cyubeVR is easily among the most impressive-looking VR games I’ve come across, and while it launched in 2018, it just had a huge graphics optimization update. It’s now on sale on Steam until September 20.
A voxel-based sandbox world, cyubVR (pronounced “cube VR”, of course) is credited as coming from Stonebrick Studios, but it’s really a labor of love from one person.
“There is exactly one person on the dev team, it's just me,” they tell me, who goes by the name "sbsce", and quickly credits the game’s dedicated user community as collaborators. “I've been working full-time on cyubeVR for over 7.5 years by now, so quite a long time!”
There is no multiplayer mode yet, but sbsce tells me that’s on the roadmap. “It's certainly one of the most requested features by the community.”
And despite surface appearances, it’s not Minecraft. Really:
“I'd say it's quite different actually,” the developer argues. “Much more different than most people seem to expect after looking at a few screenshots of the game. cyubeVR is generally slower paced and puts way more focus on the ‘being in a super immersive environment that you can naturally interact with’ aspect.”
To be sure, there’s room for more than one voxel-based sandbox game, especially since the one everyone thinks about first is now owned by a massive corporation that can’t be as responsive to the user community — especially in the VR space:
“Most importantly, in cyubeVR all mechanics in the game are designed from the ground up for VR, so that automatically makes a lot of things work differently than in a game that was designed for being played with a keyboard and mouse, or gamepad.”
Many hardcore community members have created amazing builds in cyubVR (see above), but sbsce says players can just enjoy the game’s challenges without necessarily creating:
“For those players, the goal would not be building anything, but just unlocking all the best tools and exploring all the different things the procedural generation of the game comes up with. So the game can be played in many different ways."
