O! My Genesis VR Review - O! Where's the Game?

In the words of modern American poet Kanye West: I am a god. Thankfully, some god games coming out on PlayStation VR allows me to solidify this. O! My Genesis VR is one of these, letting you in for a noticeably cheap $3 price tag. Does this mean that there's something important missing, or is this a cheap way to abuse a few worlds?

Let me spoil the secret right now: there is something important missing. Namely, the entire game. O! My Genesis VR is a $3 tutorial for DLC planets, only two of which exist so far. As such, don't come in expecting anything more than to be told how to play a game that may eventually evolve into something cool, and be given a few brief moments to mess around before you've done everything. All told, it probably took me about twenty minutes to play O! My Genesis VR from start to finish.

You'll be playing as an "amateur world creator" whose job is to create a world and keep its occupants safe. The occupants are made of "Owleys", which are basically just cute owl people. Guiding you is a sorta rabbit-looking ghost woman who gives you advice and generally tells you what to do. You'll be using your hands to interact with the world, just grabbing it and turning it so you can look around, or picking up and dropping Owleys near things to get them to accomplish tasks. Usually, this would work pretty well, though at times this meant dropping an Owley near something a few times before they did what I wanted.

Over time, your Owleys will begin to build totems, and these will grant you special powers. There are two powers available in the game right now: one allows you to create rain clouds to grow trees for your Owleys to create houses, while the other lets you create wind storms to blow sand off of minerals. Both powers require an Owley to be praying at a totem for you to use, so if something kills them you'll be locked out until you can get a new Owley to replace them. Since neither power is used for anything other than some resource gathering, there's no real urgency to get this done ASAP.

Dangers do start to show up in O! My Genesis VR, starting with meteors that will collide with your planet. The game shows the trajectory of the approaching rock, and you'll have to stick a hand out to block it. Later, you'll have to make a torch to burn away plant monsters. Eventually, the game ends with the construction of a blowdart to sedate and tame a T-Rex. All of these are neat examples of threats the full game could have, but they don't do much here.

All of these elements add up to a god game that, frankly, has some real potential to shine. Taking care of my Owleys was fun, easy, and worked well with the systems in the game. It's just, outside of the planet's eighteen tasks (the vast majority of which are completed in the tutorial), you've got very little to do. Once you finish everything, you do unlock a bonus apocalypse mode where you need to keep your Owleys alive from various threats long enough, but its all the same stuff in the main game and it feels like a bonus rather than a full game mode.

The good news is that O! My Genesis VR has a nice sense of style as you play it. The way the planet looks like it can fit in the palm of your hands is really cool, and glancing around to see stars and the sun is a nice little treat. The Owley design is cute, and all the character, monster, and environmental models look like they could reasonably belong in a cartoon. There wasn't much in the way of audio, and the bunny/fairy woman's voice acting was fine, if kind of grating in the same way Navi's was, but nothing that really stood out as good or bad there.

I'm seriously interested in revisiting O! My Genesis VR once all the DLC is out. At the current time, all that's here is a tutorial for content I can't access yet. There's quite a bit of potential for this to be a really cool cheap-end VR god game, but that potential isn't really enough. If nothing else, you can peek in briefly and check if it's something you should pay attention to in the future.

O! My Genesis VR was reviewed on a PlayStation VR using a copy purchased by the reviewer.