escape room – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

May 14, 2021

Pilot Underwater Mechs In A Rogue Escape, Coming June 11 For PC VR

A new puzzle game is arriving for PC VR early next month that will see you attempt to take control of a giant underwater mech in an escape room-inspired experience.

A Rogue Escape places you in a giant underwater mech and tasks you with playing around with all the switches and controls to find a way to get it moving so you can escape. Here’s a bit of what to expect from the Steam page:

It was your only way off this forsaken planet, but standing aboard a colossal stolen mech, you find yourself surrounded by unfamiliar buttons, levers, and monitors. In full VR, push, pull, press and hack everything you can find in an attempt to activate this lumbering beast and make your escape.

The game is being developed as a collaboration between Spare Parts Oasis and VR development studio Sylphe Labs. It’s actually a reimagining of one of Spare Parts Oasis’ previous games – their 2019 title Nauticrawl. Spare Parts have teamed up with Sylphe Labs to take the original rogue-lite puzzle game and turn it into a VR title with a fully explorable 3D space inside the mech.

Despite being a reimagining of a previous game, Spare Parts Oasis says that A Rogue Escape has been built “from the ground up to deliver a tense, atmospheric experience, on par with some of the very best escape rooms.”

“Combining an escape room with dungeon crawling and cockpit simulation was a daring concept back when I did this on PC with my previous title Nauticrawl, but somehow it feels right at home with a headset on and a fully immersive and tactile environment to experience,” said Spare Parts Oasis’ Andrea Interguglielmi.

If that sounds like your kind of jam, you won’t have to wait long – A Rogue Escape will be available from June 11 for PC VR on the Oculus Store and Steam, where you can wishlist it now.

May 22, 2020

Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets is the First Live Escape Room for Oculus Quest

The last couple of years saw physical escape rooms surge in popularity, great for a birthday outing with friends or corporate team-building exercises. There are several virtual reality (VR) titles devoted to this particular puzzle genre, but none have managed to mix the two until now. Today, VR studio Adventure Lab has launched its first product, a multiplayer experience called Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets.

This isn’t your average escape room videogame as Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets is built around bringing that traditional physical escape room experience into your living room. This means you actually have to book your adventure and select a time slot, because each session will feature a live host.

Suitable for between 2-4 players, the host will initially guide players, showing them how the various mechanics work before the main gameplay starts. The host will then take the role of the story’s central villain, talking to the group to make the experience interactive and individual, repeated sessions will see different hosts appear.

In Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets, you’ll play as newly recruited secret agents for the Virtual Intelligence Agency, with the mission being to investigate Dr. Crumb disguised as animals. You and your team will then have to complete a succession of rooms in an allotted time to succeed, having a maximum of 40 minutes to finish it all.

Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets is the brainchild of Adventure Lab co-founders Maxwell Planck (CEO), a 10 year Pixar veteran and the technical co-founder and CTO of Oculus Story Studio, and Kim Adams (COO), a producer at Pixar and Head of Production at Oculus Story Studio.

“At Oculus Story Studio, we experimented with VR as a great storytelling medium. We now believe VR is better for making shared memories through adventure,” said Planck in a statement.

Currently supporting Oculus Quest, to book time slots for Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets head to Adventure Lab’s website. Due to the live nature of the presentation, currently, only one slot is available each day which costs $100 USD, so for the best value make sure all four places are filled.

Adventure Lab plans on expanding the experience by adding support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Valve Index, more performers and puzzles in the near future. VRFocus will continue its coverage of the studio, reporting back with its latest updates.

March 12, 2020

Extreme Escapes Looks Like A Highly-Interactive VR Puzzle Game

If you’re a fan of VR games designed around making you push, pull, and tinker with things, Extreme Escapes looks like it was made for you.

Some gameplay from our upcoming Quest game “Extreme Escapes” from r/oculus

From Immersion VR, the same developers behind The Ancients, Extreme Escapes is an upcoming VR puzzle game that will support “all major headsets.” The footage shown above on Reddit is from the Oculus Quest version, but tethered headsets like the Rift S will have “better visuals” according to the developer on Reddit.

