Tethered

Does not launch. Discussion of many people having this problem. The "solution" did't work for me.

I hate games with broken achievements

This was a great game when it was released, half a decade ago, when VR was new & exciting. But that time has long since passed, and the devs have abandoned this game. So unfortunately, not worth buying today...

It's just too shallow, and has too much busywork.

It's cute. The "floating island" look, and the peeps working for you, are both nice visually. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of gameplay. Mostly what you do is send peeps around collecting resources, and not much else. At night, hostile slugs show up which you have to kill, but otherwise it's almost entirely resource gathering.

It doesn't help that your peeps don't have a lot of independence. If a resource gets exhausted, they'll stop doing anything. If a peep doesn't get orders for long enough, they start getting upset, and eventually die. Often enough you'll send peeps off to gather something arbitrary just to give them something to do and avoid the "no orders" penalty.

There's some outright busywork in there, like the fact you have to manually collect Spirit points. The goal of each scenario is to reach a certain Spirit score. You get Spirit for doing things like defeating enemies, but you don't just actually get the points until you point and them and press left-trackpad long enough to hoover them up.

The controls aren't the absolute worst VR controls I've encountered, but they're not good. Too much reliance on mapping certain actions to certain buttons, instead of using gestures or clicking on dialog choices. Some of the UI choices violate common conventions, i.e. you're constantly pressing "down" on the trackpad to select things or confirm choices, instead of the far more common "trigger as mouse click" convention. In fact, the trigger button is never used.

Ultimately, the problem is that you're constantly doing near-mindless actions, like sending idle peeps off to mine something, and only very rarely making anything resembling a real decision.

I'm a bit late to the party, having just purchased VR this year. I wish I could recommend this game. I read numerous reviews about it being similar to Black & White which was amazing.

Sadly, this game does not work on my system. I definitely meet the minimum requirements. Hell I even exceed the recommended requirements.

This game crashes the second I try to run it. I cannot even get it to work in nonvr mode. I tried to troubleshoot it myself. Updated all my drivers. Ran the prerequisites found in the games file folders. I even went so far as to try to contact the devs through their webpage for help in getting it to run. I think this dev team has been disbanded.

I gave them 2 days to message me back but did not hear a "peep" from them.

Don't buy this game if you have a newer system. Chances are it will not run at all. Scratch that, don't buy this game regardless. My whole 0.2 hours of playtime is just the game hanging at a black screen before closing or returning me back to steamvr home.

Well these devs wasted enough of my time with their nonfunctional game and lack of support. Time to refund and spend my money on a game that works.


System Specs:
11th Gen Intel i9 3.50GHz
32 GB RAM
Windows 10 x64
Nvidia 3080ti
Valve Index

I played this in virtual reality. The presentation is very nice, but unfortunately the gameplay is overly simplistic combined with tedious micromanagement to accomplish those overly-simple tasks.

I hate it when a game's design is at that nexus point of being both fiddly and too simple at the same time. It's the same problem I have with Final Fantasy XII. But that's a whole 'nother review.

With Tethered, I'd had my fill of the game after completing the first non-tutorial level. It's not a game design that I enjoy. There are probably better God games in VR these days, with better interactions than using the motion controller as a glorified mouse pointer.

A well crafted game with lovable minions and beautiful little islands to defend.

It's heartbreaking to watch your little minions starve then become depressed and fling themselves off the island cliffs you worked so hard to create.

I really hope this company makes some more games, I think this might be their only title, but I will be buying anything they come out with in the future!

A lot of reviews compare this to Black and White. Don't be fooled: this is nowhere near the near-but-flawed master piece of BW.

Black and White you had a Hand Of God that you moved around the world, dung covered peasants would see it and worship it. You could lob many many spells from that hand using an innovative gesture system. And when you got bored you could grab one of those peasants and lob it at your creature for it to catch and then most likely bury the poor bugger under a mound of feces.

In this you have two ghosty hands that don't do anything of import, the touch controls are just badly implemented and really it feels like they were an after thought and the game was originally designed to be played with a gamepad.

One of the most glaring examples of this is gathering balls of spirit energy. This is a major objective of the game and is nothing but tedious. You'd think that having two hands you'd be able to point one hand at the energy and suck it in whilst looking elsewhere and using the other hand. But this is not the case, you have to LOOK at the spirit energy to suck it towards you: if you look away it stops.

