If you’ve ever wanted pets but your landlord doesn’t allow them, the mixed reality eco-sanctuary Living Room might be for you.
Developed by Thoughtfish, your job (should you accept it) involves cultivating life in a customizable terrarium full of cutesy critters. Alongside dressing up the different biomes, you must breed and feed flocks of creatures, managing the delicate balance of carnivores and omnivores to avoid total extinction.
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After scanning your playspace to establish the eponymous Living Room, you’ll soon get acquainted with a small pool of helpful tools. This includes a Paint Gun that squirts terrain across your playspace to create islands and a trowel for manipulating the topology. Picture-book menus let you purchase various flora and fauna to decorate your DIY apartment sanctuary. It sounds like an intense initiation but a meaty tutorial helpfully guides you through these approachable systems, drip-feeding new animals and upgrades to get you comfortable with the workflow.
To develop your digital zoo, you’re served a consistent flow of miniature challenges to tackle, like safeguarding creatures from predators or purchasing a defined number of plants. By keeping your kingdom happy, you’ll gradually earn a currency called Happy Points, which are used to purchase new wildlife and decor to flesh out your ecosystem.
Despite the playful sandbox premise, Living Room feels surprisingly hands-off after a while. There aren’t many surprises to discover as you build out your little world, which could have freshened up the gameplay beyond dropping in new assets and idly waiting for more progress to unlock. This gets a bit dull once you understand the upper limit of its systems, with Living Room opting to orbit the nitty gritty process of curating a living world. In this way, playing feels more like watching a chibi wildlife documentary than playing God.
Still, there are moments of unlikely humor that soften this disappointment. For example, while distractedly writing notes on my phone, I returned to see that my gorilla population looked rather thin. With some investigation, I realized this was the result of a few extra jaguars that I’d thrown in before taking a break, who quickly tampered with the food chain.
Despite my guilt, I couldn’t help but laugh as the happy little Jaguars wandered across the digital plains, flourishing in the face of my neglect. Living Room’s forgiving systems ensured I would swiftly resolve the problem, though, and despite the charming repercussions, I restocked my gorilla supply almost immediately.
Living Room also lets you pluck one of your favorite creatures and turn them into a room-sized pet. Spurred on by my long-standing childhood wish to own a pint-sized elephant, I chose a trunk-haver from the herd, named it ‘Pipsqueak’, and watched as they apparated into my playspace and began jumping on the furniture. I thoroughly enjoyed petting them and seeing little hearts appear above their head.
To my surprise, they can also dig up treasure spots that appear within my room, uncovering precious Happy Points to spend on my cavalcade of creatures. As someone whose allergies prevent them from having a crib full of animals, this feature is a heartwarming salve that offsets the eventual monotony of its core gameplay loop, standing out as my favorite aspect.
Living Room is now available for the Meta Quest 3 family.
