Steel Wool Studios released a new trailer for Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted this week that gives over a minute of Oculus Quest footage.
Even though the game has been out for quite some time on SteamVR and on PSVR, the upcoming Oculus Quest version feels like an opportunity for new life. Just as with many games over the last year, releasing again on Quest is a great opportunity for Five Nights at Freddy’s VR to have a lot of success.
Not only is the standalone Quest a great device in and of itself, but it’s also naturally more shareable and easy to show off as quick demos to people and Five Nights at Freddy’s VR is the perfect game for that. Millions of people are familiar with the franchise from the PC games to the mobile games, so it won’t require a lot of introduction.
This trailer gives us a great glimpse into what the Quest port will look like. Not all Quest ports are created equally, as evidenced by Robo Recall and Red Matter — two ports on completely different ends of the “how close is this to the original” spectrum. But based on this quick look, Five Nights at Freddy’s VR looks like a pretty solid job.
We’ll have our full review, video footage, and livestreams for you to consume with your eyeballs next week. Until then, let us know down in the comments if you plan on playing Five Nights at Freddy’s VR. Why or why not?
Welcome to another Friday roundup of the best virtual reality (VR) titles due for release over the next seven days. There’s quite an assortment in store across most VR headsets so there should be something for everyone here this week.
Crisis VRigade 2 – Sumalab
Only released into Early Access for PC VR headsets in June, developer Sumalab is bringing its action-packed first-person shooter (FPS) Crisis VRigade 2 to PlayStation VR in a few days. Currently a single-player experience, you play a SWAT officer fighting your way through hordes of enemies.
Supported platforms: PlayStation VR
Release date: 14th July
vrkshop – scopatgames
For those wanting less action and something a little more practical then there’s woodworking videogame vrkshop. In this Early Access experience you’re challenged to build projects with various hand tools without the ease of snap-to-guides.
Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted – Steel Wool Studios
If you love your horror games and the recent Layers of Fear VRwasn’t enough then Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted by Steel Wool Studios could be the answer. Try and survive these deadly animatronics across various mini-games from the franchise.
Fancy a game of pool with a twist? Then how about Golf Pool VR, which is exactly as it sounds. Offering solo and PvP modes, use a golf club to play 8-Ball Pool across a range of detailed and immersive environments.
Oculus confirmed that the upcoming release of Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted will support cross-buy between Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest when it launches on the standalone platform on July 16.
In a tweet from the Oculus Gaming account, Oculus confirmed to a user that Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted will be a cross-buy title at launch for Oculus Quest. This means that users who already own the Oculus Rift version of the game will be able to download the Oculus Quest port for free from the Oculus Store.
Good news for you! FNAF will be a cross-buy title.
However, this only applies to the PC VR version of the game available on the Oculus Store. As cross-buy is linked to your Oculus account, if you own the game for PC VR on Steam, you won’t get free access to the Oculus Quest version.
For PC VR owners (or those with Oculus Link capability) who just can’t wait, you could grab Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted on the Oculus Store for Rift now and still have access to the Quest port when it releases later this month.
Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted is one of the most anticipated Oculus Quest releases for this month, which is saying something given how stacked July is for VR releases in general, not just on Quest. You can check out our full list of releases for the month here, but in short — Shooty Skies Overdrive, Five Nights, In Death: Unchained and Onward are all coming to the Quest this month! You certainly won’t be starved for content for a while.
Will you be picking up Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted on Quest? Let us know in the comments.
Virtual Reality might be one of gaming’s most immersive ways to play but it remains a niche platform.
[UploadVR regularly commissions freelance writers to review products, write stories, and contribute op-ed pieces to the site. This article is an opinion-based listicle from the perspective of the writer.]
That’s mostly attributable to a high price barrier. Though efforts from Sony such as PlayStation VR and Facebook’s Oculus Quest have helped, the price still helps explain why AAA publishers are reluctant to invest in fully-fledged original experiences. As a result, much of the time, VR is incorporated as an optional experience within existing non-VR titles instead.
On the other side, developers have also adapted VR games to more conventional platforms, providing them a larger audience. Whether it’s launching with both options, porting to VR-less platforms, or patching in a desktop mode, the inclusion of both methods can make great experiences more widely accessible.