Overall the game is painfully tedius due to the level of micromanagement required. The game is incredibly simple and there's not much strategy involved other than remembering to reassign some fuzzballs to collect food again after fighting, because someone thought it would be a great idea to make it so they forget their job assignment when you order them to attack a creature.

By the end of only the first proper island my arm was knackered and I was annoyed with having to constantly reassign fuzzballs to do work instead of moping about and getting depressed (literally, they throw themselves off a cliff if their needs aren't met), and so I refunded.

Would not recommend.

Some people are going to love this game.

I did not, but I did feel a bit of a heel in refunding it.

First of, graphically it's gorgeous. One of the best in terms of VR graphics. I cannot criticise the graphics whatsoever. In fact I would like a game similar to Tethered, but not actually Tethered.

So what's wrong with it from my perspective.

1) Camera movement.

Teleportation zones (clouds) are easily the most accessible way to move around. Moving around by grabbing and pulling, or changing zoom by pulling apart or pushing your hands together seemed clumsily implemented. Perhaps I needed more experience, but it didn't handle well for me. Perhaps the cloud based movement was incorporated because to counteract this style.

2) Micro-managment

If I send a little one off to a quarry, no problem. If it then gets into a fight with a slug, no problem. However, after the fight the little peep will just stand there. I'd rather they resumed their task and from an icon I can see if they need healing. This may seem a minor niggle, but it will get annoying after a while.

3) Lack of building variety

This won't be a problem for some, but to others they'll find it somewhat limiting.

4) Combat is boring

Just build a couple of arrow towers, send your little ones to fight slugs, then to the pub when you see they are badly hurt. That's it. No really, that's it. And if your idea of fun is to micro-manage, then you'll actually love it. By the way, if anyone does like table top combat games, check out turn-based Quar: Battle for gate 18.

Overall, Tethered is beautiful, and as by the overall positive score, many people love this game, and part of me does too. It's just those 4 points listed above that made me refund it.

However, if the same company, using the same engine, was to make a similar game, but with more buildings, less micro-management, and perhaps I slightly less clicky combat system, I would be very interested.

Watching the little guys doing their stuff is amazing on VR, the game looks beautiful, and the touch controllers work great. As and RTS game is empty and repetitive, there are no many relevant options and you basically have to build one or two buildings of certain type to win. Very relevantly: there is no continuous gaming option, so you only get to "play god" for a little, fairly stressful time, and don´t get to see the results of your good management: It would be nice, after the level is done, to have the chance to sit back and relax, just adjusting things here and there, and spend some time watching the little guys do their stuff, which is the most beautiful aspect of this game. It would be nice to have a sort of "Free level" with much more space and building options.

This is a really polished game visually, which is what initially drew me. However after playing it for several hours I haven't found much enjoyment, but much tedium.

This is a very casual RTS with most of its gameplay revolving around mechanics like resource collection and management and unit micromanagement. All of these mechanics are implemented here in a very rudimentary manner, to its detriment. The game is based around fulfiling objectives in which a day night cycle exists. By day you have your units engage in productive behaviour, but at night enemies spawn and attack and you must fend them off. The controls and UI are atrocious, with every task requiring far too many clicks. I say clicks because though the game was supposedly designed around VR, the controllers are used as little more than a pointer emulating traditional mouse control. Here are a few examples of simple UI problems that plague the game:

-You cannot order a unit to move to an arbitrary area. Instead you must tell it to go to one of a few specific places on the map. If there's a low health unit under attack, you can't just tell it to move away, instead you must tell it to go to one of a few predefined areas. If the direction you'd like to head in doesn't have a point of interest, you can't move there.
-You cannot order units to do a task en masse. This is something you will want to do frequently. If you have five units you all want to do the same task, you must tell each one individually to do that task.
-Combat usually involves having all your units gang up on enemies. Once they're all standing together, it's extremely difficult to pick out any one unit because pointing at something with your controller is fundamentally less accurate than with a mouse cursor, which the controllers try to emulate.

Everything is overly simple so there is little to no thought you need to put into your actions. Harvest resources, make structures, and tell everyone to kill the enemies at night one by one. However, you will constantly be doing things because the game loves to make you micromanage. The level of micromanagement expected is not fun, just dull. Telling three people to do one task over several clicks isn't fun gameplay, it's just busywork. Sending weather clouds to resource nodes because they're depleted doesn't really require any decision making, it's just a thing to do. Constantly - and I do mean constantly - holding down a button or grabbing the resources you need to complete levels as they float above the land is among one of the most mindless mechanics in a game ever. None of these things are remotely engaging or require any thought or strategy, they're just things you have to do to progress the game. Unfortunately, most of the gameplay doesn't rise past this level of banality.

