The Deepak Chopra demo hits Xbox Live

I downloaded it and there is a “game” where you rotate a planet using your hips to plant and water trees around the planet. Pretty slow and boring and yes I get that it is a relaxation game so to that end they gig okay cause boredom and relaxation are not mutually exclusive….Right? It has other stuff to do but nah just not my thing.

Pretty good. The demo is divided into a “game” side and a “practice” side. They have fancy names, but that’s basically what they are.

You start with only one “game” unlocked, where you stand up and move your hips to make a planet rotate to make seeds grow into trees that will be showered by rain and then sunlight. The concept is great, but frankly it felt laggy. After you get past it, you unlock variations of the same game, and also the “practice” side. This one was a very short, 5-minute, guided sitting meditation. Strangely, it used the same planet, which wasn’t very fitting, IMO. I assume it was supposed to use the core of the planet for point-focused meditation, but the planet spinning and the rain and trees actually felt like distractions/unrelated.

There’s an option to make your own mandala (you move both your hands and the mandala spins and is generated by how you move), which was cute but nothing else.

At this point i was ready to write the whole demo (and game as a whole) off, despite it being one of the most gorgeous titles on the market (if you like the visuals of Child of Eden, this looks even better, in my opinion). But then a new game unlocked, where you control a Rez/Tron-looking “ship” throught light tunnels by moving your shoulders. Now THIS was sooooo fun. It felt like the most relaxing 80′s arcade game ever. I played three variations of it (you complete one, it unlocked another), and all three were incredibly fun and immersive. They all were built around moving your ship into matching lights in a tunnel, and every time you do it right, the sounds and music respond more and more to your success. It felt very… “zen”, to use a term that is easy to understand. The second or third variation took me 13 minutes, and i hadn’t even noticed it. I felt completelly lost into it, and it was wonderful.

From the menus, it seems there are 7 “games”, each with 7 variations, and 3 kinds of meditation. All (7 + 3, i guess?) have tutorials that explain what they are for and how they work. You can change the narrator between “Leela” and Deepak Chopra (the girl sounds better, as his accent is thick), and turn subtitles, songs and music off.

I hope the other types of meditation are better than the very strange one in the demo. Also, the game as a whole is very mellow and slow-paced, as it should be, but I hope the final game will have options to skip the tutorials and narration, as i bet a LOT of people getting this will get it so they can squeeze a quick 15-25 minute meditation section during lunch or before work. An option to jump straight into the meditation would be a must for that.

Finally, the game recognizes both your hands during menus, even when you’re sitting cross-legged on the floor, which was unnecessary outside of the mandala section. Outside of that, the game should use one hand only, as having two cursors on-screen didn’t add anything but clutter.