Earlier this year at Gamescom we got a glimpse of an intriguing new VR game named Down The Rabbit Hole. Developed by Wands studio, Cortopia, the game boasted a few unique ideas that helped it stick in the mind. This new video showcases some of those features.
We just debuted this clip during our Holiday VR Showcase earlier in the week. In it, the developer walks us through an overview of its new game, which is incredibly different to Wands. Down The Rabbit Hole plays out a little like a picturebook in VR; you control an unnamed protagonist (specifically not Alice) as she explores Wonderland, completing tasks for a strange assortment of characters.
In the game, players move between panel-like scenes, navigating the protagonist from a third-person perspective. You grab roots protruding from scenes to pull yourself around environments but you can also reach into scenes to solve puzzles and occasionally you’ll also embody characters to interact with others. We also love how the video above plays with scale and utilizes some of the more familiar characters.
When we tried the game at Gamescom, we thought it had a fascinating mix of ideas, though some of its puzzles were a little on the obscure side. That could all change when we’re given the freedom to play the game outside of a demo booth, though.
Down The Rabbit Hole is due for release on PC VR, Oculus Quest and PSVR headsets in Q1 2020. Are you looking forward to tumbling into Wonderland in VR? Let us know in the comments below!
One of the more interesting puzzle titles to appear at Gamescom 2019 was Cortopia Studios’ Alices Adventures in Wonderland-themed Down the Rabbit Hole. Offering puzzle scenes which unfolded around you, the videogame was only shown on Oculus Quest with the studio saying other headsets would be supported. Now more have been added as well as the confirmation of a release window for early 2020.
Cortopia Studios has previously confirmed that Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR would all feature versions, but now Valve Index and HTC Vive Cosmos have also been added to that list. It wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to imagine those devices supporting Down the Rabbit Hole thanks to SteamVR compatibility, at least it confirms the fact for players interested.
Down the Rabbit Hole uses the characters from the famous children’s book, so you’ll see the Cheshire Cat pop up as well as the Caterpillar, yet the story itself will be original. This time there’s no Alice, as the story takes place before she ever discovers Wonderland. So you control an unnamed female character who stumbles into this fantastical world, challenged to solve a variety of puzzles to find a way home.
Rather than a fully realised 3D world, in Down the Rabbit Hole you are essentially like the title states. In this underground hole, the levels appear as little diorama’s, growing and expanding around you as area are explored and puzzles solved. Because of these fluctuating scenes, players can turn the cave by grabbing onto various roots growing out of the walls. The experience isn’t entirely viewed from this point either. While some puzzles are interacted with directly, at various times you’re pulled into the scene for an immersive view of the experience.
When VRFocuspreviewed Down the Rabbit Holeat Gamescom 2019 we found: “From what was shown Down the Rabbit Hole is going to be a delightful little puzzle adventure. The gameplay uses the characteristics of VR in all the right ways, from all-encompassing scenes to deliver the story to lots of interactive elements that can be grabbed and pulled.”
Originally slated for a 2019 launch, Down the Rabbit Hole has shifted to Q1 2020, for what sounds like a multiplatform launch. As further details are released, VRFocus will keep you updated.
Gamescom 2019 had an impressive amount of virtual reality (VR) content thanks to a lot of European developers showing up in force. One of those was Cortopia Studios who demoed its new puzzle experience Down the Rabbit Hole. For VRFocus’ final piece of coverage on the title from the show, it’s time to see the videogame in action.
As VRFocus has previously written, Down the Rabbit Hole is a collection of mini-scenes which appear and surround the player as they progress through this fantastical world. While inspired by the classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland children’s novel, the storyline takes place prior to Alice, featuring another girl who just so happens to stumble upon the realm.
Still featuring some of the book’s most well-known characters, Down the Rabbit Hole’s puzzles are a mixture of third-person interaction by way of controlling the girl or other characters and direct interaction as some sort of godly overseer. For example, you need to run her around a series of doors to find the right path, then in another instance directly hit plants to make a musical melody.
