The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed

The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed
Information
VR/AR	VR
Developer	Cloudhead Games
Publisher	Cloudhead Games
Platform	SteamVR, Oculus Rift (Platform), Viveport
Device	HTC Vive, Oculus Rift
Operating System	Windows
Type	Full Game
Genre	Adventure, Puzzle, Indie, VR, Episodic, First-Person, Great Soundtrack, 1980s, Kickstarter, Atmospheric, Story Rich
Input Device	Tracked motion controllers
Play Area	Standing, Room-Scale
Game Mode	Single Player
Language	English
Rating	ESRB: Teen (Violence, Language)
Review	Very Positive
Release Date	April 5, 2016 (HTC Vive); December 6, 2016 (Oculus Rift with Oculus Touch)
Price	US$14.99 (October 2026); US$29.99 at launch
App Store	Steam, Meta Horizon Store, Viveport
Website	https://www.cloudheadgames.com
Infobox Updated	10/21/2026

The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed is a first-person puzzle and exploration adventure game for virtual reality, developed and published by the Canadian studio Cloudhead Games. It is the first episode of Cloudhead's episodic series The Gallery, which takes its tone from dark fantasy adventure films of the 1980s. The game was released on 5 April 2016 as a launch title for the HTC Vive on SteamVR, and a version for the Oculus Rift with Oculus Touch controllers followed on 6 December 2016, as part of the Touch launch lineup.

The project began as The Gallery: Six Elements, a 2013 Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift, and was rebuilt for room-scale tracking after Cloudhead received early SteamVR hardware from Valve. The game shipped with Blink, Cloudhead's teleport-based movement system, and was bundled with new HTC Vive headsets from August 2016. It was followed in October 2017 by The Gallery - Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Release dates, Kickstarter figures, development history, Vive bundles, PlayStation VR status, prices, Steam requirements, story, gameplay and review summary checked against the developer, store and press sources in the meta file. About review dates.

Gameplay

Call of the Starseed is played standing or in a room-scale space, with a tracked motion controller representing each hand. Objects such as bottles, flares, batteries and cassette tapes can be picked up and handled, and the game asks the player to move physically, including sitting, standing, crouching and crawling, to look in, under and around parts of the scenery. Key items go into a backpack that floats in the play space; the player reaches behind to use it. Objects can also be pulled from a short distance. There is no combat.

Movement over longer distances uses Blink, Cloudhead's teleportation system. The player holds the touchpad, aims a destination marker on the ground, sets the facing direction with a thumb swipe, and releases to move there; the view jumps to the new position instead of gliding through the scene, which is meant to avoid the discomfort of smooth artificial movement. Snap turning is available, but the game has no smooth turning option.

The puzzles are short, hands-on tasks: following a Morse code message, firing a flare gun at a set of bells to distract a sentient lighthouse, assembling a machine, and catching battery cells that float in zero gravity. Cloudhead has said that the puzzles were inspired by Myst and were designed to advance the narrative, not only to unlock new areas, and that one hidden area is a homage to a scene from The Goonies.

Story

The player character, Alex, begins with a cassette tape from his twin sister, Elsie, asking him to meet her at a windswept cove. Further collectible tapes hidden along the way carry her story, and Alex is helped by an unhinged, sewer-dwelling professor who may have motives of his own. Locations include a beach, the cove, the professor's cave hideout and a lighthouse. The search for Elsie leads to a powerful cosmic machine and a shadowy figure who resides within it, and the episode ends with a cutscene. The tone and mood draw on 1980s fantasy films such as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

Development

Cloudhead Games was founded in 2013 solely to make virtual reality games. It launched a Kickstarter campaign for The Gallery: Six Elements in early March 2013, about a month before the first Oculus Rift development kits (Oculus Rift DK1) reached developers. The game was pitched as a Myst-like first-person adventure designed for the Rift but playable without it, for PC and Mac, in which the player would travel through six painted portals representing the "core elements of life". The campaign closed on 17 April 2013 with US$82,937 pledged by 1,568 backers against a US$65,000 goal. It also met two stretch goals: Razer Hydra motion-controller support at US$70,000 and a female avatar at US$80,000. Cloudhead planned to release the game on Steam through Steam Greenlight. Cloudhead's CEO and creative director, Denny Unger, later said the studio had asked for the bare minimum because it was a three-person team with a much smaller scope at the time.

