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Tea for God. It’s a bizarre name for a game that utilizes the uniquely VR concept of walking endlessly through randomly generated areas and spaces. These spaces, known as “non-euclidean” spaces, can be thought of as a scene from an M.C. Escher painting, where rooms appear out of nowhere and have seemingly no beginning and no end.
In Tea for God though, everything just makes sense. When you begin, you’ll be presented with a simple hallway to walk through. Unlike most other VR games, where you traverse the virtual world by teleporting or by moving a joystick to have your character virtually walk while you stand in place, Tea for God entirely relies on you to physically move your body in order to move around the virtual world. That’s right. No teleporting. No virtual movement of any kind. It’s a weird concept when coming from so many other virtual reality games where this is the norm.
As you walk, the world is created right around the next corner, and everything is calculated to fit the precise measurement of the room you’re in. Since roomscale VR headsets like the Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift and Rift S, and the HTC Vive all rely on a guardian system that users setup to define physical barriers in the room, Tea for God has all the tools it needs to create a virtual world of this exact size already. The difference here is that a doorway always leads somewhere else, the next corner always opens up to the next room, and the elevator you’re about to enter never gets confused with physical space.
We’ve seen this concept before, and the game itself isn’t particularly new either. When the HTC Vive and original Oculus Rift came out, a title called Unseen Diplomacy used the exact same concept to build a virtual obstacle course full of lasers and puzzles to keep you, a super spy, from foiling the plans of a supervillain. We featured it several times in our HTC Vive review back in 2016 and loved the concept, but it’s seen no love at all outside of that game. That is, until Tea for God debuted.
Tea for God takes the concept that Unseen Diplomacy pioneered and adds a significant layer of depth to the strategy. It’s a rogue-like shooter that has both exploration and challenge modes with full levels, enemies, obstacles and puzzles galore. It’s a never-ending, procedurally-generated virtual world that’s even better when paired with a wireless headset, and it’s here where Tea for God’s design gets unlocked.
If you’re looking to show off that new Oculus Quest, this is one of the most amazing ways to show its true potential. You’ll need to sideload the APK to your Quest, but the process isn’t overly complicated and there’s plenty of tutorials available online to show you how. HTC Vive owners that have either available wireless adapter will also find the experience to be near perfection, as you climb through corridors and shoot around virtual corners, getting fully immersed in the experience.
Head on over to the official website to grab either the Oculus Quest APK version or the Windows version that has support for OpenVR, SteamVR, and Oculus headsets. Headsets with wires will get tangled, there’s just no getting around the fact that the cable will get twisted as you turn and turn over and over again through virtual hallways. It’s about the only thing that’ll bring you back to the real world, but Quest and wireless Vive players will be able to get the full experience on their setups.
Try it now, seriously. It’s game-changing, and it’s free.