Back in 2017 French studio AtlasV – the team behind Spheres and Gloomy Eyes – revealed that one of its upcoming projects was a virtual reality (VR) short called Battlescar. Today, the team has announced that Battlescar is ready for release, set to arrive next week.
A 30 minute VR movie narrated by Rosario Dawson (The Mandalorian,Trance, Sin City) the story is set in New York City during 1978, following Lupe, a young Puerto Rican American teenager who meets Debbie in a juvenile detention center.
“Debbie exposes Lupe to the underground scene of the 1970’s Lower East side,” explains the synopsis. “Despite their total lack of musical abilities, the two runaways decide to form their own punk music band, moved by the powerful lyrics written by Lupe.”
An homage to the underground scene, taking viewers through NYC’s gritty crime and drug filled streets, Battlescar featuring artists from the era including Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Death and Lydia Lunch. The project was created by Martín Allais and Nico Casavecchia, written by Nico Casavecchia, and produced by Atlas V in co-production with Arte, Albyon and 1STAveMachine.
There’s been a lot of good animation recently for VR fans, with 3DAR and Baobab Studios’ Paper Birds recently released as well as Spice and Wolf VR 2 by Spicy Tails. Whilst there’s Baobab Studios’ Baba Yaga and Namoo to look forward to.
Battlescar is coming to the Oculus platform first, hitting Oculus Quest and Rift on 14th January 2021. A Steam version is then slated to arrive by the end of the month. A 360° version will be available via Youtube as well. Check out the new trailer below, and for further updates keep reading VRFocus.
After winning several awards at film festivals in 2019 virtual reality (VR) animation Gloomy Eyes was confirmed for public release last month for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest. The launch has taken place today but only on Viveport for PC VR headsets, with Oculus Store users now having to wait.
The launch was supposed to coincide across both platforms but for some undisclosed reason has only taken place on Viveport today. With Viveport being platform-agnostic for PC headsets, this means only Oculus Quest owners won’t have access. HTC Vive, Vive Pro, Vive Cosmos, Oculus Rift/Rift S, Valve Index and Windows Mixed Reality headsets are all supported. Gloomy Eyes was previously available exclusively through Viveport Infinity, now non-subscribers have access.
Gloomy Eyes is a three-part poetic love story between a zombie boy and a human girl in a sunless town, written and directed by Fernando Maldonado and Jorge Tereso and co-written by Santiago Amigorena, published by ARTE.
Inspired by Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas the synopsis explains: “When the sun grew tired of humanity, it hid, never by to rise again. This darkness awoke the dead from their graves. In the midst of chaos, a zombie kid named Gloomy and a mortal girl, Nena, fall in love and form a deep connection that not even the most powerful man in town can destroy. Together, the star‐crossed lovers from different planes of existence may hold the key to bring light to the endless night.”
The English version is narrated by Hollywood actor Colin Farrell, with four other language options available: Tahar Rahim (French version), Max Riemelt (German version), Jorge Drexler (Spanish version) or Jam Hsiao (Chinese version). The animated series has won awards at events such as Sundance 2019, South by Southwest 2019, Annecy 2019 and Newlmages Festival 2019.
Gloomy Eyes can be purchased on Viveport for £11.40 GBP. Details on the Oculus release will be announced at a later date. When that happens VRFocus will let you know.
There have been some wonderful animated movies for virtual reality (VR) audiences over the last few years, from the now defunct Oculus Story Studio with Dear Angelica or Penrose Studios’ Allumette, to Bonfire and Invasion! by Baobab Studios. Last year Gloomy Eyes made its first appearance at several film festivals including Sundance, winning plenty of awards in the process. It has just been announced that the VR animation will soon be publicly available for a range of headsets.
Gloomy Eyes is a three-part poetic love story between a zombie boy and a human girl in a sunless town.
“When the sun grew tired of humanity, it hid, never by to rise again. This darkness awoke the dead from their graves. In the midst of chaos, a zombie kid named Gloomy and a mortal girl, Nena, fall in love and form a deep connection that not even the most powerful man in town can destroy. Together, the star‐crossed lovers from different planes of existence may hold the key to bring light to the endless night,” explains the synopsis.
