Multisensory Storytelling - Playthings

This was delightful!

Playthings ticks so many boxes for a nice, short intro to VR-type experience. It's colorful and inviting from the jump. The interactions with the drumsticks are immediately intuitive. There's no explicit direction, which means a viewer isn't being pushed right into a situation where they're being overloaded with sensory input and "rules" or objectives to follow.

Then, when I noticed the portal in the first space, it did not take very long at all to get the idea of sticking my head into it. This mode of changing scenes was great, and honestly more room-scale experiences would probably benefit from the approach of letting the player use the whole space and then transitioning between spaces with that sort of portal/blink mechanic.

Loved the final rhythm game sequence where all the different food instruments came into play, that was a perfect way to build upon what came before it. I'm also a bit shocked that it already had a nice rhythm game UI touch that to my knowledge Beat Saber doesn't have as an option yet (the thin lines tracing the paths between notes, giving you a sense of the arcs to swing your arms in).

The only quip I can make about Playthings is that the rap was a bit cheesy, but who cares? This is going on my list of things to have VR first-timers check out.