What’s notable about the brief bit of gameplay, other than the obviously impressive visuals, is just how interactive everything is. You can see the player reaching out and touching with tons of objects in the environment. It looks like a fiddler’s paradise in that floating contraption. For more, you can see this three-month old beta gameplay video too.

Stylistically I’m getting strong Red Matter vibes, which is certainly a compliment for the artists on the project, and gameplay looks a bit like an expanded and more free-form version of I Expect You To Die.

If puzzles and escape games are your jam, then you definitely need to keep an eye on The Room VR: A Dark Matter, which releases later this month on all major VR platforms. Check out our hands-on and interview right here for more on that one.

We don’t know a release date yet for Extreme Escapes, nor do we have any other concrete details, but the footage looked too promising to ignore. We’ve reached out to the developer for more details and will follow-up with more coverage when we hear back.

The post Extreme Escapes Looks Like A Highly-Interactive VR Puzzle Game appeared first on UploadVR.

February 28, 2020

The Room VR Releases March 26 On All Major VR Platforms

Announced last year at OC6, the latest entry in The Room puzzle game series is a VR title and will launch next month on March 26.

The Room VR will be available on Oculus Quest, PlayStation VR, and SteamVR, and Rift headsets. Unlike many other games, The Room VR will have a simultaneous launch on all major VR platforms, which means that the vast majority of VR users will be able to play the game on the day of release.

The series has traditionally appeared on mobile platforms making this latest installment the series’ first VR title. However, although The Room series hasn’t ventured into VR before, the developers behind it have. Fireproof Games released Omega Agent in 2016, back in the early days of modern consumer VR. The Room VR is designed for virtual reality from the ground up and will be set in the British Museum in London, where players will investigate the disappearance of an Egyptologist.

While at OC6, David Jagneaux from UploadVR went hands-on with the game and enjoyed the demo, noting that the game had “a strong mysterious flavor” that should entice fans of the genre and the franchise. “Similar to the mobile line of The Room games, or even just physical Escape Rooms and VR-themed Escape games you might have played, it’s just as much about interpreting the objects you’re given as it is filling in the blanks,” wrote David.

We also got to interview Barry Meade, the Co-Founder and Director of Fireproof Games, while David ran through his demo in the background, which you can watch above.

Are you looking forward to The Room VR? Which headset will you be playing it on? Let us know in the comments.

The post The Room VR Releases March 26 On All Major VR Platforms appeared first on UploadVR.

February 12, 2020

Prince Of Persia VR Escape Room Coming This Spring To VR Arcades

Today Ubisoft announced that it’s releasing a Prince of Persia-themed VR escape room similar to its current lineup that includes Assassin’s Creed Origins-themed Escape the Lost Pyramid and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey-themed Beyond Medusa’s Gate.

Surprisingly, the Prince of Persia VR escape room, named The Dagger of Time, is set in the world of The Sands of Time, a PS2-era platforming action-adventure game. The VR escape room experience will be developed by Ubisoft Düsseldorf for all ages and requires 2-4 players.

According to a press release:

“In the story, players are summoned by Kaileena, the Empress of Time. They are asked to help her to stop the evil plans of a Magi who is attempting to restore the sands to the Hourglass of Time and create an army of Sand Monsters. To successfully escape the fortress, players must use cooperative teamwork and problem-solving skills to complete objectives, utilizing powers such as time control from the dagger of time.”

Ubisoft initially seemed bullish on the potential of VR as an interactive medium releasing several games quickly such as Eagle Flight, Werewolves Within, and Star Trek: Bridge Crew, but eventually abandoned their latest endeavor, Space Junkies. Since then we’ve heard rumors of upcoming big VR projects but never saw confirmations. In the meantime they’ve pivoted to using their IP in the location-based market instead.

There’s more information on The Dagger of Time over on the official Ubisoft Escape Games website. The attraction will roll out to over 300 locations worldwide this Spring.

Let us know what you think of the news down in the comments below!