Created by ARTE in collaboration with French co‐producer Atlas V and Fernando Maldonado and Jorge Tereso (writers and directors, 3DAR) and Santiago Amigorena (co‐writer), Gloomy Eyes is narrated byColin Farrell (English version) Tahar Rahim (French version), Max Riemelt (German version) or Jorge Drexler (Spanish version).
Inspired by Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Gloomy Eyes will be available for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest from 14th February 2020, retailing for $14.99 USD. If you happen to be a Viveport Infinity subscriber then you’ll already find the animated series on the service. ARTE Cinema’s official YouTube channel will also host an official 360-degree version for free.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Gloomy Eyes and all the latest VR animation offerings, reporting back with further announcements.
Colin Farrell (The Lobster, In Bruges) is lending his voice to a new three-part VR animated series called Gloomy Eyes, the first installment of which is making its premier at Sundance Film Festival 2019, Variety reports.
Farrell is narrating all three episodes of the VR series, which was co-directed by 3dar’s Jorge Tereso and Fernando Maldonado, the creators behind animated short Shave It (2012).
Here’s a synopsis of Gloomy Eyes:
1983. Woodland City has been plunged into a perpetual night for ten years now due the experiments of a mysterious priest. This man’s madness engendered to Gloomy, a half-human, half-zombie child who lives away from everyone else in the forest. How do you find your place when you’re not entirely dead, nor entirely alive, and when, in spite of your better instincts, you can’t manage to control your need for human flesh?
“Anything that invokes a sense of magic and total immersion is worth gold, and it was amazing to be a part of the vision Fernando and Jorge created in Gloomy Eyes,” Farrell told Variety. “It’s a completely transportive and beautiful experience, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and really connected with my passion of storytelling.”
“The world we imagined in Gloomy Eyes shows the darkest side of humanity. But we balance it with the hope that two little kids bring in their eyes. To love what’s different will bring harmony once again,” Tereso and Maldonado said.
Gloomy Eyes was produced by 3dar and France’s Atlas V, and co-produced by Ryot, ARTE France and HTC Vive, with the support of the CNC, Unity and Rhône Alpes.
This year’s Sundance Film Festival takes place January 24th – February 3rd. Like many VR experiences and films premiering there, Gloomy Eyes is presenting at the festival’s New Frontier section, which highlights new media and storytelling styles.
A Fisherman’s Tale puts you in the boots of a curios puppet-man named Bob who lives in a strange, recursive world centered around a dollhouse-sized lighthouse. Looking above, you see infinitely Big Bob. Looking below, infinitely Small Bob. It sounds like a trip, and it is: a quick trip into a super French storybook that’s begging to be fleshed out into something more substantial.
Publisher: Vertigo Games
Developer: Innerspace VR, ARTE France Available On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows VR, PlayStation VR Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Release Date: January 22nd, 2019
Gameplay
A Fisherman’s Tale is a single-player adventure game built around a series of escape rooms that feature light puzzle solving and much more prominent story-telling elements.
It’s main claim to fame is the innovative dollhouse mechanic, which lets you not only see a smaller in-sync version of yourself in a perfect miniature representation of your lighthouse, but also a giant doppelganger towering above. The idea is to interact with the smaller/larger recursive copy of yourself by handing up or down items with an eye for tactically resizing them to fit the situation.
To be honest, it felt like the game only scratched the surface of what’s actually possible here. I could have easily strapped in for a more serious interaction with what you might call the ‘single player co-op’ mechanic, which lets you do things like pick up a giant anchor blocking a door, but what in the context of the game is also a pint-sized dollhouse item that you can easily lift away and use for something else.
Image courtesy Innerspace VR, ARTE
The story line skews pretty young, and feels more like someone reading a storybook aloud to you. While it might be perfect for kids ages seven and up, it personally seemed a little too simplistic to be truly enjoyable. The game’s well-realized environment and mind-bending infinity were the true stars of the show here, but I would have welcomed something a little more substantial, and a little less “we must give Mr. Fishy something to drink!”
