Frequency Garden

This one stuck out to me in the wall of thumbnails in my Steam Library because of the interesting and colorful lighting.

According to my records, I purchased this on June 27, 2020, so around 30 years ago…

Frequency Garden–available on Steam–is a short puzzle-ish game that involves reactivating old machinery on an abandoned world. The game play is a bit shallow, but the environment was interesting to inhabit. I enjoyed the combination of a desolate machine world with intense lighting generated by these machines.

The game takes you on a short journey to reactivate these machines in the interest of traveling to another world or reality. The reward at the end is access to several pseudo-interactive environments. Personally, I found the journey through the machines more compelling than the end.

Aside from the lighting, something else that I liked about this game was the scale of the environment. So many VR titles cram you into a tiny area or limit your render distance. Frequency Garden uses a mix of skyboxes and huge 3D models to create a sense of enormity that I’ve rarely seen in VR.

Here is a short video with some notable photos and clips.