With some developers seeking to unify both audiences, here are some of the best examples we’ve seen yet for great non-VR games with must-play VR support.
CCP Games have seen huge success with EVE Online. Released in 2003, EVE became renowned for its vast scale, seeing players compete for virtual supremacy and bringing some fascinating stories with it. Looking to branch out their universe, CCP then released VR title Eve: Valkyrie back in 2016, a multiplayer dogfighter with heavy emphasis on PvP missions. Over a year later, Valkyrie’s Warzone update was released, bringing a desktop mode that removed previous VR requirements. It’s campaign was sadly short-lived but bringing some enjoyable gameplay, it’s an exhilarating experience worth revisiting for quick space thrills.
Several studios have tried recreating the intensity of floating through outer space via virtual reality and back in 2017, Anshar Studios’ Detached was among them. Featuring PvP multiplayer as well as a separate campaign, it’s an incredibly lonely experience that saw you separated from your ship, left to explore an abandoned space station to survive. Its zero gravity antics proved nauseating in places and, trying to broaden its user base, Anshar developed a non-VR version in 2018, easing the experience but losing that immersion. With benefits to both formats, Detached proved an enjoyable title that’s worth looking into.
Five Nights At Freddy’s: Help Wanted (Switch Non-VR, PC / PC VR, PS4 / PSVR, and Quest)
When Five Nights At Freddy’s launched in 2014, few expected it to become the hit sensation we see today. Originally developed by Scott Cawthon, this horror series saw you playing an overnight security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, trying to survive against a group of deadly animatronic characters. Spawning six main sequels, FNAF expanded into VR last year with Help Wanted, featuring 50 minigames based off its previous entries. It saw positive reception and quickly became a best-selling VR title but, not wanting to leave any fans out, developers released a non-VR release six months later, landing on PS4, PC and Switch.
Tequila Works made a name for themselves most recently with Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son but back in 2017, they were hard at work releasing The Invisible Hours. Invited to a mysterious mansion by Nikola Telsa, each guest holds a murky past, many of whom are looking to make amends. Playing as disgraced detective Gustaf Gustav, we find Tesla has been murdered by another guest and it’s up to you to discover the truth. Receiving strong reviews, Tequila Works soon developed a non-VR version, releasing a free patch six months later and it proved just as satisfying.
The Persistence recently became a multiplatform release but two years ago, developers Firesprite made waves on PSVR with their former exclusive. Finding your spaceship stranded in deep space and overrun by demonic creatures, you played the crew’s sole survivor, Zimri Elder, trying to make it through this horrific onslaught. Incorporating FPS and roguelike mechanics, death is a minor obstacle, finding Zimri cloned back to life each time and no two playthroughs are identical, changing the spaceship layout on each run. Now withVR optional on PC/PS4, it’s a great choice for horror fans.
Tetris should require no introduction to most. With differently shaped blocks known as Tetrominos falling downward, you aim to clear lines by filling them up, earning points for speed. Since arriving in 1984, Tetris has seen many different releases, but news of a VR version surprised many in 2018. Helmed by Rez producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi, TetrisEffect retained the classic gameplay formula but split stages into three cinematic sections, activated by clearing a set number of lines. Bringing us stunning visuals and an excellent soundtrack, it launched with support for both VR and non-VR and comes highly recommended.
It’s been three years since VRChat first launched but even now this free-to-play title retains a significant following. Featuring gameplay reminiscent of Second Life, VRChat is a user-driven experience, allowing players to create their own worlds, avatars and custom content. It may be surprising considering the name but VRChat isn’t limited to virtual reality, including a desktop mode so anyone can join, albeit with control limitations. Not every world caters to desktop users but ultimately, this experience comes down to you. Whether you’re looking to socialize, play some games or something else, there’s plenty of fun to be found.
There are undoubtedly countless others that we could have included. What are some of your picks for the best VR games that also have non-VR support?
For Halloween 2019 Oculus and Steel Wool Studios announced that the jump scare filled Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wantedwould be coming to Oculus Quest. It’s now been revealed the horror title will be a summer release, arriving in the middle of July.
