Land's End

Land's End
Information
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Developer	ustwo games
Platform	Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Go
Device	Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Go, Oculus Quest
Operating System	Android
Type	Game
Genre	Puzzle, Adventure, Exploration
Input Device	Gaze (head direction), optional gamepad for turning
Play Area	Seated
Game Mode	Single-player
Release Date	10 November 2015 (Gear VR)
Price	US$7.99 (Gear VR, at launch)
App Store	Oculus Store
Website	https://www.landsendgame.com/

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Land's End is a virtual reality puzzle and exploration game developed by ustwo games, the London studio behind the mobile game Monument Valley. It was made for the Samsung Gear VR and released through the Oculus Store on 10 November 2015 at a price of US$7.99. The player explores five island landscapes and solves puzzles to awaken an ancient civilization, using only the direction of their gaze. The game does not require a gamepad and does not use the Gear VR's side touchpad.

The game was ustwo games' first complete VR title. It later became available on the Oculus Go, and in October 2019 it was one of the Go titles that owners could play on the Oculus Quest.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Dates, price, platforms, gameplay mechanics, development quotes and reception checked against every cited source. About review dates.

Gameplay

Land's End is a first-person game set across a series of deserted islands. According to ustwo games, the player is "tasked with awakening an ancient civilization using the powers of their mind". The game has five levels. Engadget described it as roughly an hour of play in total, and 9to5Google gave an estimate of 30 to 60 minutes to finish.

All interaction is done by looking. To move, the player fixes their gaze on a "lookpoint", a small sphere of light; the game then carries the player toward it in a nearly straight line at a slow, deliberate speed. This means movement follows set routes rather than free walking. Lead designer Ken Wong compared the result to a hike "where someone has gone ahead and plotted the best trail throughout this landscape."

Puzzles use two gaze mechanics. With the first, the player looks at a marked point on a stone block, which then follows the player's gaze, so heavy blocks can be dragged through the air like telekinesis. With the second, called "star-lines", the player draws a beam of light from point to point to connect glyphs carved into rocks, like a connect-the-dots puzzle. Completing a constellation triggers a change in the world, such as parts of the landscape shifting. The two mechanics are combined: moving blocks that carry star points can make a constellation possible to complete. Engadget wrote that puzzle complexity rises with each level but stays gentle.

The landscapes were inspired by isolated places, including the Hebrides, Iceland and Saudi Arabia, and by neolithic sites such as Stonehenge. An early demo shown in 2014 was designed to be played on a swivel chair, allowing full 360-degree turning. Everyeye.it likewise recommended playing the release version on a swivel chair. Its review noted that a Bluetooth gamepad, while not required, could be paired to turn the view in steps of about 60 degrees for players who cannot turn freely.

Development

The studio announced Land's End on 3 September 2014 as a game coming only to the Samsung Gear VR, with the one-line description "A surreal trip through an archipelago of forgotten worlds." The project started as research into interaction and navigation in VR after the completion of Monument Valley, and the studio expected it to be a short piece of work. Ken Wong told TechCrunch that the team first thought the game would take about three months. According to The Verge, the team began by putting a VR camera inside Monument Valley, but found that the earlier game's impossible architecture did not work in a 3D space where players control the view. Technical director Peter Pashley told Engadget that the game was still being prototyped as a non-VR title when the team tried the Gear VR, which he described as a "step change" over the then-current Oculus Rift development kit.

Wired reported that Wong, Pashley and Dan Gray spent more than a year developing the game. At the time of the September 2015 previews, the games team had 11 members. Ken Wong, whose concept drawings first inspired Monument Valley, was the studio's lead designer; Pashley had led programming on the earlier game.

Motion sickness shaped most design decisions. Pashley said early concepts placed the player "on the shoulders of a giant", but testers felt sick when they were not in full control of the motion; settling on the final movement system took months. Wong said the team limited free movement and designed levels so players would not notice the limits, adding that the game was designed "from the start for sensitive people." The developers also found that sharp inclines and declines could cause discomfort, and that players rarely tilt their heads back, so the game seldom asks the player to look above eye level. Pashley told MCV that the team chose gaze controls because it did not want to assume players knew how to use a gamepad, and found the Gear VR's side-mounted touchpad "tiring and distracting".

The game was built in Unity. Pashley said the engine's ease of level design and short design-build-test cycles suited what the team expected to be "an incredibly iterative process", and that Unity's early commitment to VR support was a factor. He also said that VR rendering was "extremely intensive for a mobile phone".

Release

Citing an earlier Wired report, UploadVR wrote that the game had first been aimed at a December release, which passed without a launch. On 18 September 2015 ustwo games said a demo would be playable at Oculus Connect 2. On 21 September 2015 the studio released a trailer and announced a release date of 30 October 2015. The game instead launched on the Oculus Store for Gear VR on 10 November 2015, priced at US$7.99. 9to5Google reported that at launch the game worked only with the Galaxy S6 and that ustwo was working on a version for the Galaxy Note 4.

In October 2017, UploadVR listed Land's End among the games shown on Oculus's website for the upcoming Oculus Go, which was binary compatible with Gear VR. The official website lists the game as available on the Oculus Store for Oculus Go and Gear VR. In 2019, it was one of 66 Go apps selected to run on the Oculus Quest. The feature arrived in a Quest update in early October 2019; owners could install their Go purchases from the Quest library. UploadVR reported that on Quest the game supports six degrees of freedom tracking, adding positional head tracking that the original release lacked.

Platform	Date	Notes
Samsung Gear VR	10 November 2015	Launch release on the Oculus Store at US$7.99
Oculus Go	Shown for Go in October 2017, before the headset's launch	Listed on Oculus's Go website before launch; Go is binary compatible with Gear VR
Oculus Quest	October 2019	Playable as part of the Go apps on Quest program, with six degrees of freedom tracking

Reception

Previews were positive. Engadget called it "a relaxing, almost purifying experience" and reported that 30 minutes of play caused no nausea for its writer. Wired praised its landscapes, writing that "if you could live in a sunset, this may be what it feels like," while noting that head-only controls can feel awkward at first. At release, Road to VR called it "one of the most stunning and intriguing VR titles to date".

In its review, the Italian site Everyeye.it gave the game 9 out of 10, describing it as short (under two hours) but intense, and as an experience that would lose its reason to exist without a VR headset. As of October 2026, Metacritic lists one critic review and no Metascore. The game's official website quotes Polygon calling it "one of the best VR games so far". In 2019, UploadVR described Land's End as one of the best games on the Oculus Go platform.