Early builds used the Oculus Rift with Razer Hydra controllers, including a ladder-climbing mechanic that required players to mimic real climbing movements. In February 2015, Cloudhead announced that Jeremy Soule, the composer of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, would write the score. At the end of 2014 the studio attended what Unger called Valve's "secret summit", and it received prototype SteamVR hardware in January 2015, initially a 3D-printed headset that was later fitted with two 1200 x 1080 displays. Cloudhead had about two months to build a demo for the first public demonstrations of SteamVR and the HTC Vive at the Game Developers Conference in March 2015. Before that event, the studio said that it now had "a hardware target that matches the original vision for The Gallery: Six Elements". Unger said the team relied on hand tracking for the demo because there was not enough time to implement the studio's simulated root tracking system, and he later explained that early builds had shown a full body with the Hydra, but as room-scale tracking improved the team removed the legs and then the arms because it could not track elbows or feet convincingly.

In August 2015, Cloudhead confirmed that The Gallery would be released in episodes, with Call of the Starseed as the first, and announced Blink, which it showed on the HTC Vive at PAX Prime in Seattle at the end of that month. Unger said the episodic format let players take in the story in smaller pieces rather than one very long game. By the time of release the project had taken about three years, and the team included former staff of studios such as BioWare, Relic, Riot and EA; it grew to about 20 people by 2016. Cloudhead has said that it built the first episode to ease new players into VR, with length and pacing closer to an interactive movie than the later episodes. In 2016 Unger said that teleportation, which Cloudhead had helped to develop, "does have a negative impact on immersion", and that the studio was prototyping other movement methods to complement Blink.

In October 2016, Valve asked Cloudhead to build a demo for Steam Dev Days in Seattle, a few days before the event, to show its prototype capacitive-touch hand controllers (later known as "Knuckles"). Cloudhead took a section of Episode 1 and filled it with objects that attendees could pick up and handle.

Release

Call of the Starseed was released on Steam on 5 April 2016, the launch day of the HTC Vive, at US$29.99. It was also sold through HTC's Viveport store. In August 2016, HTC replaced Fantastic Contraption and Job Simulator in the free software bundle for new Vive purchases with Call of the Starseed and Zombie Training Simulator, alongside Tilt Brush. On 31 January 2017, HTC expanded the bundle to four titles: Call of the Starseed, Zombie Training Simulator, Everest VR and Richie's Plank Experience.

The Oculus Rift version was released on the Oculus Store on 6 December 2016, as one of the launch titles for Oculus Touch. Unger, who had discussed early VR with Palmer Luckey on forums in 2012, said that with the Oculus release the studio had "come full circle". He listed the systems Cloudhead had developed for the game as "hand tracking, constraint & interaction, body persistence, VR comfort mode, and Blink Locomotion".

A PlayStation VR version was considered, but none has been released. In September 2017, Cloudhead said that a port of the first episode was under consideration but not committed, because bringing a game designed for room-scale VR to PlayStation VR "requires a bit more effort and care".

Platform	Release date	Notes
HTC Vive (SteamVR, Steam)	5 April 2016	Vive launch title; US$29.99 at launch
Oculus Rift (Oculus Store)	6 December 2016	Requires Oculus Touch; Touch launch lineup
Call of the Starseed Original Soundtrack (Steam)	5 April 2017	Free download
PlayStation VR	Not released	Port considered in 2017

As of October 2026, the game is sold for US$14.99 on Steam and as a PC VR title on the Meta Horizon Store. The Steam version is VR-only, requires Windows, includes native Oculus Rift support, and supports Steam Achievements (18 in total), Steam Cloud and SteamVR Collectibles. In the United States it is rated Teen by the ESRB for violence and language. Steam also sells it in a bundle with Episode 2.

Reception

Critical reception was generally favorable. Reviewers praised the voice acting, the spatial audio, the sense of hand presence and the 1980s fantasy atmosphere, and one called it possibly the most polished VR game he had played. The main criticism was its length: estimates of playing time ranged from about one to three hours, and one reviewer felt the US$29.99 launch price was steep for that length. A retrospective review in 2017 found that the game had aged, citing basic textures, a limited number of grip points on objects, teleport targeting and distance grabbing that were sometimes hard to use, and the lack of smooth turning, while still calling it a well-realized cinematic experience.

The game won Best Narrative Experience at the 2016 Proto Awards. By October 2016 The Gallery had passed US$1 million in sales; Unger noted that the studio had spent more than that building it. Cloudhead's store description says the game has won more than 30 awards, including "VR Game of the Year".

Sequel and series status

The second episode, The Gallery - Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone, was released for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift on 18 October 2017. In a December 2020 question-and-answer session with players, Cloudhead said it would like to make a third episode but was waiting for a larger VR market and a next-generation step in VR hardware, and that nothing official was in development. The studio's later work includes the rhythm shooter Pistol Whip.

Features

System requirements

Windows

Minimum

OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel Core i5-4590
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290
DirectX: Version 11