Grade: A-
A low-key environmental exploration of a New Zealand landscape
Wakamarina Valley, NZ, was created by Matt ‘caves’ (@cavesrd). Matt’s ‘caves’ works in the niche gaming genre of translating real-life settings into 3D environments that you can explore. Matt goes to interesting locations worldwide and then uses the Unreal Engine to bring them to virtual reality (or just hi-def flat screen if you have no VR device like me!)
This game took me to a location I’ve always been interested in exploring, the beautiful island of New Zealand. In Wakamarina Valley, you explore a gorgeous area. The game itself is simple. First, go to the picture board and see what you’re looking for. Then, find the locations. It’s a simple search game premise.
Complex Camera Controls
The central portion of the game is a photography simulator, and you can take as many photographs as you’d like.
The camera controls are impressive. Beyond the simple zoom, focus, and landscape/portrait options, there’s also a whole pile of filters and effects you can layer into your photos. I’m not a digital photography expert, but it seemed like they embedded almost all of the fiddly things you can mess with within an image to fine-tune exactly how you want it to come out. For example, EXP, CONT, WB, F/, ISO, filter, and strength were all settings you adjust within the game.
Gorgeous Vistas
New Zealand is a temperate climate, and I was interested in looking closely at the trees and plants aligned to what we have in Philadelphia. They seem to have many more fern-like thing-a-ma-bobs in NZ than we do in Philly (I am no botanist!). My favorite little moment was standing in the water and looking down and investigating each rock in a stream. Two other spots stood out. One was a big vista across the valley, and the other was finding some light streaming through the trees.
Overall Impression
The graphics were crisp, and the relaxing piano music was a nice add-on to sell the experience. I ended up walking around the paths for about 20 minutes or so. The game railroaded you to specific directions, and there was no off-trail adventuring. My only complaint was that I would have loved to have more freedom to explore, but I understand the potential technology limitation there (especially with one developer creating the game).
I’m going to check out more locations from this developer. Maybe I’ll head to Iceland or Italy next!
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