Naau: The Lost Eye - a diamond in the rough? - The game supports native Oculus drivers!

[RuneSR2]

Naau - The Lost Eye has arrived:

I've tested the game using my Rift CV1 and the Valve Index. The game works great using either hmd. After starting the game through its desktop icon, the icon is shown in Oculus Home and plays exactly like if you bought it in the Oculus Store. The game is only available on Steam (for now) and 10% off until March 4 - get it here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124600/Naau_The_Lost_Eye/

I'm probably going for lcd for this game, so it should work great using Quest 2 and Rift-S. Later levels look great (graphics are kinda poor when use start the game, don't be fooled by that), and I've got solid 90 fps even using res 200 % and 2xMSAA with the Index. That said I also get solid 90 fps using my Rift CV1 with super sampling 2.0. But even though many textures aren't high-res at all, these are so low-res close-up that adding some SDE using the CV1 ss 2.0 isn't helping much. Devs need to increase the res of many textures to really make this game shine. 

It's still a highly optimized and polished game, even if it's Early Access. In the start the gameplay is quite slow and old school (even boring and repetitive), but it gets a lot better after about 30 minutes or so. Consider the first 30 minutes like a tutorial for persons new to VR 😉 The game may be considered some kind of Zelda and Fujii combo... 
You got full locomotion and smooth turning (and teleport, snap turning) - and the game supports Index with full finger tracking.
The AI might not exactly beat the hell out of Kasparov in chess, but I enjoyed the game nonetheless.
The devs should make 4K-ish textures like Boneworks, and this game would shine a lot more. 7/10 for now (I added 0.5 for the Rift native driver support :-))

 

 

 

[RuneSR2]

The game is now v. 1.0 and no longer Early Access - happened today - official launch trailer:

Get it here: 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124600/Naau_The_Lost_Eye/

[RuneSR2]

Note that Naau now also is available in the Oculus Store:

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/3398215516862676/?ranking_trace=1943584525923090_33982155168...

- but the Steam version supports native Oculus drivers  and is 15 % off, so this time it's really hard to recommend the Oculus version - the Oculus version is full price ($25). 

The devs kinda lost me in the 3rd (4th?) level where the game got somewhat boring and repetitive, but that was the Early Access version, maybe gameplay has been improved. Also the versions seem to jump from several v. 0.1x versions and then extremely fast to v 1.0. You could get the impression that the devs didn't want Early Access anymore and simply jumped to v. 1.0. Maybe v. 1.0 really is v. 0.19, lol 😉 Then again, the game never felt Early Access to me.

To quote the devs:

"Hello Everone,
We have good news. Naau: The Lost Eye will be available all platforms on April 29. You can access the game other stores Oculus Store, VivePort and Steam as fully launch. Thanks for everyone who play the game as early access. We changed a lot of things in the game. Game is better balance now. We are still not done, we know that we will continue to make updates, we are aware that there are more things we can add and improve.We will continue to improve these over time. You can express your opinion about the game in the comments. We read and evaluate all of them one by one.

You can access version 1.0 after this post. We will fully launch the game on April 29.
Thanks for playing Naau. I hope you like the game."

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1124600/eventcomments/3132793555953927721/