Played on the Oculus Quest, Down the Rabbit Hole is being developed for multiple VR headsets including PlayStation VR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. A release date is expected before the end of the year. To learn more about the videogame also check out VRFocus’ interview with Cortopia Studios.
VRFocuspreviewed Down the Rabbit Hole,noting: “From what was shown Down the Rabbit Hole is going to be a delightful little puzzle adventure. The gameplay uses the characteristics of VR in all the right ways, from all-encompassing scenes to deliver the story to lots of interactive elements that can be grabbed and pulled.”
Cortopia Studios has had plenty of success with its virtual reality (VR) PvP title Wands, bringing the magical combat experience to several headsets. Now the studio is working on something slightly different, a puzzle experience called Down the Rabbit Hole, inspired by the classic children’s novel Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland. Making its debut during Gamescom 2019, VRFocus spoke with the team to learn a little more about this particular re-imagining of the tale.
While inspired by the book Down the Rabbit Hole doesn’t use the storyline. So there’s no Alice in this version as it takes place before she ever discovers Wonderland, but there are still a few familiar faces to be found along the way. For this edition, you control an unnamed female character who stumbles into this fantastical world, solving puzzles to find a way home.
The title puts you in a sort of cylindrical cave, with the levels displayed as little dioramas which can be peered into. As you progress through each one a new scene will appear, sometimes higher or lower than the last. Because of these fluctuating scenes, players can turn the cave by grabbing onto various roots growing out of the walls. The experience isn’t entirely viewed from this point either. While some puzzles are interacted with directly, at various times you’re pulled into the scene for an immersive view of the experience.
VRFocuspreviewed Down the Rabbit Hole,noting: “From what was shown Down the Rabbit Hole is going to be a delightful little puzzle adventure. The gameplay uses the characteristics of VR in all the right ways, from all-encompassing scenes to deliver the story to lots of interactive elements that can be grabbed and pulled.”
Speaking with Ola Bjorling, Chief Strategist for Beyond Frames Entertainment (an umbrella group for Cortopia Studios, Zenz VR, Odd Raven Studios and Moon Mode) he reveals how the experience came about and what to expect from the puzzle title.
Lewis Carroll’s famous book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland never fails to inspire, offering developers a rich tapestry to work with. There have already been several virtual reality (VR) titles inspired by the book such as Alice VR and House of Alice. Cortopia Studios (Wands) is now trying its hand, creating a puzzle adventure called Down the Rabbit Hole.
Demoing the title for the first time at Gamescom 2019, Down the Rabbit Hole takes Alice’s weird and wonderful adventures and creates something new and unique, yet still peppered with the characters and lore so many are familiar with.
The gameplay setup is similar in concept to titles like Spark of Light or even Ghost Giant (to a degree), where you find yourself in the middle of a cylindrical puzzle world. You control Alice through a series of rooms, each only appearing once the previous puzzle has been solved. Each room is a little diorama which can be peered into, either to help complete the puzzle or simply to admire the design work.
Once several of these rooms have been opened at select point roots start appearing, seemingly indicating that you happen to be viewing this fantastical world in a subterranean location. Yet these roots do serve a purpose, giving you the ability to turn or manoeuvre the world if required. Now, this wasn’t particularly needed for most of the demo thanks to the versatility of the Oculus Quest. For other headsets or when playing seated this feature should prove to be particularly useful.
Down the Rabbit Hole isn’t just about controlling the small Alice character through a series of puzzle rooms, however. At points, you’ll find yourself transported into these very locations and cinematic cut scenes build the story, with the likes of the Cheshire Cat or the Caterpillar appearing to offer their sagely and confusing advice.
The puzzles themselves also require a mixture of techniques. The demo went from solving a riddle in the fake King of Spade’s chambers to completing a musical challenge by hitting the correct sequence of flowers with your hands. That’s nice to see in Down the Rabbit Hole is this mixture of third-person character gameplay and first-person puzzle-solving. This gives a genuine hands-on approach to the experience, helping connect you to this bizarre world which is unfolding before your eyes.
