Lucent VR Is The Prettiest Quest 3 Experience I've Ever Played

Lucent VR, a recently-released exploration experience, is one of the most technically stunning and artfully inspired destinations on Quest 3.

Lucent VR looks amazing on Quest 3, and it’s instantly become my personal showcase for the heights that standalone VR graphics can reach.

In Lucent VR, you explore seven scenes, interact with your environment, and enjoy the sights and sounds of these wonderfully crafted virtual spaces. When you begin, only one scene is available, but hidden artifacts found scattered throughout the experience gradually unlock the rest.

There’s an island, grassland, a snowy vista, a rainy house, a crackling mountainside campfire under a gorgeous night sky, an undersea area, and an interplanetary romp upon one of Saturn’s moons.

Each of these scenes is beautiful in its own way. Visually, the game is exceptional, presenting some of the best graphics that I’ve seen in a Quest experience. But they’re also artfully created, with some moments triggering my photographer sensibilities. More than once I found myself taking pictures in-game, wishing I could display them in real life.

Lucent VR is also technically impressive. The water physics are phenomenal, reacting to our touch, carrying floating objects, diffusing the sunlight to the seafloor below. It looks and behaves simply beautifully.

But artful design is not just about visuals. It’s about creating an environment that speaks to something deeper. Lucent VR brings that too, for example, when in the campfire scene we’re visited by an unexpected guest, or when a gargantuan whale appears from out of the blue in the underwater zone. These are fun or awe-inspiring moments, and certainly worth experiencing without spoilers.

Lucent VR’s less grand moments are thoughtfully designed, too. There’s something surreal about these environments, and something lovely, too, about wiping the steam from a window, and peering through the mist to the rainy mountain valley below, and watching the clouds drift and reshape themselves endlessly, and the way that water droplets bead off your goggles when you emerge from the sea into the sunshine.

These artful touches coalesce around Lucent VR’s broader audio design. Consisting mostly of relaxing ambient noises of rustling plants, ebbing tides, and gentle breezes, the game’s soundscape puts you in a slow-down state of mind. There’s the realistic sound of water filtering into your ears as you descend beneath the surface, and the muffled echo of submerged eardrums, and the crunch of snow beneath your boots, and the patter of rain on window panes.

Not all of Lucent VR’s scenes are perfect. Some aren’t as interactive as others, or as vast, while some are inherently less impressive than others. It’s hard for a cozy house to really feel as epic as bouncing around on a moon in space, after all. And while I personally adore the relaxing vibe, simply existing and enjoying the sights and sounds of a cool technical showcase, some players might become bored pretty quickly. At a leisurely pace, you’ll run through the currently offered seven scenes in about two hours.

And though I’ve called Lucent VR a game several times in this writing, Lucent VR is not really a game in the usual sense. It’s something else. I can appreciate it for what it is, but maybe you can’t. Neither perspective is right or wrong.

What I do know is that I keep returning to Lucent VR’s windswept grassland, an experience that feels as striking to me as ThatGameCompany’s Flower did when I first played it on PlayStation 3 back in 2009. And while Lucent VR is even less a traditional game than the unconventional Flower, it’s no less impactful.

Wherever people talk about games as art, they almost always mention Flower. I get the feeling that those of us who “play” Lucent VR will still be talking about it years from now.

Lucent VR is now available on Quest 3 headsets via the Meta Horizon Store.