Demeter review: a fidgety, gimmicky mixed reality platformer

What do you do when a figurine-sized space lady crashes into your lounge room, rabbiting on about a mission involving precious crystals? Help her out, of course! The narrative justification for Demeter’s protagonist Atalanta arriving at our homes isn’t divulged—an oversight I’ll expand on later. For a little while at least, most players probably won’t be too bothered by this omission due to the novelty of seeing exotic alien dioramas pop up in their own space, around their furniture and belongings. 

The coalescing of virtual and physical world spaces will become increasingly common; by the time you read this review, the idea of a mixed game unfolding in your lounge room will be very “so what?” But Demeter was one of the first platformers of its kind—certainly the first I played—therefore arriving with some novelty and wow factor. The developers at Novelab seem to have followed the logic that if they can make a mixed reality platformer, they should, believing it’s good to get to the party early. I respect them for playing in the sandpit but was left cold by a game that’s rote, fidgety, narratively uninteresting, and lacks visual flair once the initial novelty has worn off.

The experience begins with flashes of light and rock formations that shoot and swirl through your room, before the aforementioned spaceship nosedives towards the floor as its pilot cries out for help. This is Atalanta, who’s soon lying face down on one of the game’s many island-like mini worlds. If you don’t activate her she’ll ask “why won’t you get me up?” and soon add: “get me up with button A or B, like we did in training!” She mentions the need to hurry, due to the presence of what she refers to as “beasties,” in a slab of dialogue that for me was tainted by the fact that she was facing the opposite direction while speaking—expressing herself to an expanse of empty wall. 

There were other comparable boo-boos going forward—for instance occasional moments when I’d discover Atalanta standing in mid-air, near a ledge, following a jump the game thought she’d made. In another VR experience I might’ve described these bits as “immersion-breaking,” but here I’m reluctant to do that given how little immersion there was in the first place. By having the experience take place in mixed reality, our physical world elements always viewable and thus intruding on every moment, we’re never allowed passage into the imaginative world; we’re never immersed somewhere else.

Nor is our physical reality notably changed, let alone transformed into something new. In the visually striking mixed reality chapters of Stranger Things VR, our room becomes a kind of laboratory at the edge of existence, holes in the walls opening up to parallel dimensions, all sorts of crazy crap flying through them. This experience spectacularly escalates, turning our floor into a floating platform flying through a surreal hellscape. In Demeter, our physical space is crucial to the experience yet narratively irrelevant. There’s no synergy between the physical and virtual layers; they don’t work in concert. 

I might not have been bothered by this, had Demeter invested me in its emotionally or endeared me to its protagonist. But the game prioritizes exposition over emotion, Atalanta rambling on about being from a planet “quite far from here” and imparting details about her mission to procure crystal-like energy sources. Blabber blabber blabber. How about her strengths, her vulnerabilities, what she cares most about? The dialogue often feels dangerously close to gobbledegook—and spills right over into it when we begin hearing voice-over narration from the perspective of the energy source itself. 

Our objectives include helping Atalanta obtain resources to repair her ship, and finding more of the aforementioned energy sources. These are inconveniently located in mini worlds containing platforms, ledges, doors, alien plants benign and poisonous, and the aforementioned “beasties,” defeatable by basic swipe-like attack moves. The gameplay never feels smooth or intuitive, and controlling Atalanta can be fidgety. I couldn’t make it to the end of the game…it was too much of a slog.

The first truly striking visual occurred during the last world in chapter one: a level that’s seven or eight times larger than the previous ones. It was a “wow” moment, watching this elaborate diorama consume three quarters of my lounge room, the game’s playing space ballooning from the size of a large dollhouse to a queen size bed. But that “wow” quickly subsided. In a better production, this is when well-developed characters, an engaging narrative and satisfying gameplay would carry us through the rest of the experience.