Cortopia Studios has also ensured the videogame makes for a comfortable experience that anyone could pick up and play thanks to it being entirely stationary. Unlike the cuter, The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets which features fairly easy puzzles, Down the Rabbit Hole will likely offer a greater challenge. None of the puzzles shown were too difficult, just requiring a little more time and thought.
From what was shown Down the Rabbit Hole is going to be a delightful little puzzle adventure. The gameplay uses the characteristics of VR in all the right ways, from all-encompassing scenes to deliver the story to lots of interactive elements that can be grabbed and pulled. It’s certainly a change from Wands, let’s just hope there’s enough content for a proper wonderland adventure.
Cortopia Studios, the Stockholm-based team behind the spellcasting combat game Wands (2016), showed off their next entry into the realm of VR at Gamescom 2019 this week. Called Down the Rabbit Hole, I got a chance to go hands-on with the third-person adventure game, which tasks you with solving a variety of puzzles while leading a lost girl through a miniature world inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865).
Strapping on an Oculus Quest, I find myself looking at a two inch-tall pair of characters, a girl (simply called ‘The Girl) and a little playing card-shaped knight, the so-called 4½ of Spades.
Grabbing onto a large root suspended below the scene, I pull the diorama of the dark forest closer to me, and absentmindedly brush my fingers through a river and play with the leaves of the bonzai-sized trees.
Image courtesy Cortopia Studios
The narrator tells me that the plucky duo is searching for something called the King’s Keep on their quest to follow the White Rabbit, and as luck would have it, a tiny Cheshire Cat is there to help.
Much of my 15-minute demo was played in the third-person; character locomotion is achieved by either moving the pint-sized people via Touch’s thumbstick or drawing a path to the desired destination (the latter is especially useful when you have to backtrack through complex pathways). However at times you’ll also snap into a first-person mode too. Walking close to the Cheshire Cat, I’m presented with a dialogue tree populated with a few options to interrogate the curious kitty.
Image captured by Road to VR
If you know your lore, you’ll remember that Cheshire Cat is pathologically incapable of answering straight forward questions though, so he instead saddles us with the important task of rounding up five pesky butter-flies—literal sticks of butter with wings, which is the overarching task for the demo.
Although I say ‘most’ of the game is in third-person, I can’t really be sure of that from what I’ve played. As with dialogue trees, some of the puzzles I encountered were actually in the first-person too, so it feels like there’s going to be plenty of latitude for interesting and varied interactions between the two.
Ambling my characters separately through a few adjacent rooms to complete some door puzzles—all of it in service of those hidden butter-flies—it becomes clear to me that it’s actually I who is down the rabbit hole. The numerous dioramas eventually create a cylinder around me, and the black void above and below me keeps revealing more and more little rooms stacked on top of each other. Using the same locomotion method as when I leaned in to get a better look, I shift the world around me and climb around by using the many roots as handholds.
Eventually we run into more familiar faces, including the hookah-smoking Caterpillar himself, and a pretty suspicious-looking King, who is really just a low-numbered card with hastily painted on whiteout and a big ‘K’ scribbled on his chest. That’s some low-key Swedish comedy for you.
Image courtesy Cortopia Studios
The demo’s puzzles, both first and third-person, were fairly simple, although were varied enough to keep my attention. A puzzle with a singing bird and musical set of flowers was the most difficult for me personally, although that’s because every musical instrument I’ve ever laid my fingers on turns to dust and flies out the window in a magical tornado conjured by the ghosts of classical musicians past.
In the end, it appears the game isn’t going to offer a single prescribed ending either, as Cortopia say that you’ll be able to make “many choices about the girl’s backstory” and how you want to deal with the various characters, something they say will ultimately determine the ending of the game.
Down the Rabbit Hole is slated to arrive on PSVR, PC VR headsets, and Oculus Quest sometime in December 2019. Check out the gameplay trailer below to get a taste of what’s in store:
This year at Gamescom, Europe’s largest games festival, VRFocus saw a host of brand-new augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) releases. For the first time ever, the event featured a tie-in event known as the VR Games Showcase. Out of the games announced over the course of the 20th – 24th August 2019, here are some highlights.