Previously released for PC virtual reality (VR) headsets as well as PlayStation VR, Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted brings all those classic mini-game scares under one banner. With the Oculus Quest edition, you’ll be able to take all those mechanical horrors with you to frighten your friends.
It looks like the Oculus Quest version will have the same content as the other platforms, combining Five Nights at Freddy’s, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, Five Nights at Freddy’s 3, Five Nights at Freddy’s 4, and Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location.
If you’ve not braved the videogame before the story revolves around a theme park which has giant animatronics to entertain the guests. However, at night the once cuddly mechanical creations come to life and take a menacing turn for the worst, so it’s up to you to keep them at bay.
This means having to keep an eye on security cameras for any movement, crawling into claustrophobic ventilation systems to fix them or trying to mend broken animatronics. All the while making sure you’re not going to be their next victim. All these scenarios and more take place in short mini-game stints.
VRFocus gave the PC VR version of Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted a four-star review, saying: “Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted has great visual impact, and would definitely make for some funny YouTube videos with people trying it for the first time.” Adding that the title: “is definitely one for series fans or those that enjoy a good scare.”
Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted is coming to Oculus Quest on 16th July. For further updates on the videogame, keep reading VRFocus.
Five Nights at Freddy’s fans rejoice, we finally have a date! Five Nights At Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted will launch for Oculus Quest on July 16.
To say that the arrival of the famous horror franchise on the Quest has been highly anticipated would be a huge understatement. Five Nights at Freddy’s fans have been absolutely clamoring for any news on the Quest port of the franchise’s VR game, subtitled Help Wanted.
During our recent UploadVR Showcase: Summer Edition, many viewers in the livestream comments were holding out for some potential Five Nights at Freddy’s news, and while we didn’t have anything to share then (to the disappointment of the many passionate fans), Oculus announced today that the game is just over 3 weeks away. The tweet was accompanied by a short trailer you can watch above. As a nice bonus, you can also scroll through the tweet’s replies to witness the sheer excitement coming from Freddy fans as they react to the news.
So it’s the end of the year and what a 12 months it has been for virtual reality (VR) fans. With hardware makers pushing out more and more headsets Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has taken a far more relaxed approach by letting PlayStation VR continue to do its thing. The headset has had some excellent videogames appear and here is VRFocus’ pick of the best.
First and foremost this is a list of the best PlayStation VR videogames which launched in 2019. Which means there are several titles which appear on other ‘Best of lists’ that won’t appear here. Beat Saber is a prime example. While the highly popular rhythm-action experience left Early Access in May, that was only for PC (including an Oculus Quest edition). The PlayStation VR version launched in November 2018, hence its omission.
The Best PlayStation VR Games of 2019:
Blood & Truth
Hailing from Sony London Studio, Blood & Truth was the biggest PlayStation VR exclusive of the year by a long shot. Mixing intense action gameplay with a tightly interwoven storyline and cinematic cutscenes, the title showcased what could be achieved with PlayStation VR. VRFocus’review gave it a full five stars, saying: “From start to finish Blood & Truth is one hell of a ride, a finely choreographed John Woo movie that’s all about sheer entertainment.”
Ghost Giant
Zoink Games’ Ghost Giant, on the other hand, is a very different beast; loveable and kind-hearted. A puzzle adventure where you play the titular Ghost Giant, an invisible friend to a lonely boy named Louis. Placed in the centre of a living cartoon world, you can interact with a lot of the world, helping not only Louis but the other town residents as well.
Perfect for gamers of all ages, Ghost Giant is a relaxed experience full of child-like wonder, being able to open houses and peer inside to see the richly detailed worlds. Great for when you don’t anything too hectic.
No Man’s Sky: Beyond
A summer update adding VR support rather than a dedicated VR videogame, even so, No Man’s Sky: Beyond was a major addition from Hello Games. With a massive procedurally generated universe to explore, new planets to discover, unusual creatures to find and other players to team up with, No Man’s Sky: Beyond offers quite possibly the most VR gameplay for your money. Plus the there’s the added benefit that the update was free for those who already own the original version.
Unless you really don’t like sci-fi and flying around in spaceships, then No Man’s Sky: Beyond is a solid addition to any VR library.
