No Climbing Experience Required: Everest VR Hits Steam

Have you ever wanted to climb the “ultimate” mountain, and without dying? If so, and you happen to be equipped with an HTC Vive, then you’re in for a real treat: Everest VR has arrived on Steam, for a price of $24.99 ($22.49 until August 9).

Everest VR has what it takes to deliver an unbelievable, memorable experience. With the help of hundreds of thousands of photographs, Sólfar Studios has recreated the mountain that every serious climber craves to step foot on.

The fact that this recreation of Everest is based on real photography is half of the allure here: this isn’t just an artists rendering, it’s as close to a proper digital recreation as we could get. If you’ve ever read into Everest climbs, you’ll undoubtedly spot notable landmarks – but hopefully not the dozens of bodies of unsuccessful climbers that litter the real Everest.

As the top image highlights, Everest VR starts you off at Everest’s base camp, just in real-life, and from that point on, you can begin making your trek up the punishing mountain. Sólfar notes that four iconic scenes other than the base camp are included: Khumbu Icefalls, Camp 4, Hillary Step (probably trumps the others in terror factor), and of course, the ultimate location: Everest’s summit.

If you manage to make it to the top, you’ll unlock God Mode, which allows you to reach a unique vantage point “only possible in VR”, delivering what could be the coolest (no pun) location across the entire title.

Speaking of visuals, NVIDIA has a couple of technologies present in Everest VR. At the forefront is VRWorks’ Multi-Res Shading mode, which reduces the image quality of the content in your peripheral vision to emphasize the content you’re directly looking at. NVIDIA says that using this feature can increase performance of VR content up to 65%. Example benchmarks are seen in the graph below:

To increase immersion while players are scaling Everest, PhysX’s Turbulence mode comes to Everest VR‘s aid. With it, snow will move realistically around your feet, as well the snow that’s falling from the sky. While in most titles, you simply walk through falling snow as if it’s not even there, you can push it out of the way in Everest VR.

As mentioned earlier, this title is designed for use with HTC’s Vive, as its room-scaling ability helps improve the overall experience. This is essentially a walking simulator, after all. No one ever scaled Everest in a chair.