There are some good things about this game. It runs well, the visuals are excellent, and it has a cute, kid-friendly design. However, the gameplay doesn't live up to the rest of this game's level of polish.

Pro:
-Game is beautifully designed
-The peeps might be the most damn adorable things to ever exist
-Not to hard to get the hang of the game
-Lots of situational towers making you having to always change strategies

Con:
-Peeps don't go back to what they were doing after fighting a critter (requires so much pointless work during night time)
-Eggs end up turning bad too often, even if I put a sun/peep on it instantly
-Sucking in spirit energy sometimes takes too long causing you to fall behind on assigning tasks

This game is overall amazing. Besides these little inconveniences I think the game has a ton of potential and is probably one of the best visual VR games I've played (and I've played too many)

26 hours played atm. Yep, it's that good. And I'll be back for more.

You have to push through the 2 or 3 starting levels when learning the game and you'll get hooked. One of the best VR games. One to actually have fun instead of just showcasing VR to friends.

I couldn't wait for Tethered to be playable without VR because it looked like such and amazing game, and I had seen all the reviews online and metacritic scores. It is as good as I was expecting, if not better. It looks really stunning and I dont have a very good graphics card. It's a really fun strategy game that just eats up your time - I can't stop playing it. The music is really cool as well - I kind of wish I had bought the deluxe pack now so I had the soundtrack. I think it is really clever how they have used the 'look at' pointing mechanic even in the non-VR version - it totally makes sense when you play the game, and I think it would not have had quite the same direct fun feeling if they had changed the controls to something different.

I would definitely recommend this game, and I was really lucky that at the same time it got the patch to make it playable without a VR headset it was also in the sale!! Very happy!

Tethered is amazing, one of the best VR games so far, polished to perfection. Games like this one is what VR needs. At merely 23 eur, this game is a steal. It actually has a lot of content, quite an in depth gameplay, and it's built from ground up for VR and is actually capitalising upon it's VR nature in all the best ways. And the visuals are just beautiful.

Very fun VR game, sadly probably one the only I would consider a full game release. Ya, short time playing so far, but thats VR.

Point being there are tons of islands and I have only touch 2 of them so far! Great God Game and as mentioned a full game, kudos to the devs on this one! If you like the genre BUY IT NOW! that's if you have VR of course ;) Oh this is on Vive, OCR is being supported it seems by the devs, look to the forums, but for Vive it was easy as pie ;)


Things I liked...

1. The creatures are cute as a button!
2. Graphics are very nice
3. Sound and music are just great!
4. Game play is solid and I love building up my villages on the islands
5. Weather control is fun stuff !
6. Feeling like a god is pretty cool in this game , even the little guys look at you when you get close
7. There is combat for your little ones (night monsters)
8. Allot of building options
9. Allot of promotional options for your peeps.
10. Just overall a great experiance.


What I didn't really care for....

1. Movement controls are a bit wonky for me
2. Popups to explain things are nice, some pop up thou and sometimes i would have diffculty removing them. Finally got it thou, just wasn't explained well.
3. Save , but they are coming with something on that.
4. Fast pace, I mean it's like any real time god game, but in this, being VR, have some sort of "Slow" god power would be nice, I thought about pause, but that would break the emmerision. But great news on this one too , like save they are adding a time control update soon so sweet! :)

Summary:

Loved it , recommend it, will play allot more in future!

So good to see fully fleshed out games with game mechanics that don't get boring in 15 minutes. I normally get bored of most games and end up switching between several before giving up, but this one had me playing until my temples started hurting (really need that deluxe strap!) Controlling the little guys is fun and apealing, the art style and graphics are a perfect fit for the game. The upgrade and gathering mechanics are deep enough to not be just a chore, and the enemies are just enough of a challenge to keep it interesting longer term.

That said, the controls could use some work. The main mechanic, tethering, would be better suited to the trigger. Finding and clicking on a specific Peep is a pain sometimes, especially finding and using certain professions. There isn't enough feedback in the game to show you what something does. Things like the wood piles could easily have numbers over them to show you the stock, but you have to go to an info panel. Finding your warriors and getting them to attack is cumbersome. Menus often block your view and follow you around and sometimes cannot be dismissed. Also, during the tutorial, I had menus inside objects, the ground, and the clouds so I couldn't read what they said and had to guess how to proceed.