Tetris Effect
How do you make one of the greatest, most iconic puzzle videogames even better? Give it to a team which includes Enhance Games and let them work their magic. Offering both VR and non-VR gameplay, the core Tetris mechanics remain untouched with some added extras for those well versed in the puzzle title.
The big change comes for the visual and sound design, with a feast for your eyes and ears. Needless to say, while the non-VR version does look and sound nice, the effects are far more pronounced and engaging. And when it comes to addictive gaming Tetris Effect doesn’t disappoint.
Trover Saves the Universe
When the guy who helped co-create Rick & Morty decided to found his own videogame studio and then create a VR title, you know it’s going to be a little different from the rest. Trover Saves the Universe has that weird and zany humour Justin Roiland is known for, combined with a third-person adventure, where you control Trover, a little purple eye-hole monster trying to save the universe from a beaked lunatic named Glorkon, who just so happens to have kidnapped your dogs and put them in his eye sockets. Exactly…
Angry Birds Movie 2 VR: Under Pressure
So what about proper multiplayer titles? While No Man’s Sky: Beyond does feature multiplayer, you can’t enjoy it when a few friends are around. That’s where Angry Birds Movie 2 VR: Under Pressurecomes in handy. Exclusive to PlayStation VR, the title uses the social screen (TV) to allow up to four people to play locally, one in VR and three via the TV. The job is to collect treasure and not let the submarine you’re in suffer too much damage.
It’s a fast and frantic videogame where the VR player is the captain, with a different viewpoint and tasks to the other players. Thus encouraging everyone to have a go in VR. There is a single-player mode but Angry Birds Movie 2 VR: Under Pressure is all about the social gameplay.
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted
What’s a ‘Best of’ VR list without a horror title thrown in to scare you. Bringing the classic franchise into VR, Five Night’s at Freddy’s: Help Wanted combines all the original mini-game levels with a bunch of new ones. Not for the faint-hearted, Five Night’s at Freddy’s: Help Wantedis full of jump scares as you try to survive the night in the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza security office, or repair vents in the depths of Circus Baby’s Entertainment and Rental.
When it comes to playing VR horror keeping the lights on won’t help, you need nerves of steel and Five Night’s at Freddy’s: Help Wanted certainly helps test that.
A Fisherman’s Tale
Released all the way back in January by French studio InnerspaceVR, A Fisherman’s Tale is another puzzler for those who like something a little different. Clinching the VR Game of the Year at the VR Awards 2019, A Fisherman’s Taleis an experience about perspective and a little wooden sailor.
Delightfully charming in its design and gameplay, the single-player videogame centres around a lighthouse which you’re both inside and outside of. Confused? Don’t worry as it’s all about picking stuff up and learning how to manipulate your surroundings. Great for new and veteran VR players alike.
Vacation Simulator
A followup to the insanely popular Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator is like one massive toybox split across three different regions, a Beach, Forest and Mountain. Inside each one are loads of mini-games to complete as well as other fun stuff to play with. Challenges range from building sandcastles and making burgers to throwing snowballs and a little skiing.
With light-hearted humour throughout Vacation Simulatoris another VR experience suited for all players, designed to showcase how immersive and unique VR technology can be in comparison to standard videogames.
Concrete Genie
Another title which isn’t purely VR, Concrete Genie’s main campaign isn’t VR compatible. Instead, the title has two ‘VR modes’, the ‘VR Experience’ campaign which has a basic narrative and is required to complete before unlocking ‘Free Paint’, so you can let your creative ideas go wild.
With a visually stunning aesthetic, Concrete Genie offers an interesting mix of VR and non-VR gameplay depending on what you fancy at the time. Plus it’s a creative stop-gap until Dreams eventually arrives in 2020.
Every year is the biggest year for virtual reality. It seems more developers are delving into VR to explore the medium, hone their techniques and find out what works and what doesn’t. Virtual reality fans walk a similar path; every achievement in this burgeoning medium sets a new bar, and a new expectation of something greater as a result.