In The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets, join your grandfather to immerse yourself in childhood fantasy miniature worlds filled with treasure and puzzles. Developed and published by Apex Construct studio Fast Travel Games, Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets will be available on Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift & Windows Mixed Reality headsets later this year.
Acron: Attack of the Squirrels is a multi-player, cross-platform adventure where Trees and Squirrels battle for ownership of the precious Golden Acorns. While VR players take on the role of a protective tree, friends on iOS & Android set their sites to take on the trees as a crafty Squirrel. Acron: Attack of the Squirrels will catapult itself onto Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift headsets on the 29th August.
Down the Rabbit Hole is being developed for PlayStation VR, HTC Vive & Oculus Quest headsets. An unnamed girl has found herself in the world of Lewis Carroll’s classic fantasy novel, Alice in Wonderland. The player’s decisions determine her fate in this mysterious world. The second VR title from Cortopia Studios after their top-selling VR game, Wands for multiple headsets including Oculus Go, Down the Rabbit Hole currently has a target release date of December 2019.
Coming soon to VR arcades, Corsair’s Curse, is a location-based title is being brought to you by Innerspace VR in partnership with Vertigo Games. A spiritual successor to Vertigo Games’ A Fisherman’s Tale, 2-4 players find themselves with complete freedom on board an ancient galleon where you must solve puzzles, find treasure and ultimately escape. In various locations, the game will feature additional 4D weather and vibration effects.
New from Pixel Reef comes Paper Beast. You become immersed in the world filled with paper wildlife in this open-world, free-roaming adventure where your behaviour influences the mysterious paper inhabitants. Pixel Reef describes this world as being filled with “decades of lost code” and “a complete ecosystem, born from the hidden confines of big data.” With no text or dialogue, you must find your own way across this vast world in this PlayStation VR exclusive release, coming later in 2019.
Relive the event with video summaries of each day available on VRFocus’ Facebook pages as well as individual reviews of each videogame available upon release available here on the site, and check out our weekly upcoming releases video on our YouTube channel.
I’m almost jealous of all of the cool ideas Down The Rabbit Hole has.
The moment I jumped into the demo for the latest game from Wands developer Cortopia, it clicked. Mashing novel with VR, it plays a little like a panoramic comic book, with new panels unfolding around you as you move your characters from one scene to the next. If they climbed a ladder to a higher panel, I could grab roots dotted around me and hoist myself up to see them.
When two characters spoke, the game shifted from a third-person perspective to a more direct and personal first-person approach. In some puzzles I had to reach into the world myself to manipulate objects as if I were the god of Wonderland itself. Even the name has me asking why I didn’t think of it first.
Needless to say, I’m fascinated by what Cortopia has on its hands.
This is a puzzle game at heart. Cortopia describes it as more of a prequel to the novel than a straight up adaptation. In my demo, the Chesire Cat — appearing as vibrant and toothily grinned as ever — tasks me with finding five butterflies. Two characters, including an unnamed girl (as in: probably not Alice) navigate Wonderland together, and I can swap between them on the fly.
There are sparks of genius here. I really enjoyed jumping into first-person to get up close with Wonderland’s fantastical cast of characters. Reasoning with the King of Spades, who’s face changed from one scribbled emotion to another was a rare moment of VR magic.
My concerns lie with the game’s puzzle elements. Down The Rabbit Hole has some fun brain-teasers, but some pretty obscure ones too. For example, at one point I had to guide the other character, a card (specifically which card I forget), through a small gap between a door. The developer had to point it out to me, otherwise I would have had no idea it was there. I want to spend time exploring this world and being rewarded for it, not getting frustrated at road bumps like that.
Based on the trailer above, it looks like it’ll be worth persevering. There’s simply too much potential in this universe and Cortopia seems to be making the most of that in the ways that count. Nothing gets weirder than Alice and Down The Rabbit Hole promises to live up to that status quo.
Down The Rabbit Hole is coming to PC VR this year. PSVR and Quest versions are also in the works, though jury’s still out on exactly when they launch.
