Insomniac Releases ‘Strangelets’ on Magic Leap One, Its Final Indie Project

All the fun of alien animal husbandry with none of the cleanup

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Insomniac Games, the studio behind VR games Stormland (2019) and The Unspoken (2017), announced its acquisition by Sony Interactive Entertainment back in August, and while we imagined their last independent project was surely the open-world Rift adventure Stormland, it appears the studio had another title sitting ready in the wings for Magic Leap One called Strangelets.

Strangelets is Insomniac’s second ML One title, which follows December the release of Seedling (2018), a game that puts you in the shoes of a space cadet tasked with repairing a dying galactic ecosystem due to the effects of ‘The Schmelling Incident,’ a catastrophic cosmic event.

Playing in the same universe, strangelets (cute alien creatures) find themselves “trapped in pockets between dimensions,” the studio writes in a Magic Leap blog post.

Here’s how Insomniac describes the game:

With the help of a mysterious companion known only as “Bulby,” Strangelets invites players to search their homes for dimensional rifts, reach inside to rescue strange alien creatures, then care for their collection by using harvested energy from real-world objects. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience that encourages physical movement through multiple rooms, transforming players’ familiar spaces into a playground of discovery and surprise.

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“After the launch of Seedling, our small team of spatial computing pioneers were more inspired than ever by the potential of this new platform,” said Nathaniel Bell, Creative Director for Strangelets and Seedling. “We were ready to dive headfirst into our next experimental experience and to continue collaborating with our passionate partners at Magic Leap. Our goal moving forward was to build on lessons learned from Seedling and to venture into new territories of spatial computing not yet experienced by players.”

It will be interesting to see where Insomniac goes from here, and whether it continues to focus on VR/AR, or keeps its main focus on traditional ‘second party’ games for PlayStation. However it goes, Insomniac is one of the most experienced studios in immersive gaming, so we’re hoping for something good for PlayStation 5 and the next iteration of PlayStation VR to say the least.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Insomniac definitely deserves a reward for how good they are at listening to fans. Their Discord is extremely well managed and they get back to us about concerns very quickly, especially about Stormland

    • Discord, eh? Is that where they are? Their tech support blew me off over my Windows 7 issue with Stormland.

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  • Mike Porter

    Why is a video game made for an enterprise product?

    • Investment. That’s it. Having these pointless games nobody will ever play looks good on their portfolio. It shows they have experience with emerging tech. They’ve been making games for Sony tech since the PS1, but only recently got bought up. They didn’t get bought up after the Ratchet and Clank movie. That was when Insomniac was at their highest point. Why did they get bought now of all times? Experienced emerging tech developers are SUPER RARE. Sony making certain that Insomniac’s software appears on their VR/AR tech, instead of the next Xbox or Nintendo’s future VR hardware. Magic Leap might be a joke, but it’s a high profile joke that people pay attention to. These little “indie” projects have made Insomniac look REALLY GOOD.

    • Malkmus

      Hololens is the product that’s strictly enterprise. Magic Leap is a dev kit for consumer-oriented AR, with a very small fraction devoted to enterprise.

  • Wonderful, now can they focus on a Quest game??

  • Nice

    Does ML1 support OpenXR?

  • Personally, I am not amazed by the trailer.