Starship Home

Sometimes a piece of media hits you at just the right moment in time. A film might speak to you about recent events in your life, or the themes of a book you are reading might resonate with recent thoughts you’ve been having. Or a video game might come swooping into your life at the perfect time to allow you to turn your mind off and escape your present circumstances.

So, I was down in Tampa, Florida last week, dealing with a death in the family amidst the backdrop of the approaching hurricane, which hour by hour was building into the disaster it eventually became. Admittedly, I was in a distracted state of mind, and probably not in the best place mentally to assess the value of video game. But, while hurriedly packing for the trip, I had tossed my Quest 3 into my luggage, thinking that I might have a few minutes of downtime to mess around with few games that I had pending for review. And one night, during one of the worst weeks of my life, I decided to hop into Starship Home just to distract me for a bit from recent events and the swirling pressure bearing down from the South.

I cleared away all the crap I had strewn all over my niece’s bedroom floor, strapped on the Quest, and fired up the game. And all I have to say is “Oh. Damn. Wow.” I’ve often said that the Meta Quest 3 is the best piece of tech I own, and now I can say that Starship Home is the best way to demonstrate the power of that tech to others. This is a simple game – kind of goofy, even – but there’s not denying the power of what it is doing. For someone that grew up in the 70s and 80s, the fact that Starship Home exists at all feels like some hardcore science fiction shit.

I’ve often appreciated the ability of VR to transport me out of my current reality, but rarely have I been able to use it to put my brain on pause and just completely abandon my own world for a while. But that’s what Starship Home did for me, and I’m completely grateful for the four or five hours I spent puttering around an empty room in a (miserable, hot, possibly doomed) state far from home, fully engaged in activities that had nothing to do with my real life.

Starship Home takes a simple concept and executes on it beautifully. Take a room in your house, use mixed reality to convert it into a spaceship, and then zip around the galaxy completing a series of fun little missions and tasks. By adding some simple interfaces and a few color filters to your real-world situation, Starship Home really sells the fun illusion that you are launching your niece’s bedroom (or wherever) into space.

As soon as you fire up the game, you discover that a little package has arrived in the middle of the floor. From this package, you pull a series of goodies, which you place on walls and surfaces around the room. Here’s a window. Here’s a control panel. Here’s an airlock. And…a watering can. And another window. And a Minority Report/Star Trek Generations star map. And another window. And a storage thing full of supplies you can pull out of the ground like Mary Poppins pulling stuff out of her handbag. And..sure…another window. Windows are important.

You put this stuff wherever you want in the room, and it seamlessly sticks right where you put it. I was probably most impressed with the windows, which – no matter where you put them – give you a realistic and cohesive view of space outside. You can even move them around the wall, placing them into different locations for a better view. It’s mad impressive.

Once you have everything in place, the games guides you to your first destination on the Stellar Cartography map. You choose the planet, you yank on the big “Go” lever, and you are launched into space on your first mission. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that you’re going to have this grand space adventure on various planets with away missions or laser battles. This game is modest in scope, and maybe a bit on the repetitive side in its level design. The developers definitely decided to focus on a certain type of experience, and then worked to deliver that experience in the best way possible.

You’ll travel to a variety of planets, where you’ll perform a series of scans to locate specific plant specimens. Once you’ve recovered each plant, you’ll need to take care of them, by delivering timely feedings and waterings - and by cleansing their dreams. Each plant has its own specific dream (I know, but yes, the plants dream), and you have to pop in there and play a nifty little VR minigame to get rid of the disease that has been infecting them.

And that’s it; fly, scan, recover, cleanse. There is a comfortable sort of rinse-and-repeat structure to these missions, though the plant dreams do vary. There is also a fair bit of time management needed; as your pile of plants builds up in your niece’s bedroom, you need to keep them all living and healthy.

I can’t express how much fun it was to dither around with all of the goodies that Starship Home provides. The only real issue that I had came in reloading the game after a break early on; the game remembered where everything was, but the prompt to move forward in the story had disappeared from view. I had only played for about an hour, and I was able to hustle through that content and catch back up pretty quickly. But had the bug occurred further into my playthrough, I might have been more frustrated.

But the bottom line is that Starship Home is sweet, innocent fun, enabled by some very impressive tech. The entire experience is so welcoming and friendly that I couldn’t help but be enchanted by it, progression bug be damned. I was in dire need of something to give me happy thoughts, and Starship Home perfectly rose to the occasion. If you need a little vacation from your life (or you just want to see a really impressive use of mixed reality), you might want to launch yourself into space for a bit.