Now, a little under four years since the big names in hardware released their first generation consumer headsets, we live in a time when a number of VR games have actually approached the best that any gaming platform has to offer. And although this next decade is slated to include big titles from established studios, next-gen hardware built by the biggest in manufacturing, and experiences that teeter on complete photorealism, it’s these formative steps that are defining what’s fun, meaningful, and technically possible.
In our third annual Game of the Year Awards, we again celebrate those VR games—those stories that can only be told through the act of suspending your disbelief and immersing yourself in another world, head-first.
Without further ado, Road to VR’s 2019 Game of the Year Award winners:
Sanzaru Games and Oculus Studios brought Asgard’s Wrath to life as a part of the Oculus initiative to fund less, but bigger titles for the Rift platform. And outside of some PC-to-VR ports, it doesn’t get bigger than this melee-focused action RPG, which puts you squarely in a world that’s surprisingly alive, and boasts a depth in gameplay and visuals that make it truly something to behold. There’s little filler in the 30+ hour adventure, but even if you go for the meatiest bits, you’re looking at very least a hearty helping of gameplay that should last you well into the double digits.
While this Norse-inspired adventure doesn’t occupy an open world, it feels impressively large in scope as you traverse the game’s many layers, including moments when you need to either be god-sized or mortal-sized to solve puzzles and engage in epic combat, and when you have to control your chimeric animal pals to act as both keys to specific puzzles or order around as essential combat partners.
The game’s gestural-based combat takes some time to massage into muscle memory, but once you get down the basic moves of parrying, blocking, and countering, the game really starts to take flight. And when you begin matching those moves with more difficult enemies, many of which have their own combat styles, you’ll quickly learn that Asgard’s Wrath demands nothing short of precision (i.e. no wildly waggling your controller).
How much you like the puzzles or combat is basically subjective, but one thing that’s positively undeniable is the game’s visual finesse. Although object interaction wasn’t notable, Sanzaru expertly showcases its attention to detail as one of the key pillars of immersion. Textures, character animations, level design, all of these things are impressively realized, making it one of those games that begs for your attention long after you complete its twisty-turny story.
Wary of other rhythm games in the wake of Beat Saber (2018) hype? You shouldn’t be, as Cloudhead Games thrusts into the genre with its addictive and mightily impressive title Pistol Whip.
Pistol Whip successfully marries rhythm and shooting, and gets mega style points in the process, as it draws on things like the John Wick film series and Equilibrium (2002) for inspiration. You might also describe it as a fun mashup between Superhot VR (2017), Beat Saber, and Smash Hit (2015).
Like any good arcade game, cognitive load is high in Pistol Whip. You’re tasked with returning fire and dodging incoming bullets from scores of enemies—approaching the sort of flow state you achieve in a bullet hell game, except you’re using your whole upper body to physically flow to the beat. Its bass-heavy music goes particularly well with the punchy tones of your gunshots.
The more you fire on-beat, the more points you get, forcing you to not only shoot accurately, but to feel the music and really immerse yourself in the cool, stylized world. The song library is still a little on the low side, but it doesn’t stop the game’s replayability from being both extremely high and ultimately super satisfying.
PlayStation London Studio heard loud and clear from players of PlayStation VR Worlds (2016), the studio’s PSVR launch title, that VR needed more of the narrative-driven action teased by the ‘London Heist’ mini-game. And in Blood & Truth, the studio delivered, full stop.
Blood & Truth is the fully fleshed out vision that ‘London Heist’ deserved. Set in the midst of two warring crime families, the game takes players on an action-packed journey with strong gun and shooting mechanics, richly detailed environments, and action set pieces made to make you feel like you’re the star of your own action movie. With a smart approach to locomotion (which lets players focus on the fun) and thoughtful details (like the ability to twirl pistols around your finger for extra flair) the game manages to hit a consistently satisfying note throughout.
We also really enjoyed the scene where the player sneaks into a modern art museum, which London Studio used as a genius way to pepper the game with some rather unique VR moments that otherwise would have lacked context.
Blood & Truth is an impressively crafted experience that is not only expertly designed around the limitations of the aging PSVR, but even manages to raise the technical bar for character rendering and performances on any VR platform even against much more powerful PC hardware.
Note: VR games which were available on other VR platforms in previous years were not considered for our Quest Game of the Year award.
