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Spacious Places is a musical health and wellness app for times when life has no chill.

Monday morning, after making breakfast for my daughters, getting them ready for the day, and driving them to school, I spent 45 minutes paying bills. By the time my monthly mortgage, car loan, utilities, and incidentals had all been paid, my wallet felt quite a bit lighter and my psyche significantly heavier. I looked ahead, to a daily planner that showed eight hours of tasks squeezed into a five hour period. “That’s life,” I shrugged, before opening my email and beginning the workday, a stiffness building in my neck.

One particular email contained a review key and press release for a new experience called Spacious Places. Described as a “mindfulness and meditation app that blends nature therapy and music [that] invites players to unwind by playing virtual instruments inside calming, beautiful environments,” Spacious Places sounded like the answer to my stressful morning.

A few minutes later, I had breezed through the app’s incredibly succinct tutorial and found myself sitting upon the sands of a virtual beach, palm trees swaying luxuriously in a gentle breeze, tickling a xylophone and rapping a bongo in time with an ephemeral soundtrack of soothing spa tunes.

The app allows users to jump between 18 environments at will, within which exist a number of “vistas,” aesthetically pleasing views of natural beauty. Here, you can simply exist in peace and solitude, to observe the (virtual) natural world, and relax.

There’s a “breathing mode” in which a pearlescent bubble blooms to life in the near distance, expanding and contracting in a slow rhythm which, if you match with your breathing, is designed to slow the heartrate and promote calm. There’s a music mode in which a selection of 16 beautiful instruments coalesce around you. You can touch them with your hands or with controllers, playing freely or trying to match the timing of the existing background music. And there’s a mode where the instruments and breathing bubble disappear entirely, replacing these with the ability to blow bubbles, create floating lanterns, shoot fireworks, or generate snowflakes.

Technically, Spacious Places does what it intends to do. The environments look gorgeous, the instruments play realistically (though with a simplicity that promotes accessibility), and the overall vibe is chill and peaceful. It’s a relaxing little break from the everyday stress of modern living. While it won’t change your life, and it’s not designed to be a real replacement for getting outside, exercising, or talking to a therapist, it is indeed a nice place to visit, breathe, and twiddle with a xylophone.

A half hour later, I closed the app and pulled off the headset. Despite generally eschewing meditation and self-care in favor of adopting a “work through it” mentality, I had to admit that I felt a bit calmer, a bit more relaxed, and despite wearing a VR headset for the previous half hour, my neck muscles were less rigid than they had been immediately following my bill-paying spree. Now that’s remarkable.

Spacious Places is free to download. It includes a demo level, with the full experience available as an in-app purchase for $12.99. A 20% discount is available for the first two weeks, post-launch.

Spacious Places is available now on Meta Quest.

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The post Bandai Namco’s Hit Puzzle Platformer Series ‘Little Nightmares’ Comes to VR in April, Trailer Here appeared first on Road to VR.

We went hands on with Bandai Namco’s Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes on PlayStation VR2 at GDC 2026. How is it? Read on.

If you’re not familiar with the Little Nightmares franchise, it is a series of puzzle-based platform horror games played in third person. Altered Echoes bridges off the stories of the first two games. Without getting too deep into spoilers, Altered Echoes stars Dark Six, the dark corrupted version of Six, who starred in the first game and is a prominent part of the second. As it was explained to me, Dark Six is on a journey to reunite with Six.

The demo was played on a PlayStation VR2 in a first person view. One thing pointed out to me right away was a silhouette of Six/Dark Six’s signature hood present in the field of view while playing. It doubles as both added immersion and a lore-friendly way to help newer users with motion sickness via a makeshift vignette. The demo was also in snap turn only. I didn’t have time to check the options to see if I could disable it as I only had thirty minutes to play the demo.

I started in a deserted train station and right away the sense of scale stood out. In keeping with the franchise continuity, everything around you is larger than you. A simple row of chairs or a stack of suitcases becomes a near insurmountable mountain. Altered Echoes gets this right away. I spent the first few minutes in awe of how I, a 6 foot tall husky guy, felt so small in this world. Immersion? Check.

This early stretch was a simple matter of calling and then boarding a train. First few rooms were simple enough. Find a switch or repair a fuse to power up the station and open the next door. Pretty basic stuff. The level design is what stands out here. Not just the aforementioned sense of scale, but between the security cameras’ lights turning from green to red and following me if I was in line of sight, a light use of fog, and the eerie lack of music making every sound (like a door shutting behind me) shudder-inducing, I was tentative with every move. Atmosphere? Check.

After navigating a death trap of a moving maze, I boarded the train and the real horror kicked in. The train was filled with sleeping adult passengers. Disrupting their slumber by bumping into one of them or breaking one of the dinner plates woke them up and summoned the Conductor: a grotesque worm like creature patrolling the cabin cars. Here Dark Six has to simply get from one end of the cabin to the other without being caught by the conductor. It’s stealth horror at its finest. Get spotted and go back to the start to try again. My time ran out shortly after this just as I made it to the kitchen car adjacent to a dining room with several hungry looking patrons. If you are not familiar with the franchise, hungry adults in Little Nightmares is a bad thing.

Overall, this demo was terrific. Visually, the game looked great in the PS VR2. The closest adjacent experience I have played in VR is Out Of Sight, which similarly plays with world scale and would be a good primer to check out before Little Nightmares drops next month.

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is scheduled for release on April 24. The game can be wishlisted now on Quest, PS VR2, and Steam.

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