, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Oh, and last thing I’ll say, the soundtrack choice is truly amazing. It for sure adds to the experience. Good on Matt for working with Chillhop!
Itch.io link: https://cavesrd.itch.io/australia
— PC SPECS —
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700K @ 3.6Ghz
Storage: WDC WD20–2TB
RAM: 16.0GB DDR4
VR Headset: Oculus Rift S
