Tea For God Review - A VR Game Played Completely By Walking

Tea For God is an indie project with a single developer, one songwriter, and one extremely good voice actor. Tea For God has been around for a while and has changed a lot over time.

It is also in active development but is currently a complete experience that you can play from beginning to end. This isn't just a half-baked tech demo, though there is some very unique tech to experience in Tea For God, and I'm not just talking about all of the laser guns and robots.

The setup for the game is simple. You're a futuristic soldier who has a problem with the god emperor of humanity. So you go to deliver her some tea, and inside the tea is a metric ton of explosives.

The plot of Tea For God is both straightforward and impossible to understand

To get to the emperor with your tea you need to traverse a number of different levels in a technologically advanced but desolate future earth. Also, there's a war going on for some reason that I never fully understood.

I like the premise a lot, but the premise isn't what drew me into this game. No, when I first read Tea For God's SideQuest page and downloaded the free demo, what really interested me was this tagline. Quote, "Tea For God is a VR adventure that uses impossible spaces with procedural generation to allow players infinite movement within their own room."

The Tea For God SideQuest page

I was instantly intrigued, and also instantly curious as to why I hadn't heard of this game before. Tea For God can, and should, be played completely by walking.

I mean physically walking. With your feet, like you're going to the grocery store or something. Seriously, real life walking. No joystick movement to slide you around, though that's an option if you haven't got the space for a roomscale boundary, and no teleporting by pointing your controller somewhere. As you progress through the sci-fi, technological hellscape of future Earth you do it completely by using your feet.

After playing for a while you actually walk quite a bit. I racked up 150 meters in 10 minutes when first trying the demo.

Most importantly walking with your own two feet in this game felt absolutely amazing and freeing. It's a hard feeling to describe, but I'm going to try anyway. It's sort of like... standing up for the first time after a long bus or plane ride. It feels good to move your legs instead of just standing or sitting in place.

The realization that slowly dawned on me when I first saw a place in the game and realized that I could actually physically walk over to the thing I was seeing in VR with my actual legs was both hard to compute and incredibly freeing.

Fighting a centipede robot in Tea For God

Even after playing the demo the first time I started the game I tried to use the joystick purely by reflex. Tea For God's freedom of using actual, real movement took a little to settle in at first, but when it did I felt so much more than usual that I was actually in the world.

It was sort of like the first time ever playing a VR game, another barrier, another abstraction, between what I was physically doing and what my eyes were seeing was removed. In this way, Tea For God is an incredibly unique VR experience and you should definitely at least try the free demo of it just to experience how a Virtual Reality game can give you such freedom.

So how does Tea For God do this? By using something called "Impossible Space." This is basically when you've got a room and some hallways... but they don't actually make sense. A new hallway can go right into the same space the hallway you just came out of came from. This is one of the things that makes Tea For God a bit of a trip.

The space you walk through doesn't entirely make sense. It loops back in on itself, and there would be no way to physically make a building in the layout of a Tea For God level, hallways and rooms would run into each other. In VR though this makes it so that when you reach the edge of your playspace, the next generated section of rooms and hallways will loop back to an empty area that you can physically walk through, so you never reach the end of your playspace.

You do end up walking in circles a lot, and the game can feel like running through a maze, but that's all necessary to keep you inside your playspace. This game is an incredible technical achievement for pulling this off so smoothly. There was the occasional bug with the generation of an area, but this was really rare.

Getting hit in Tea For God

Tea For God also makes great use of verticality not only to provide a sense of grandness and scale, but to also make the levels not feel as cramped, and give you the feeling of going somewhere. Elevators and moving machines of all kinds also cart you around the level, which makes sense, your conception of your real life body is being moved in the game, and so while technically this is a way to teleport you around from time to time, it doesn't feel like it.

No other game has pulled off what Tea For God does with its movement system alone. Try the demo, and play this game purely just to see what playing a shooter is like by walking from place to place. It's a transformative Virtual Reality experience that everyone should try at least once.

Even if what I'm about to say about the gameplay doesn't sound appealing, download the demo and give it a shot once so you can feel what I'm talking about here.

It's incredible, and I think you'll be impressed. Also, play this game on a standalone headset like a Quest if you can. The impossible space concept involves a lot of turning around in circles, and so if you've got a cord hanging from your headset it'll get twisted and tangled really fast.

Tea For God - The Gameplay

Anyway the gameplay! Well here's where Tea For God is less impressive. Since all of the rooms you're going through are procedurally generated, you'll find this a less balanced or fair experience if you try to just play it through from beginning to end like it's Half-Life Alyx or something. Tea For God can be played straight through to experience the world and story with the challenging bits in between, or as a roguelike.

