What I'm playing 🐭📖 Moss: Book II | You can high-five the mouse!

The next book

Moss is a VR “third-person” platformer set in a story book where you help a little mouse on a big adventure. All six VR players liked it so much that there’s a sequel! Moss: Book II picks up right after the events of the first game, after you helped Quill kill the big bad snake.

Quill looks over a room in an overgrown mouse-scale castle.

The game starts with me opening the literal next book in the story and being transported into it.

Inside a large reading hall, I’m sitting at a desk piled with books. Under candlelight, I’m reading the second book of Moss.

It’s on the mouse

Quill, the mouse, works with the usual third-person platforming controls. Like every game that calls itself action-adventure, there’s the usual mix of combat, puzzles, and exploration.

However, the special feature of the Moss series is that you can directly interact with the level to help her, with the level shown at about the height of your chest. You can pull and push objects to help Quill get around or even grab enemies to hold them still for her to hit. The combat is very forgiving, with enemies slowly telegraphing their attacks, plus you can heal Quill any time by holding her in your hand.

With one hand, I grab an enemy and drag it over to stand on a button. With the other hand, I drag a block over to trap it there.

As expected from a book, Moss: Book II is a linear adventure. I sometimes get pulled out of the book world back to my seat to watch the next pages of the story unfold.

Back at my desk outside the book world, the room is now flooded with swamp water and covered in swamp life.

A VR game that doesn’t try to throw you around

Even as an experienced VR user, it gets annoying when a VR game feels the need to have very large spaces or to fling you halfway to Mars to try to sell the immersive power of virtual reality. In contrast, Moss sells the immersiveness of VR modestly but also more intimately. The environments are smaller but very detailed, like a stage right in front of you on a desk.

Under moonlight, Quill approaches an ornately decorated tree and offers a tiny piece of glowing glass.

Unlike a lot of VR games, in Moss, sitting is actually required. Sometimes, you need to lean and look around, but the game never asks you to get up and move around. Keeping with the book theme, instead of scrolling the view as Quill moves around, scene changes are represented as turning a page of the book.

Since everything happens right in front of you, at about chest- to eye-level, and you never need to turn around, Moss is a much more comfortable and less intense experience.

Friend-shaped

Virtual reality is a very intimate format for a game. Eye contact and physical gestures feel so much more compelling in VR than in any other format. VR games inevitably integrate the players themselves into the game setting, so the fourth wall is always at least a bit loose in VR.

In Moss, there is no fourth wall. Quill knows you’re reading her book and often turns to look up at you to ask for help.

And you can pet her!

Quill flattens her ears as I pet her on the head.

And you can high five her!

Where we’ve been

At this point, I’ve explored swamps and castles on a quest to get the important things that do the important stuff. I’ve just made it past a big twist in the story, which I deliberately left out of the pictures and videos in this article.

But here’s a picture of a beautiful swamp.

Quill climbs up a wall of vines in a swamp at night. In the background are a bunch of buildings formed from living trees.