When We Made... Demeo
Richie Shoemaker enters the virtual basement of Resolution Games’
Tommy Palm and Gustav Stenmark, as they relive the quest to build the mightiest of VR board games.
I
f you’ve ever found yourself wondering where the spirit of Wii Sports dissipated to when Balance Boards and Kinects started disappearing from living rooms, it’s likely because you haven’t strapped yourself into a Quest 2 headset recently. There, in Facebook’s curated virtual reality, you’ll find the some of the most accessible games around, such as ForeVR Bowl and Walkabout Mini Golf – games that offer the most approachable and compelling approximations of competitive and cooperative real-world pastimes as have existed since ‘casual gaming’ entered the vernacular. What’s different about this latest generation of grandpop-friendly games however (apart from the obvious immersion that VR brings), is the ease with which multiplayer games can be played and enjoyed – as much in the company of strangers on the other side of the world as with friends and relatives on the other side of town. However we might categorise such experiences, Demeo is very much among the best of them. Released last May and in receipt of a number of significant upgrades since, Demeo is a fairly simple fantasy board game played in VR. If you’ve any experience of the recently-resurrected HeroQuest, you’ll know what to expect. If you don’t, it won’t surprise you that each of up to
four players picks a class (warrior, wizard, etc) and moves their pieces around the board, killing beasts and collecting loot as they go. What is so compelling about it is that you exist in the game as a board gamer, an avatar that leers over the playing area and has to physically throw dice and move your model around. In the virtual presence of other like-minded players, it’s the closest thing to a board game night with friends you can get without needing a board game, friends, or indeed the absence of daylight. In that sense, the rules of the game are almost secondary. There are plenty of enjoyable digital board games out there – more complex ones, certainly – but Demeo is very much on its own as an experience that captures the fiddly awkwardness of playing a board game without the necessity of being fiddly or awkward.
LIVING THE DREAMEO “It’s been the game that I always wanted to do” says Tommy Palm, Resolution Games’ CEO, who like many of his generation got into programming off the back of playing Dungeons & Dragons, convinced he could create something more streamlined. However, with each new subsequent RPG he played, he became increasingly of the
66 | MCV/DEVELOP March 2022
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