Starship Home for the Quest 3 is an attempt to give meaning to mixed reality

Starship Home, a cozy mixed-reality game for the Meta Quest 3, is trying to get to the heart of “what makes a game meaningful in mixed reality.” That’s according to developer Doug North Cook, who wrote on Reddit that the game, which turns your environment into a custom spaceship and you into an intergalactic horticulturist, is indie studio Creature’s “first answer to that question.”

A Meta Quest blog post says players will customize their starship by “strategically placing virtual windows, control panels, and other components” in their room. Outside the windows, the game’s trailer shows you’ll see things like space creatures, planets, cloud-tops, and travel animations as you leave planets. When players land on a planet, they’ll collect plant clippings and nurture them aboard their ship. The game uses the Quest 3’s automatic room meshing, so you won’t have to do any manual blocking to tell the headset where things are in your space.

Starship Home’s story puts players in charge of exploring planets and saving alien flora from a “sinister blight that threatens plant life across the galaxy.” Other aspects of the game will include entering the plants’ dreams, navigating with a star chart, interplanetary space jumps, and “unraveling the mystery” of the sickness afflicting the plants, according to Creature’s website.

The whole thing sounds like it could be very fun — if it’s done right. The developer doesn’t seem to say whether your spaceship persists across play sessions (it sounds like it might, given Cook’s Reddit reply saying there will be save files “so you can each have your own Starship”). If it does, that could give you a real reason to actually put the headset on every day. You know, the sort of time-honored tradition seen in everything from Animal Crossing to Tamagotchi. “Sorry, family,” you might say, “I need to go down to the basement to play with my trains tend to my space plants.”

Starship Home is a Quest 3 exclusive; its first, according to UploadVR. At the moment, it doesn’t have a specific release date, but Creature says it’ll be out in the third quarter this year.