I hope the developers continue to fine-tune the game, but even with it's warts, it's still one of the best non-shooter games out there.

Hands down the most finely crafted game I think I have played all year in the Vive. Genuinely stunned - had a massive grin on my face the whole time :) Only played through the first tutorial level (shy of 40mins) - very impressed. The cutesy Pixarish animation style of the Peeps is amazing and really makes it feel like a living world beneath your feet. Just...wow. Incredible. So much fun, the Strategy elements remind me of classic Settlers style gameplay but with some great tweaks... Wow. Did I say Wow already? Wow.

This is the kind of VR god game that everyone expected to come around and it's great! Lovely art and audio, simple intuitive interface, and thoughtful strategy design. I only played through the tutorial, but it looks like there's hours of content to chew on.

You can freely scale and move the floating island. This is awesome because you can perfectly fit it inside you room bounds and then playing it as a roomscale model without needing to change viewpoints. However, sometimes the viewpoint autochanges and I had to reposition the island for roomscale again. There's also cloud hotspots that you quickly hop between if you're playing with a standing only setup. It looks like there's also gamepad controls if you're playing seated, but I didn't try them.

I know I can't be the only person that wants a VR version "Black & White".

This game seems very much like an RTS Survival. You meticulously collect "Spirit Energy" one at a time from dead enemies or at random. (Just think of it as sunshine in PvZ.) The first level requires 320 Spirit Energy or something like that. That's when you have to survive the night. I put up a defense tower that uses Stone resource as ammo.

This game is very well-made. The tutorial and everything is easy to read.

The tutorial takes 30-40 minutes. About 80% through the tutorial they said, "That's it, that's all you need to know." (or something along those lines.) So I quit to menu expecting Level 1 to be unlocked. NOPE!! LOL I had to do the tutorial TWICE. (FML)

I can comfortably play this game seated with motion controls. (They allow you to use Xbox controller too.)

It's definitely worth the pricepoint.

When the "Peeps" build a house. There's this sort of "Pixel Magic" that comes down from the sky. It's really cool. Ironically, it reminds me of the startup screen to BLACK & WHITE!! (shake a box with little pixel cubes inside.)

Only gripe is sometimes you'll tether a soldier unit to an enemy and they'll pickup a resource instead. So navigating the camera is crucial.

You also work with elements of clouds. Mix Rain with Snow and get a thunderstorm and drag clouds to enemies. You can take snow and freeze a river. Use a tornado and make Peeps teleport to their destination. It all adds a twist.

The game is really good. I've tried lots of other VR games and they just aren't up to par with Black & White. Tethered really scratches that itch.

I ended up with mass suicide because they were hungry. But I was so busy fighting monsters. So yeah lots of trial and error. Good thing it's a really relaxing game and it's hard to get angry.

9/10

Finally, a VR strategy game that I want to play! I enjoyed the Black & White games in their time, and I'd strongly encourage other fans of the series (or any similar) to give Tethered a try.

The movement controls seemed a bit strange at first, but felt very smooth and natural after only a few minutes of messing around. Otherwise, this game is beautiful and well-polished...easily one of the best looking games on the Vive at the moment, and the "peeps" are absolutely adorable! The game runs smoothly on my i7-3770k/gtx 980 system, with no apparent glitches or dropped frames.

One minor issue for me was that the hand assignment (right/left) seems to be reversed from the Vive controllers' expectations. It threw me off at first, but swapping the controllers physically was a simple enough workaround.

Beautiful VR strategy game! If you loved God games of yore like Black & White, Populous, Cultures, or some of the early Settlers games, you will feel at home. The controls are quite simple. (On HTC Vive) You use grips to move the world around and triggers/ thumbpad to "tether" your Norn-like peeps to resources and buildings. The weather plays an important part in controlling production, access, defense, and healing.

In order to complete each world, you need to gather Spirit Essence to wake the island's guardian. This requires reeling in floating orbs before they expire, which you will do whenever you are not managing your peep's orders. The game is somewhat slow-paced, but I found I had little down time as there was always something to attend to.

Game runs smoothly on my i7-6700k and GTX 970. There were a couple framerate issues on load or when the building triangles are swirling around the camera, but during normal play I did not have any stuttering or issues.

Overall a wonderful game and I am so happy Secret Sorcery brought this to PC!