Cosmonious High review — Step into high school once again in this funny and creative VR adventure

Cosmonious High is the perfect playground for those new to VR or looking for a game to blow off some steam. There are no repercussions for your actions, you are given a multitude of fun powers to experiment with, and the game actively encourages you to create chaos. It also helps that Cosmonious High is quite funny, filled with a diverse cast of characters with unique personalities, and makes great use of VR mechanics. Unfortunately, the entire experience is over too quickly, and the story is never much more than a reason to mess around in VR.

Cosmonious High begins with you crash landing in a school which is on the verge of falling apart – fires are everywhere, rooms are locked, pipes are burst, meteors are bursting through the windows, and students are scattered throughout the building in disarray – but imminent disaster is not a reason to cancel classes, so you must fight your way through the chaos, earning new powers in each classroom you visit which you can then use to help rebuild the school.

You are Prismi, the first of your kind to attend the school, and you have the rare ability to obtain new powers. These powers range from being able to spray streams of water from your hands to being able to create crystals on the fly. Each power you are imbued with can be used to help you navigate the halls of Cosmonious High, slowly piecing the school back together and unlocking new areas to explore.

The main thrust of the game is repairing the school while attending ridiculously named classes such as chemosophy. Each course has a variety of assignments to complete, all of which are wildly varied and have you make great use of your newly obtained powers. You may find yourself creating formulas in chemistry, dyeing your water powers so you can haphazardly paint an entire room, shooting some hoops, or helping write love poems. The variety is impressive and each task feels unique.  Cosmonious High is essentially a playground, and as such how you accomplish a goal is often left up to you to figure out. Sure, there are a few specific tasks you must handle in a specific way, but more often the game allows you to go wild, creating a mess or pushing you to let your creativity shine. It’s all quite fun and easy, with the only challenge often being where to go next.

Water powers can be used to put out fires, ice powers can fix electrical boxes or create ice sheets, crystals can be used to attach broken cables, you can shrink or enlarge objects, use powers to create mini tornadoes, and so much more. Aside from your abilities, nearly everything is interactive, and half the fun comes from throwing everything you find and overall creating more havoc than repairs.

There is a grand hall where you can track the currently open classrooms, where to head next, what repairs still need completed, and more. Additionally, there are cards to collect and credits to earn from experiments scattered throughout the school. While there is no shortage of things to do, there is a significant lack of any real story to encourage you to continue messing around after you’ve completed all the available class assignments.

Overall, the entire experience lasts around 5 hours, with a few more to be squeezed out by those determined to make every repair and to find every collectible, but those five hours are memorable, and few will find the time they spend in Cosmonious High wasted.

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