The plot drives you forward without getting in the way of your enjoyment of Call of the Mountain’s incredible world.

It’s not the world’s most intricate story, and it really doesn’t need to be. His quest to find his lost sibling and redeem his past misdeeds will take him to the highest peaks of the Carja Sundom. You play as Ryas, a master climber and disgraced soldier who’s in search of his missing brother, Urid. There are no black bars, no illusion-shattering sense of looking at a screen. It’s a good thing you start off seated and bound in a canoe because all you’ll want to do for the first several minutes is look around - at the crystal-clear water, the textures of the colorful fabrics your captors wear, the intricate architecture of the ruins crumbling around you, and lumbering mechanical beasts in the distance. Horizon: Call of the Mountain is a visual marvel from its opening moments. The visuals in Call of the Mountain will dazzle you at every turn. It’s like having a theme-park experience in your very own home. With stunning environments and a gratifying sense of progression, Guerilla and Firesprite have created an astonishing VR game you’ll want to spend hours with. This keeps the focus on immersion and exploration, rather than fiddling with finicky button inputs and timing.

Core mechanics like traversal and combat have a generous margin of error and can be customized extensively depending on your appetite (or lack thereof) for a challenge. Call of the Mountain succeeds where so many other ambitious VR projects stumble for one reason - it keeps it simple.

For a brief, shining moment, I actually considered that I might have a natural affinity for archery, a latter-day Robin Hood or Katniss Everdeen.īut after spending a bit more time with Horizon: Call of the Mountain, out February 22 along with Sony’s new virtual reality headset (read our official hardware review here), I realized “innate talents” probably weren’t the source of the magic here. I yelped with glee as the beast tumbled to the floor in a shower of sparks. The arrow struck home, smack in the center of the monster’s metallic maw.

Horizon call of the mountain story