VR fantasy board game Demeo feels right at home on PC

pcgamesn.com:

If you wanted an RPG game with ‘good graphics’ back in the earliest days of the 1990s, your best bet was HeroQuest, the Milton-Bradley tabletop dungeon-crawler produced as a kind of introduction to Games Workshop’s more advanced Warhammer products. Demeo is a VR co-op board game designed specifically to evoke the best bits of games like HeroQuest, and today it’s available in a new PC edition that works on standard flat ‘pancake’ monitors.

In VR, Demeo has obvious charm: it recreates the feeling of being around a tabletop miniatures-based adventure game, complete with figures to manually move and dice to shake and roll. While the PC edition lacks the sense of presence that VR headsets provide, there’s still a remarkable physicality to Demeo on conventional monitors. Figures make a satisfying tok sound when you plop them down on the board, and the dice spin and bounce as they’re shaken with the mouse pointer. To attack a creature, you pick up your figure and tap the enemy with it.

During each character’s turn in Demeo, you have two action points to work with. You can spend those points on movement, attacks, or by using one of the cards in your hand. The cards you have available are determined by your character’s class, but you can add to your hand by finding treasures scattered around the dungeons, which, as in HeroQuest, are assembled from a selection of pre-made chunks in the game’s library.

You can get a sense of the vibe Demeo’s going for in the trailer for the PC edition:

There’s something magical about the table itself: rather that merely sitting on top of a virtual version of a normal table, the dungeons in Demeo are carved out of a dark void, so it feels as though you’re peering down into a tiny, expanding world