From the earliest days of VR you can people talking about how cool it would be to wield a lightsaber. And as VR matured over the years that talk slowly moved toward wanting a full-blown VR game in the Star War universe. There were teases… oh there were teases. ILMxLab itself put out the 10 minute Trials on Tatooine back in 2016, but it only made one thing clear: this wasn’t enough.
That project, along with other pioneering VR work by ILMxLab, like Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire at The VOID, finally culminated in Star Wars: Vader Immortal – Episode I, the first of a three-part narrative adventure on Oculus Quest.
Not only is Vader Immortal – Episode I (and the two following episodes) likely the most successful fusion to date of consumer VR and one of the worlds biggest media franchises, it’s also a stunning proof that you don’t need high-end computing power for an engaging and immersive experience.
For players taking their first steps into VR with Quest, Vader Immortal – Episode I is an ideal opening act that strikes a great balance between narrative and gameplay. Though this singular episode doesn’t run very long, it takes players on a thoughtfully crafted journey that sells the feeling of actually being part of the Star Wars story.
And for the more hardcore gamers that can’t quite get enough Vader Immortal – Episode I‘s ‘lightsaber dojo’ offers up wave-based combat which is challenging and engaging enough to easily triple the time spend in the campaign portion of the game. And as the first part of a trilogy, Episode II & Episode III are already available for players to continue the story.
Five Nights at Freddy’s took the Internet by storm back in 2014 with its memorable jump scares and bizarre re-imagining of the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant/arcade attraction. Now, Steel Wool Studios has rebuilt the game from the ground-up as a Freddy Fazbear-brand VR experience, which includes a number of minigames in addition to the good ol’ classic task of evading the deadly animatronics from your curiously unsafe control room.
Object interaction is well designed in Five Nights at Freddy’s VR, which helps ground you in the world, and it’s really well polished on the graphical side as well. One big part of what makes FNAF VR great though is sound design, as you’re forced to not only look at the CRT monitors to see where each of the monstrous creations could be lurking, but you also have to listen for them clanking around. Ambient noises such as spinning fans and flickering lights really crank up the fear factor as you frantically pick apart what’s an important sound and what’s simply background filler. The lack of sound is even worse, as any FNAF fan can attest to.
Taking a big screaming Freddy to your face when you eventually fail to correctly manage resources is about 100 times scarier in VR; you simply can’t look away. You’d be forgiven if you’d rather watch someone else play from the comfort of your couch and a security blanket than actually dive in head-first based on how immersive and scary Five Nights at Freddy’s VR truly is.
Stormland, like most great VR games, is very much designed around its locomotion. While all too many VR games have players slowly (and boorishly) walking from A to B, Stormland makes moving around part of the game’s core fun.
This is achieved first with an expansive world. The game is set in a world where floating islands jet out of a sea of clouds. The disparate islands are a marvel to look at as the sun strikes them just right, and knowing that they are real places that you can actually travel to makes them that much more alluring.
Second, Stormland makes its movement between important gameplay spaces fun by making it interesting and different from the typical locomotion. When you set foot onto the cloud sea, you immediately kick into speedy slipstream which has you jetting around at high speeds. While we’d normally expect this kind of quick movement in VR could make players dizzy, developer Insomniac Games realized that trying fast locomotion to broad body movements goes a long way to helping players remain comfortable. And so when you slipstream along the clouds, you keep your arms pointed outward in a superman pose and steer based on the direction they face.
Third, Stormland mixes and mashes locomotion schemes to give players freedom. Slipstreaming gets you from island to island quickly, but what do you do when you get there and find that the precipice is hundreds of feet overhead? Nearly everything in the game can be climbed with a laser that projects to nearby objects from the palm of your hands, and you can even grab a wall and ‘fling’ yourself for some extremely quick cliff scaling. And once you’re up there, you can glide naturally through the air to land on unsuspecting opponents or even cruise toward your next island destination.
With these gesture-driven locomotion schemes working together effectively, Stormland gives players a thrilling freedom of movement that’s unsurpassed in other titles. We hope (and expect) to see future VR titles borrow heavily from the foundation of excellent locomotion that Insomniac built into the game.
Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR), PlayStation (PSVR)
Release Date: August 14th, 2019 (VR mode)
PC-to-VR ports aren’t “perfect” for a number of reasons. It can come down to the limitations of aging game engines, a misunderstanding of what makes VR great, or the basic lack of time investment to fully realize a true VR version. Here, No Many’s Sky bucks the trend by presenting a fun and fully-playable VR mode, which thankfully came to all users this summer for free as a part of the base game on PC or PlayStation 4.
The VR mode is basically exactly what you’d imagine from No Man’s Sky in VR;blasting off into space is magical, exploring planets is awe inspiring, riding around in exovehicles is really awesome. It also looks great too, as the rich and vibrant universe demands even more inspection from the immersive viewpoint of a VR headset. That’s not to say we didn’t have our gripes with No Man’s Sky’s VR mode, as it largely ports over the same 2D inventory scheme as in the flatscreen version, and suffers from some clunk around the edges, the latter of which seems to have gotten better over the course of the last few updates.
But what really attracts us to No Man’s Sky is the utter vastness of the universe. The game is rife with opportunities to become a pirate, trader, fighter, bounty hunter, farmer—so much so that every quality-of-life update seems to tip the balance in favor of staying in the VR headset as opposed to just firing the game up on a flatscreen—the true mark of a great VR adaptation.
Available On: Oculus (Rift), Steam (Index, Vive, Rift)
Release Date: August 27th, 2019 (Early Access)
Until You Fall might seem like an odd choice for an Excellence in UI accolade, but the game succeeds here by knowing what to avoid in the game as much as what to add to it.
This rogue-lite melee combat game does a lot well, but in the interface department it makes several especially smart choices. For one, Schell Games was smart enough to realize that—in a game where players would not be using weapons other than their own—the ability to drop your weapons would merely add useless clunk to the game. Instead, weapons are summoned into players hands whenever they squeeze the grip buttons. This not only serves as a supremely efficient version of a ‘holster’, but it also feels really bad-ass to manifest your blades in the palm of your hand just before diving head first into a fight.
What’s more, when players aren’t holding their weapons, their hands become useful for other critical game tasks. Turning your palm upright reveals a menu of stats which speaks specifically to the weapon assigned to that hand. The menu floats above your hand, making it easy to optimally position, and disappears when you don’t need it any longer.
The game has also pioneered a very satisfying ‘crushing’ interaction which serves as a very engaging way to make important choices and selections. At the end of each room you get to pick between three different power-ups. When you decide which one you want, you reach out and grab it and continue to squeeze your grab trigger until you crush the power-up and consume its energy. With the addition of haptics and sound effects, it feels great every time, so it’s no wonder that we also see this same interaction used back in the forge for selecting and upgrading weapons.
And then there’s the game’s block and attack indicators. When enemies are attacking you you’ll see blue 2D block indicators appear showing you where to place your sword to block the attack. Although these can look and feel ‘arcadey’, their function outweighs any visual concerns; knowing when to block and where is part of the way that Until You Fall manages to set a deliberate and satisfying combat pace. Equally ‘arcadey’ but important and satisfying are the attack indicators. Once you break through the opponents shield you’ll get the opportunity to start a combo. In a combo you can dish out tremendous damage, but only if you strike along the indicated line in quick succession. Here too, great haptic and audio feedback make this feel awesome and satisfying.
Boneworks is a prime example of how independent developers who have the freedom to take risks can make huge contributions to their field. With two VR titles previously already under their belt, Stress Level Zero set out to make a no-compromise physically simulated VR experience.
By making nearly everything in the game physical and interactive, Boneworks delivers on player’s expectations of agency in a way that often goes far beyond its contemporaries. In the game, just about every object, enemy, and weapon is physically interactive, leading to moments where novel ideas—like, say, using a coffee mug as a melee weapon—actually work.
While the heavy emphasis on physics can be frustrating and wonky at times, it’s hard not to feel a sense of added embodiment when your ideas about what’s possible in the game world are satisfied in a realistic fashion. Things as simple as being able to push enemies away from you with the barrel of your gun—or as morbid as stabbing through multiple enemies simultaneously with a claymore—show a glimpse of the rich interactivity that is the ultimate goal of VR.