At one point, the story does turn a tiny, oh so tiny bit dark when we learn that the lighthouse keeper’s father was a negative bastard who hated his son for not being a fisherman, but a few stern words from Dad was it. There was real potential there to create some character defining moments, flashbacks, anything to get us caring about the relationship, but like the game itself, the moment slipped away upon reaching the next room.
Image courtesy Innerspace VR, ARTE
Most of the puzzles were interesting in construction, although were fairly simple even without the narrator’s hints, which can be toggled on and off mid-game. There was one puzzle where the recursive puppet world doesn’t work in the same way as previously introduced, forcing you to stretch both your arms and your imagination a little bit to solve.
I desperately wanted more of these intriguing moments but sadly was only given one. As it is, there are only six or seven fundamental puzzles to solve, a true shame considering the high production value of nearly every aspect of the game up to that point. That said, there’s no filler here, no convoluted tasks for the sake of it, which is nice. But that doesn’t play a large enough counter balance to the overall lack of puzzles, and difficulty range that spanned ‘very easy’ to ‘slightly less easy’.
My personal gameplay time was about one hour, and that was playing without hints at a leisurely pace. Even if I had played all the way through with hints, I’m not certain the time would have changed by much, as I knew basically what to do immediately anyway.
With the narrator voiced by the never-not-smoking French comedian Augustin Jacob, the game feels more akin to the sort of kitschy and experimental short film that comes on before a Pixar movie—charming for just long enough, but really only an appetizer to what should be a larger meal.
You’ll hear plenty of “zut alors!” and “sacré bleu!” to underline the fact that A Fisherman’s Tale is a French production made by people who care that you know this; it was after all co-produced by Franco-German cultural TV network ARTE France and Paris-based studio Innerspace VR.
Image courtesy Innerspace VR, ARTE
Anyway, the game’s voice acting is nothing short of awesome. The narrator’s raspy, smoky voice adds a degree of seasoned authenticity to an admittedly banal, but inoffensive storyline. Jacob’s performance elevates at every turn, pushing it in a higher direction artistically despite the low complexity both story and puzzle-wise.
Visually, A Fisherman’s Tale plays host to a number of well realized set pieces that change shape and function throughout the story, sometimes offering a different way to interact with the world thanks to the re-sizing mechanic. The visual style feels extremely cohesive, with everything in A Fisherman’s Tale tending towards the devastatingly cozy end of the spectrum. It’s easy to fall in love with the look and feel of the environment, but again, I only wish I could have had more play time to soak in what’s clearly the result of a collectively competent hand in VR game design.
A Fisherman’s Tale features basically the full gamut of comfort styles, including standing or sitting modes, and room-scale or standing snap-turn for users with front-facing sensors.
Locomotion is based on teleportation, although the game plays out in such a small physical playspace that much of it can be traversed in room-scale.
However you slice it, A Fisherman’s Tale is extremely comfortable experience, making it ideal for VR newcomers or users that are sensitive to artificial locomotion.
Ever since VRFocus first came across InnerspaceVR’s virtual reality (VR) title A Fisherman’s Tale, the mind-bending puzzle experience at Gamescom 2018, the title has proved to be continually fascinating. With an early preview of the first area sowing the seed, and a secondary preview unlocking the second chapter, this only heightened the interest, so much so the videogame made it onto our ‘Best of Oculus Rift Games Coming in 2019’. Now that publisher Vertigo Games (Arizona Sunshine) has launched the experience VRFocus can say that while enjoyable, it feels like it’s over before truly finding its feet.
Right from the start A Fisherman’s Tale comes across as a classic children’s story, involving a lighthouse keeper and a seafaring tragedy. But then it turns all weird and magical once you come to realise that you, in fact, play a wooden puppet inside a model lighthouse. Even stranger still is the moment you get to interact with said model, finding that it is actually one of many, continually repeated indefinitely.