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November 7, 2019

Puzzle Adventure ‘Last Labyrinth’ to Launch on All Major VR Headsets Next Week

Last Labyrinth, an escape room-style adventure game from Japan-based studio Amata K.K., is making its debut across a variety of VR platforms soon, arriving on PC VR headsets, PSVR, and Quest next week.

Last Labyrinth is slated to release on November 13th, coming to Steam (Vive, Rift, Index, Windows VR), the Oculus Store (Quest, Rift), and the PlayStation Store (PSVR), priced at $40. A release is also planned for PC VR headsets via the Microsoft Store, however its launch has been delayed due to unspecified reasons.

Set in a mysterious mansion, the single-player game tasks you with solving increasingly difficult puzzles to hopefully make your way out. Sound pretty standard, right? Not quite.

Unlike other escape room-style VR games, you’ve been physically chained to a wheel chair, which only allows you to look around and move your fingers to hit a single switch resting in your hand.

Strangely enough, whatever malevolent force bound you to the old-timey wheel chair has also attached a laser pointer to your head. When you press the switch, the laser pointer turns on, letting you direct Katia, the young girl in the trailer, so she can do the legwork (so to speak).

OC6 The Room VR Hands-On: Mysterious Puzzles And Impressive Visuals

This week at the Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) conference in San Jose, CA I got the chance to try out a brief demo of The Room VR: A Dark Matter from Fireproof Games, a newly announced entry in the long-running puzzle series.

The Room VR was announced during OC6 and they had two demo pods with Oculus Quest headsets set up for attendees to try out. During my demo Tatjana did a short interview with Barry Meade, Co-Founder and Director of Fireproof Games, with me playing in the background.

You can watch the interview here:

My demo took place mostly inside the London police station you can see in the gameplay footage sprinkled throughout the interview as well as in the trailer (embedded below) as I was tasked with trying to figure out what’s going on with some new evidence at the station.

If you’ve ever played an interaction-heavy puzzle-based game in VR before, the flow of The Room VR will be very familiar. I basically spent my time teleporting between various nodes in the police station that each had a bunch of objects and items for me to tinker with. For example, near the front was a project that I could use to flip through slides that had evidence and historical details, or I could go to the evidence locker and retrieve items.

Similar to the mobile line of The Room games, or even just physical Escape Rooms and VR-themed Escape games you might have played, it’s just as much about interpreting the objects you’re given as it is filling in the blanks. One of the key puzzles in the demo was figuring out which evidence locker had the item I needed to break into a safe. The safe I was trying to open was overrun by the titular “dark matter” and made it impossible to open normally.

Over at the evidence locker I can see that someone was arrested for safe cracking but their storage number is erased — naturally. So if I look down the list I could tell that each number was listed sequentially and the letter associated was (spoilers) assigned to the criminal’s last name. After realizing that I grabbed the item, opened the safe, and then used that item to solve another puzzle later on.

What stood out to me most though is that this demo was running on an Oculus Quest and it looked absolutely great. Visually all of the environments were sharp, I could go out on the balcony outside and look over the city at nighttime, and all of the physical interactions felt really, really good.

I didn’t get a sense too much of what the narrative is about exactly, but it certainly has a strong mysterious flavor that should hook existing fans of the genre.

We’ll be keeping an eye on Fireproof Games and The Room VR for more details as the months move on. The Room VR is slated to release within the first few months of 2020 and is coming to every major VR device included SteamVR headsets, Oculus Rift via Home, Oculus Quest, and PSVR. Check out the official website for Fireproof Games for more details.

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September 10, 2019

VR Escape Room Last Labyrinth Coming To Quest, Launches November

We finally have a release date for promising VR escape room game, Last Labyrinth.

The game will be launching on pretty much all VR platforms on November 13. That includes the Oculus Quest, support for which was announced for the first time today. It’s also coming to PSVR, Rift, Vive and Windows VR. We’d assume Index support will feature, though it’s not officially listed by developer AMATA K.K.. The game’s set to be on display at the Tokyo Game Show event later this month, too.

