XR Design Analysis: The Beautiful Simplicity of Land’s End
Before trying Land’s End by ustwo games late last year, I did not quite know what to expect. The art style carried influences from the studios’ previous titles like Monument Valley, but the gameplay appeared to be a simple gaze-based puzzler. Today I can confidently say that Land’s End is a remarkable VR adventure that lets its simplicity take center stage. Let us dive into the design of this game and break down how its subtractive visuals and interactions create a memorable experience.
Gaze-Based Controls
Released in 2018 and designed for the Oculus Go (but playable on the Oculus Quest 1 via backward compatibility), Land’s End removes the use of the controller and establishes its entire interaction structure using gaze-based controls.
User Movement
The experience starts with moving your head towards white circular points designed to respond to your gaze. Land’s End quickly confirms these points as an interaction pattern by using these points as a method of locomotion. User movement is smooth, fluid, and comfortable, and it is surprising to see how much distance you can cover at a time. This single-scheme, no-button approach is considerably unique by today’s standards, where there more types of locomotion that use a variety of controller inputs and accommodate a range of player styles.
By using gaze as a form of movement, the games’ designers understand where you are always looking and purposefully leverage this fact to enhance the feeling of scale in the environment. Frequently you will move through caves and crevices and into more open environments, only to experience an intentional amount of visual-sensory overload. Thanks to clever environment design and sound design (which we will talk about later), the visual “wow” moments are masterfully done and never stretch into the territory of shock value.
Solving Puzzles
The core game loop of Land’s End is its gaze-based puzzles, which challenge you to ‘draw’ a line between an outlined triangle and a circle in the environment. Puzzles start when you look at a triangle to generate a line that attaches to the center of your gaze. The challenge begins when you are tasked with connecting this line to all empty points in the environment and ending the connection by attaching the line to the outlined circle. The line has a maximum distance in which it can travel, and will dissolve if it is stretched too far or if it overlaps onto itself.
As you progress through Land’s End, the elements of its puzzles evolve to use your gaze in more exciting ways. One of the most interesting elements of later puzzles is the use of your gaze to physically move objects in the environment. This works by looking at an object with a specific imprint and then moving your head to lift the object in the direction of your gaze. The object you move also has weight properties that are tied to its visual size, meaning the larger the object is, the heavier and less control you will have when moving it.
Use of Geometric Patterns
Throughout Land’s End, you will encounter different types of puzzles in a variety of minimalistic environments that stimulate your spatial thinking. However, the use of simple geometric shapes helps to avoid confusion on how to interact with these puzzles.
As a basic example, the use of a triangle and circle are used to denote the respective starting and ending points of the line created through the users’ gaze. Empty dots are used to help the line travel, and the size of these dots neatly contains the width of the line that is drawn. The combination of these shapes helps to create the affordance that the line should pass through these points, and have a clear start and end.
Unique shapes such as those used to represent objects that can be moved are different than those used when solving line puzzles. However, the style in which they appear is very similar to the style of the shapes used when solved puzzles. This is a great example of how to use consistent visual language to represent the interaction capacity of an object, and is also an example of how an interaction can be tutorialized or encourage curiosity even though no additional text is presented.
Layered Sound Design
The sound design of Land’s End has become one of my most striking examples of how sound can take on a form of its own, and provide a tangible experiential benefit in a minimalistic setting. While the audio in other games may be reactive, meaning a sound is played only when a button is pressed or an enemy is hit, the audio in Land’s End leans heavily on layering different sounds based on user intent in a way that feels organic and incredibly responsive.
Solving puzzles is a prime example of this audible brilliance. When hovering your gaze over a triangle to start a puzzle, you’ll hear a combination of static-like sounds that build up to a sound that is heard when a line is created. The sounds start in the spectrum of a higher frequency and then ‘thump’ to a lower frequency at the same moment in which a line is created. The line itself emits a high-pad tone, and connecting the line to empty points plays a high-pitched vocal chirping sound that separates nicely against the environmental ambiance. The layering of these sounds not only makes you aware that you are actively solving a puzzle but creates a type of feeling, between the high-pitched chirping and static-sounding effect, like the game is trying to speak.
Another example is the combination of sounds that play when moving objects. These sets of sounds are of a lower frequency than the sounds played when solving line-based puzzles but are intentional to add an audible feeling of weight to objects and create a type of texture that adds to the feeling of movement. These types of sounds also cleverly push out some environmental ambiance and deepen the level of focus for the user.
Conclusion
Land’s End is an extraordinary example of what minimalism of design looks like within VR and stands as one of the most cleverly executed puzzle experiences that use simplicity to its advantage.
Stay tuned for my next article, and feel free to leave a comment about your experience with Land’s End.
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