You can turn off a lot of the management bits and the need to navigate through levels to make it a more action-focused experience, and there are a ton of modifiers you can use to change the game up and make it easier or harder.

The customizability is cool, but for this review, I'm going to talk about the game in the way I played it, as a single campaign played from beginning to end with all of the features enabled, no modifiers, and every death brought me back to the latest checkpoint.

Tea For God is a VR shooter at heart.

You navigate by following signs with arrows that point in the direction you want to go on the map and fight your way through the mazes of impossible hallways and rooms until you reach the end of the level, and then you keep completing levels until there are no more. Also, some cool stuff happens in between like Turret sections, epic setpiece battles, and the occasional epic spaceship crash.

There’s a war going on. Not sure why though

You've got guns and a variety of little robots and devices to find to help you combat threats. Each of your arms has a holder for a weapon that you can activate with the trigger to bring the weapon into your hand, and you also have a couple of holsters on either leg.

Both of your arms have separate energy meters, and firing a weapon or using one of the unlockable abilities uses energy for that arm. You also have a personal shield that functions as your health. Your shields recharge once you haven't taken damage for a while, so if you take a lot of damage quickly you're destroyed.

Your shields will only recharge if you still have shield energy banked though, so you don't have infinitely recharging health, just a pool of health that can and will run out. You can recharge your energy at energy recharge stations and your shields at shield recharge stations as you progress through the game.

The recharge stations are pretty spread out, and once I did get into an infinite instant death loop because I had almost no health at both the autosave and the save at the start of the chapter. For some reason, not a single shield recharging station spawned throughout the entire second level, which is very likely unintentional and just a quirk of the procedural generation. This was not a fun time for me, though generally, you'll find enough of them spread out to avoid this frustration.

Recharging shields at a shield recharge station

As something designed as a roguelike, Tea For God also has a roguelike progression system. Every time you die you get experience points based on how far you got and how many enemies you destroyed. You can also find upgrade stations throughout the game, and some of these upgrades become unlockable in the main menu using these experience points.

You can fit two upgrades on each arm, at least in the advanced mode, in the action focused mode you can fit more. Some are passive like a damage boost, and some require clicking a button on your controller to activate like this amazing power I found that confuses all robots near you for a short period of time. I never would have gotten through my infinite dying loop in the second level of the game without it.

There are also a lot of weapons to find in the game. Sometimes just lying around, or dropped by enemies. these weapons all have different parts and stats to them. Some are slow charging and heavy hitting. Some rapid fire, and some even function as shotguns or burst firing pistols. However I found mostly powerful single shot weapons and craved more variety in my choices. That too, was probably a quirk of the generation.

The weapons in this game have a ton of stats

There are a couple of weapon types too. Mostly you'll be using plasma weapons, which are classic laser bolt shooters. Though there are also discharge weapons that function more like a futuristic taser, and corrosive weapons that shoot green at enemies and then cover them in a fart cloud.

Different enemy types will respond differently depending on what weapon you use. Some are armored and will shrug off weak attacks, some have shields you need to shoot around or punch through, and some try to avoid being destroyed by you by being small and fast. The enemy variety in Tea For God keeps you guessing, and that's a good thing.

You also fight these enemies in a variety of different environments. A lot of fighting takes place in the maze like series of corridors and rooms that you find yourself wandering through, but this is changed up pretty often with large areas and big combat arenas that get you into some longer ranged laser battles. Considering that you won't be using your joystick to slide from cover to cover, the combat feels really amazing in this game.

Gunfights feel a lot like SUPERHOT VR when you're physically peeking out from pieces of cover to get a shot off and then dashing to a new area to reposition. Not having to use clunky movement methods during a fight means that the fighting feels a lot more natural.

You're actually taking cover by moving to cover instead of joystick sliding towards it and ducking down. I damn near pulled a hamstring once or twice. The overall feel of the combat is intense and personal. However that tends to be the case mostly in large rooms and big epic fights. Most of the combat is done within the generated hallways and corridors.

The biggest fights are the best in Tea For God

The majority of the game is very cramped, even with the pretty big playspace I was using to record this footage. So most fights end up being at point blank range. This isn't as interesting as it could be, and I was really hungry for more variety in the combat.

I felt like fighting in the impossible space mazes was either a breeze or overwhelming as a few times in the game a seemingly infinite number of robots came out of nowhere. Only in the epic boss battle sections that were likely hand crafted and balanced combat experiences did the combat feel even between myself and the attacking robots.

Luckily, to even the odds you've got some devices you can find to help you out too. Like a shield that can absorb quite a bit of punishment before disappearing, or explosive traps that can be planted into a wall. Some of the little robots you find around function like this as well. Hostile robots are red while neutral ones are white or black, and some of the neutral robots are really helpful.

