Skip to main content

New Horizon: Call of the Mountain footage shows off VR action

Summer Gaming Marathon Feature Image
This story is part of our Summer Gaming Marathon series.

During today’s State of Play presentation, Sony shared a new trailer for Horizon Call of the Mountain. The clip gave a close look at its gameplay, which features several of the series’ signature mechanics.

Horizon Franchise - State of Play June 2022 Trailers | PS5, PS4 & PS VR2 Games

Announced at CES this year, Horizon Call of the Mountain is a VR title based on the Horizon franchise. It’ll launch exclusively for PlayStation VR2. Though Sony highlighted the new headset’s software during the stream, it didn’t give a release date for any games or the hardware itself.

The trailer follows a new protagonist named Ryas, a former Shadow Carja Warrior, doing everything you’d expect in a Horizon game but from a first-person perspective. We see her climbing walls and fighting robot dinosaurs, just as she does in Horizon Forbidden West. However, players can only see her disembodied hands.

In addition to the new look at the VR game, the State of Play stream unveiled a surprise update for Horizon Forbidden West that’s available today. It now has New Game + along with transmog features, new weapons, and Trophies, as well as a new Ultra Hard difficulty. Players can also respec their own skill points.

Horizon Call of the Mountain is being developed by Guerrilla Games, alongside Firesprite, a U.K. studio that Sony had acquired last year. As for PSVR 2 itself, it’ll have a 4K OLED display and can be set to either 90 or 120Hz. The headset will also have eye-tracking and the Sense controllers will have haptic feedback.

Horizon Call of the Mountain does not have a release date as yet.

George Yang
George Yang is a freelance games writer for Digital Trends. He has written for places such as IGN, GameSpot, The Washington…
PlayStation State of Play returns this week, will feature 14 PS5 games
Three colorful PS5s float together in a line.

PlayStation will kick off the summer of digital video game reveal streams this week with a State of Play broadcast. The stream will take place at 3 p.m. PT on Thursday, May 30.

State of Play is one of Sony's primary livestream presentation formats. It tends to be slightly shorter than the company's flagship stream, the PlayStation Showcase. This State of Play is a significant one, though, as Sony's slate of first-party games for 2024 is entirely unknown at this stage. This stream should shed some light on what's coming later this year.

Read more
PlayStation VR2 production reportedly paused by Sony
PlayStation VR2 headset on blue background.

Sony is reportedly pausing production of the PlayStation VR2 headsets because it has a backlog of unsold headsets.

This report comes from Bloomberg, which claims that PSVR2 sales have slowed every quarter since its February 2023 release, causing stocks of the device to build up. It says Sony has produced 2 million headsets but reportedly hasn't sold through them yet. As a result, it's apparently pausing the production on new units until it works through some of that backlog, according to Bloomberg's anonymous sources.

Read more
You need to try PlayStation VR2’s most psychedelic game yet
Key art for Akka Arrh shows psychedelic images.

You know that it's a busy year for gaming when a project by an industry legend launches with hardly any fanfare. That's exactly what happened in February 2023 with Akka Arrh. Created by Jeff Minter and his eccentric studio Llamasoft, the neon-tinted shooter is a remake of a 1982 Atari game that never saw the light of day after being deemed too difficult. Minter got the greenlight to revive the project, bringing it to life as a retro arcade shooter built in his unmistakable style.

While the project was exciting for game historians, it didn't exactly crack into the mainstream (it only has 37 user reviews on Steam). Thankfully, Akka Arrh getting a second chance to shine this week as its new PlayStation 5 version adds PlayStation VR2 support. While that might not be enough to make it a commercial hit, it does give PSVR2 owners a good reason to dust off their headset and check out a delightfully oddball project from one of gaming's true visionaries.
It's a trip
Akka Arrh is the rare example of a game that might be easier to explain on paper than in practice. In this throwback arcade shooter, players control a stationary ship that's tasked with protecting pods from attacking aliens. To fend off foes, players drop bombs that blow up in a different geometric pattern on each level's map. Every time an enemy touches that blast radius, it blows up in the same pattern, chaining to other enemies. The goal is to keep an uninterrupted chain going as long as possible by using a limited number of bullets to knock out foes that can't be destroyed by bombs and grabbing power-ups by hovering the cursor over them.

Read more