The model plays with scale, and this forms the core mechanic of A Fisherman’s Tale puzzles. Beautifully, elegant in its design, you can shrink and grow the size of any objects that are interactive, whether they are relative to the current puzzle or not. This has allowed InnerspaceVR to create a world that’s both physically small, yet much larger in scope, encouraging you to examine the world as much as possible.
The puzzles themselves are genuinely interesting and fun to solve as you work out what size either you or other items need to be to find all the secret nooks and crevices hidden in the title. A Fisherman’s Tale eases you into the whole experience, with a nice difficulty curve which should mean you won’t ever get truly stuck on the later levels. To help you out should a challenge become too great, InnerspaceVR has included an audible hints system which is switchable in the settings menu, offering little nudges in the right direction.
Another neat little option in the settings is the choice of roomscale, standing or seated gameplay positions, offering plenty of accessibility for most players. What was a little disappointing to see was the lack of options when it came to movement. Even in roomscale you still need additional locomotion which is only provided in teleportation form. While this works perfectly fine, it did break the immersive quality the videogame had managed to create, being unable to casually walk around and play with the model.
There were a couple of other negatives that are worth pointing out. Firstly there’s the collision detection. At point objects being held would clip a door or window frame and suddenly become stuck, or worse disappear. The item in question would then reappear in its original location after a few moments, but it did become somewhat frustrating, especially on the last puzzle which is a little more intricate.
Secondly, A Fisherman’s Tale is just way too short. You’re going to be looking at an average playtime of around 2 hours, less if you try to rush it. There are essentially four main puzzle chapters with additional bits or the story extending the gaps in between. InnerspaceVR has done such a good job interweaving a delightful narrative with a superb puzzle style that it’s over before it’s begun, like reading a child’s bedtime story that’s only a few pages long.
A Fisherman’s Tale is in many respects the VR title VRFocus hoped it would be, inventive use of the technology that oozes heart and soul, making you care about the character and his astonishing little world. The puzzles help to carry the story along yet don’t offer anywhere near the complexity of titles like Transpose. The main downside, it leaves you wanting more when there’s no more to be had.
With the new year only weeks away there are several virtual reality (VR) titles VRFocus is looking forward to seeing arrive. One of them is InnerspaceVR and Vertigo Games’ puzzle title A Fisherman’s Tale. Today, the studio’s have announced the actual launch date as well as releasing some new screenshots and an immersive video.
The new 360-degree video reveals a lot more of the narrative in A Fisherman’s Tale than ever before. Going into detail regarding how the wooden puppet in the screenshots came to be.
That puppet is called Bob, a tiny fisherman who lives alone in a tiny cabin attached to a lighthouse, oblivious to the world outside. When the radio broadcasts a storm alert, Bob needs to get to the top of the lighthouse and turn on the light. But that’s not going to be straightforward as all is not what it seems, and things begin to get a bit surreal and weird for him.
A purely single-player puzzle adventure, A Fisherman’s Tale is all about thinking outside the box, as the title plays with dimensions and scale. It only through interacting with the central lighthouse model – which is infinitely replicated – that the puzzles can be solved and Bob’s goal completed.
“A Fisherman’s Tale is an amazing story full of surprising and playful gameplay. It explores immersive writing in virtual reality and brings an unprecedented proposition to VR gaming. ARTE is a proud collaborator on A Fisherman’s Tale together with its talented creators at Innerspace and publisher Vertigo Games,” said Gilles Freissinier, Head of Web Department at ARTE France in a statement.
A Fisherman’s Tale is available to play on PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality headsets from 22nd January 2019. Take a look at the new video below, and for further updates, keep reading VRFocus.
Gloomy Eyes is a three-part poetic love story between a zombie boy and a human girl in a sunless town.
Another neat little option in the settings is the choice of roomscale, standing or seated gameplay positions, offering plenty of accessibility for most players. What was a little disappointing to see was the lack of options when it came to movement. Even in roomscale you still need additional locomotion which is only provided in teleportation form. While this works perfectly fine, it did break the immersive quality the videogame had managed to create, being unable to casually walk around and play with the model.
