Together VR is intended as a VR girlfriend experience. You can spend time playing minigames at home with the lovely Mei Hoshihara and experience sweet moments with her.
While Together VR is a virtual reality experience, it did later add DLC to allow you to play without VR. This review primarily looks at the VR version, but mentions the non-VR version too.
Home Dates with Mei
Mei herself is the main attraction of Together VR. She acts rather cute, jumping around (with notable jiggle physics on display) when excited and puffing out her cheeks when frustrated. She has a pleasant-sounding voice and uses it to deliver some sweet lines in Chinese to the player. Mei and her reactions are adorable.
This ends the positive portion of the review for the most part.
Together VR consists of four minigames, each new one gated beyond repeating previous ones several times. This wouldn’t be so bad if any of them were actually good.
You can compete with Mei at darts. When Together VR launched, the dart physics were absolutely terrible. No matter what, the darts wouldn’t fly straight. Luckily this has been fixed, but instead, they now fly perfectly and unrealistically straight. It’s completable now at least, but still feels off.
There’s a basic shooting minigame, the context behind this being that Mei brought home some VR headsets to play with. She appears briefly with other enemies as they attack you, then disappears. Sometimes, obstacles will appear. In both cases, you have to dual-wield laser pistols and shoot at Mei, enemies, and obstacles. The only challenge this minigame brought was in aiming at one of the more awkward obstacles.
Next up is a rock paper scissors minigame where you select your choice from a menu. It starts with the penalty being to feed each other black beans, then progresses to where she’ll kiss you if you win. You get a forehead flick if she wins though. Mei doesn’t play fair. This is boring, but kind of cute at least.
Last and unfortunately least is searching for an envelope on a bookcase. It’s even less fun than it sounds. The idea is to move books out of the way to search. I imagine the actual attraction was supposed to be seeing up Mei’s skirt as she went up a ladder and bent over to look.
It didn’t help that sometimes books that were supposed to move wouldn’t. It took me three tries to succeed due to this, and then it kept playing the audio for her searching while unable to find the envelope even as it showed the animation of her leaving the apartment after succeeding. On top of that, the lower part of her dress disappeared several times while playing, which does lean into the type of game, but it wasn’t supposed to happen.
Other Issues
Unfortunately, the issues don’t end there with Together VR.
Mei sometimes gives inappropriate reactions. For example, she’ll sometimes confidently declare her impending victory when she gets the lowest score in a game.
It’s even worse in the non-VR version. The non-VR version seems to be a bare-bones effort to convert the game for players without access to a virtual reality headset. Right and left hands are fixed in front, with right and left buttons mapped to them. Even picking up things like this is incredibly difficult. Darts are very awkward to play in particular, though they at least made some small attempt here by adding a power gauge to affect the throw. They also at least added a few extra costumes for Mei for this mode.
Verdict
There may be some small entertainment value in Together VR, but it’s mostly based on the appeal of Mei as a character. The gameplay just isn’t engaging and the technical issues certainly don’t help either.
TOGETHER VR IS NOT RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another VR game, you might want to check out The Climb 2. If you would like more info on VR products, why not check out our virtual reality reviews?
Thanks to AURORA Games for a Steam review code for Together VR.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