The little can shaped ones regenerate some energy, and you can press a switch on the spider bots to make them run towards the nearest enemy and explode. These combined with the unlockable abilities give you more options than just shooting and make the combat much more interesting if you think for a moment about how to approach each situation.

A prepared ambush in Tea For God

Tea For God doesn't explain this to you though, you'll have to figure out how these devices work when you first come across them, and that's an interesting thought in this game. Discovering the interactions you can do with these little robots to help you out is interesting and gave me a few aha moments that made me feel like a very smart cookie for figuring them out.

Either I just missed a lot of them, or there aren't as many as the developer likely wanted there to be. When you figure out a machine once, and they're generally not very complicated, you've figured out all of them forever.

Speaking of ideas with good intentions that didn't quite pan out in this game, there's also a sort of crafting system where you can exchange the parts of your weapons in special rooms. In fact the weapon system is really quite complicated with a lot going on under the hood.

Each weapon has an impressive set of stats to compare, match, and exchange. Personally, I never got really into this system. I exchanged some parts once or twice, but never had an "aha" moment where I really felt like I could improve something. Again, procedural generation, you have to work with what is generated for you to get.

Each weapon description reads like a book with a bunch of symbols and shorthand and well... figuring that out might be part of the game, but I felt better off understanding my weapons by blasting a bot or two with them instead of piecing together my own instruction manual for reading the description.

Protecting myself with a shield in Tea For God

So the combat, and really the whole game, is either an extremely fantastic one of a kind mind bending and unique VR experience, or just kind of okay. I really wish the excellent impossible space technology of Tea For God was combined with more interesting gameplay, and while procedural generation is necessary to make infinitely physically walking in a VR world possible, it feels like it really needs some tuning to give a more balanced feeling experience.

Tea For God Review - Visuals and Sound

Tea For God looks pretty basic. Lots of blocks, not much texturing to speak of, but cmon it's a futuristic sci fi distopia. Everything is usually pretty drab and that's a good thing here because the whole setting and world is drab. You're on a suicide mission, there's a war going on, and there's nothing natural and non robotic in sight

I really got the feel of this future where everything is huge and impressive and so advanced technologically, but also very bleak.

You don't see a single plant in the whole game, but a lot of guns, warships, and assembly lines. The world of Tea For God is awesome to visit, but I certainly wouldn't want to live there.

Earth is desolate in the future of Tea For God

There are still some incredible vistas and views, and after physically walking and running through the cramped interior mazes being suddenly presented with a grand vista of an impossible technological sci fi landscape is not only refreshing but absolutely amazing. A few times I found myself floored and enjoyed just looking at some of the ambitious and excellent scenery that really sells you the scale of the world you're in.

The sound is the same way. Simple, and mostly confined to a few generic sounding music tracks and the whirring and clacking of robots or the machines you are surrounded by.

There are a few moments, like when a warship passes overhead, where the boom of the insane science keeping it afloat really stopped and drew me in as it passed by. (clip here) These moments are pretty few though, and generally, the sound is serviceable, though Tea For God should really get some better weapon sound effects, they're the worst of all, have no punch, and sound cartoonish. Though I do have to say the robots did scare the hell out of me a few times, in a good way.

Overall it could use some more touch ups here and there, but generally, Tea For God looks and sounds minimalist, which I think works for the game's setting and makes complete sense considering there is a single developer and musician working on this.

There are a lot of very impressive views in this VR game

The last thing I'll talk about is the story. As I've mentioned the narrator sounds fantastic, but despite the strong premise the story just kind of... hangs. Your guy says some stuff, but most of it doesn't make sense and has no context.

There is maybe a race of bug aliens attacking. Also, tentacles are taking over some stuff. Uhhh yeah, the story is vague, full of proper nouns and names with no explanation, and really up to interpretation. The developer really went for the Dark Souls school of narrative design, but without awesome item descriptions to fill in the gaps and contemplate.

The story makes no sense, and unless you really like being generally confused about the wider world, we can leave the plot of Tea For God at "You're trying to get to the emperor to blow her up." Also shouldn't it be empress? The emperor is always called her, but then they say emperor instead of empress.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and try the Tea For God demo for the walking movement and impossible space procedural generation, it's absolutely mind melting and unique in a great way.

Despite all of the negative things I've said about Tea For God in this review I don't regret buying the full game and playing it through, and I don't regret creating this long review. It's an okay game with an insanely awesome way to move around with your real legs. It's available on the Quest store and Steam, and the demo is free.

Seriously. Try the demo, especially if you have a Quest. I highly recommend you try Tea For God for free. Okay, I'll stop now, enjoy yourself out there in VR.