The developer says the images below were taken from the Quest version itself. They’re a little bit blurry but overall they look quite faithful to the PC and console versions of the game, though.

In Last Labyrinth you find yourself bound to a wheelchair. A young girl named Katia assists you, responding to your commands to solve various puzzles. Get the right answer and you might escape with your life. Getting things wrong, however, results in a grizzly death. There’s a central mystery to the game about why you’ve been captured that we’re looking forward to unraveling.

The game’s being developed by Hiromichi Takahashi, best known for creating the PlayStation Cat mascot for Sony in Japan. Co-Director Tetsuya Watanbe, meanwhile, has worked on both The Last Guardian and Puppeteer. Katia herself is voiced by Stefanie Joosten, who played Quiet in Metal Gear Solid V. Not that you’d know because she was, well, quiet.

Last Labyrinth will cost $39.99 at launch. We’ll keep you updated on all the latest from the game.

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May 16, 2019

Fade Out Is A Violence-Free VR Escape Room For HTC Vive

There’s a new VR escape room experience on the horizon. Game development studio PlaySys is taking the lessons learned from developing puzzle game qb and walking simulator Abyssus into their third creation: Fade Out. It’s built for the HTC Vive and will challenge players to find all of the clues and solve the puzzles when it launches on May 21.

Fade Out is an experiment for PlaySys on multiple levels. It’s the studio’s first attempt at an escape room game and it is their first game for one of the more powerful VR HMDs. PlaySys launched their previous games on Gear VR, Pico Golbin, and Oculus Go, so they have leaped to a much higher tier of power and capability with the HTC Vive.

PlaySys has designed Fade Out for 3x3m rooms and it uses 6DoF movement so players can search spaces top to bottom for various objects and details. It’s a violence-free experience: No zombies, monsters, or blood of any kind. Thus, users seeking something calmer or more experienced VR players that are interested in games to ease new players into could find some value in Fade Out. The team states that the puzzles are designed for players of every age, as well.

Even without violence, you can see in the game’s trailer that there still seems to be some suspense. There are a lot of objects to interact with and there’s foreboding lighting as you attempt to solve all of Fade Out’s riddles. This will be an interesting test to see if PlaySys has what it takes to take the more advanced capabilities of the HTC Vive and develop a memorable experience.

The virtual reality escape room game Fade Out will be available on May 21 via Steam for HTC Vive and is playable in standing or room-scale. The team suggests that players who want to play in a seated position can do so using the game’s teleport function.

Tagged with: escape room, Fade Out

May 13, 2019

Ubisoft Bringing Assassin’s Creed VR Escape Rooms To Over 100 Locations

Ubisoft has been more deeply involved in VR development than most AAA-caliber game studios. From their early work on titles like Werewolves Within, Eagle Flight, and Star Trek: Bridge Crew to their latest release with Space Junkies, and now a seemingly growing line of Assassin’s Creed-themed VR escape rooms, they seem extremely invested in the industry.

Last year we wrote about Escape the Lost Pyramid from Ubisoft and Blue Byte games and earlier this year we covered the announcement of Beyond Medusa’s Gate, a follow-up born from that same partnership. Today, Ubisoft officially announced that Beyond Medusa’s Gate is not just a limited release but is actually now available at over 100 location-based entertainment centers across the US and Europe.

As you can deduce from the topics, Escape the Lost Pyramid was a tie-in for Assassin’s Creed Origins while Beyond Medusa’s Gate is designed as a tie-in for last year’s excellent Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. In the VR escape room teams of two to four players show up together in person and don VR headsets to be transported to another world. In the game groups have an hour to find a way out of a coastal cave where the ship of the Argonauts is anchored.

“To successfully escape, players must use cooperative teamwork, problem-solving skills and precise timing to solve riddles and find their way out of this room-scale experience,” U As part of the immersive VR experience, players start the adventure by choosing their avatar among six diverse characters and can customize them with ancient Greek accessories.”

You can find more information about the Ubisoft Escape Games brand and game locations at the official website. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

Tagged with: assassin's creed, escape room, ubisoft

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