Imagine being a god to creatures you don’t know. It’s something that has fascinated us for years. Video games always tried to give us that feeling in god simulating games. Tethered is one of those, making you the absolute leader over small creatures called Peeps. The game released a couple of months ago on PSVR but this Divine Edition makes it possible to play it without Virtual Reality. Is it still worth your trouble, let’s find out!
The force of the controller
So again, the game was originally released as a PSVR game, giving you the opportunity to look down at the colorful world as a god who’s living among the clouds. Playing it in VR really offers a unique experience and is perhaps one of the better VR games out there but what happens when you take this away? Is the game strong enough to be fun without a VR interface? Well, not exactly.
To make up for the lack of the VR, the game supports the DualShock 4 controller, including two ways to play. The first one uses the motion control of the controller and resembles the way you move your head from side to side in a virtual environment. Too bad it doesn’t work as intuitive as it should. Moving your controller around to point at certain objects in the world just isn’t as precise as it should, resulting in some frustrations while playing. Combine this with the fact that the screen bounces around if you move the controller too fast and you know you’ll use the second control option most of the times. This option offers a more classic approach, assigning the camera to the right stick but this simply works better. The game only uses the right half of the controller to interact with the world but it works far better than the motion controls. Of course, VR still remains the best way to play it.
Save the floating islands
So what is the purpose of the game? It starts really easy on a floating tutorial island. Here you’ll learn what you’ll need to do. Your task is to take care of small creatures called Peeps. These inhabit the floating islands and are the only creatures capable of saving those magical islands. Peeps hatch from eggs and the moment it hatched, it’s your task to give it a job. Sounds easy and at first, it really is easy. You just need to point at the right Peep, select the object it has to interact with and set a course towards that object. After finishing the task, the creature will have to return to the center of the island most of the time. Don’t forget to assign it to go back!
When there aren’t that many Peeps on screen, it’s easy to have a nice overview of what’s going on. The more you advance, the more difficult it all gets. When there are plenty of Peeps running around, it’s not always that easy to keep track on who is doing what. Who was taking care of the plants? Who was mining for orbs? Who was building new settlements? When you fail to give everybody something to do, some Peeps might get bored, jumping off the island to solve this constant struggle against boredom. If you’re emotionally attached to the Peeps, you’ll need to keep a close eye on the activities and make sure everybody has his/her job on the island. The task of a god isn’t an easy one, but who said it would be?
Head in the clouds
Another aspect of the game are the clouds. You’ll be able to modify the clouds to help your Peeps out. You can, for example, make it snow to create new bridges Peeps can cross to reach new ground. Or, you can make it rain to help the crops grow. Most interesting is combining clouds to achieve special benefits like healing. You’ll certainly need your Peeps healed when the night falls.
During the nighttime, enemies will attack the island, you can force Peeps to start fighting off those enemies but you’ll need to pay attention to the stats of your Peep the entire time. You don’t want it to fall in combat so you’ll have to make sure everything goes as planned. Adding this combat to an otherwise peaceful game is a smart decision since it keeps the variation high enough to keep you motivated for a couple of hours of extra gameplay. This in combination with the clouds offers a deeper layer to an otherwise rather straightforward god simulating game.
Conclusion:
Tethered: Divine Edition is a nice addition to the PlayStation 4 library but still works best in VR. This Divine Edition comes with a nice looking PS4 theme and digital soundtrack but the game itself doesn’t work as good as it should. Controlling it with a controller just doesn’t offer the same kind of magic VR is capable of creating. What remains now is a decent god simulator game with some fun elements but nothing really special that makes it stand out of the crowd. It’s worth giving a shot but it’s not the best on the market.
7/10
