Liminal VR Platform
• 3-star rating
• PCVR, Quest
• Casual Gaming, Meditation
• Comfortable, Stationary
Liminal is a platform that hosts a variety of virtual reality experiences categorized by mood, each offering a few moments of escape. Most content appears to be crafted by Liminal VR staff, which include professionals in neuroscience and psychology. Along the way the app questions you about your emotions as it tries to chart your state of mind before and after each experience.
The content selection is something of a mixed bag. We were intrigued by the 'sleep' experiences that gently pulsate colored lights in front of your closed eyelids, but we couldn't find much science to back up what this is meant to achieve. Another bedtime app places you in front of a small pixel-art image of a campfire while a story is gently narrated to you - we're not sure why simple content like this would be best delivered at night while wearing a VR headset.
Splat is novel. Start with a white space, color to reveal your surroundings.
We found some of the more energetic experiences to be briefly fun, and even occasionally novel. Splat opens in a completely white environment and through the crosshairs on the screen you can look around and lob paint pellets. Paint splatters onto what turn out to be solid objects and the backgrounds behind them, and the splattering continues at an increasing pace matched by the soundtrack until the full diorama is painted and revealed. Unfortunately there's only one environment, so there's not much replayability to this five minute event.
Checking out many of the most highly rated Liminal experiences left us consistently underwhelmed however. These included Engage, Boundless, Accelerate Awe and Chromatic Funk. The first was a very simple shoot-the-UFO game that we'd be embarrassed to show on a modern headset, and the other three felt like the bastard VR children of a Windows 95 screensaver and an early Pixar graphics demo. At least after each and every one of these short experiences we had to complete a wellbeing questionnaire that allowed us to chart our increasing disappointment.
Boundless is highly rated, but it reminded us of Windows 95 screensavers.
Reading the marketing material for Liminal it's suggested that this platform offers meaningful solutions for people with mental and physical health problems, but we couldn't find any data or sound reasoning behind this. Also, if Liminal is focused on helping people with health issues it seems surprising that they didn't even think to allow snap-turning for folks with mobility problems who want to see what's behind them.
The Liminal platform is free to download for a limited number of experiences, so it costs nothing for the curious to try out. Apparently free content is rotated weekly, but we found most of the highly rated experiences to be immediately available to us. You can continue with the free experiences, or a monthly fee of $4.99 unlocks all experiences, gives you unlimited playtime and allows you to skip the frequent nagging health questionnaires.
Experiences are described and categorized.
✅ Most content is available to check out for free.
✅ Offers a wide variety of experiences.
❌ Mostly underwhelming content with basic visuals.
❌ $60 per year (monthly subscription)
• YouTube: Trailer
• Languages: English
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