For its part, Boneworks is a flag in the ground which represents perhaps the most interactive physics sandbox seen in VR to date, and a proof point that glimpses the immersive benefits which come from more realistic virtual interactions.
Wolves in the Walls started out in life as an Oculus Story Studios project, although Facebook shuttered its first-party VR studio before the experience could be finished. It would have been a real shame if this highly immersive and well-realized retelling of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s eponymous children’s book wasn’t completed as a result. Thankfully, some ex-Story Studio veterans created Fable Studio and picked up the mantle to finish what Oculus had started.
Releasing its final chapter in November, the end result culminated in an intriguing and engaging story that centers around eight year-old Lucy, whose wild imagination has her convinced that wolves live in the walls of her home.
One of the biggest takeaways from Wolves in the Walls was how much digital humans can provide a sort of emotional immersion that will no doubt play a fundamental role in the VR games and stories of tomorrow. As cartoony as she was, it feels like Fable Studio really made it impossible to disappoint little Lucy. You’re her only friend and ally, and it’s too cold-hearted a prospect to break that trust, even just to see what happens if you don’t pay attention to her when she reaches out for assurance. In so doing, Wolves in the Walls shows off Pixar-level character design, which comes part and parcel with a rich color palette, cohesive set design, and a depth of animation expertise—all of which makes you genuinely feel like you’ve jumped into the pages of the book.
Fable Studio based their VR experience on a solid source material, but drawing you into that story would have been fruitless if you couldn’t connect with Lucy on some level. Here, she’s a real enough person to make you care about where the story ultimately goes, leaving you with a solid moment of self-reflection on your own ‘wolves in the walls’ once the credits roll.
Note: Games eligible for Road to VR‘s Game of the Year Award must be available to the public on or before December 13th, 2019 to allow for ample deliberation. Games must also natively support the target platform as to ensure full operability.
In true spooky spirit, Oculus announced the Quest port of the game on their blog this Halloween. However, the announcement was missing a release date. “We can’t announce the launch date as there is lots of work to do, but we can’t wait to share the game with the Oculus Quest community!” That was all Steel Wool Studios Co-Founder Andrew Dayton had to say on the matter.
While a surprise Halloween Quest release would have been nice, it looks like Freddy fans will have to wait a bit longer to get their hands on the game. However, Steel Wool Studios recently treated players on PC VR and PlayStation to some new DLC for the game – Curse of the Dreadbear. The DLC “unlocks a new Halloween themed hub packed with spooky new mini-games and prizes.”
The Oculus Blog also teased some future Freddy content to come. “And although we can’t get into specifics, we can share that Steel Wool Studios plans to continue its work in the Five Nights at Freddy’s universe, so fans of the franchise have more to look forward to on the horizon.”
The base game and DLC is currently available for purchase on Steam and the Oculus Store for PC VR and on the PlayStation store for PSVR.
Will you pick up Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted on the Quest? Let us know in the comments.
Steel Wool Studios released Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted earlier this year for PC VR headsets and PlayStation VR. VRFocus liked the videogame that much it featured in each headset category for our ‘Best VR Horror Game‘ list. All apart from one, Oculus Quest. Steel Wool Studios has plans to change that, revealing today that work is underway on a port.
The studio made the announcement via Oculus Blog, merely stating the title would be coming to the popular standalone headset. Currently, there’s no release date. “We can’t announce the launch date as there is lots of work to do,” said co-founder Andrew Dayton, “but we can’t wait to share the game with the Oculus Quest community!”
There are no further details about the port at present, but hopefully, the studio will be able to fit the entire Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted experience onto Oculus Quest so owners don’t miss out on all those scares. Theoretically, when Oculus Link arrives in November users could play the Oculus Rift version.
Steel Wool Studios’ version combines a lot of the classic mini-games from the older PC versions with several new ones just for VR. You’ll still need to deal with all those killer animatronics including; Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Springtrap, The Mangle, Funtime Foxy, and Circus Baby.
VRFocus gave Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted a four-star review, saying: Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted has great visual impact, and would definitely make for some funny YouTube videos with people trying it for the first time.” Adding that the title: “is definitely one for series fans or those that enjoy a good scare.”
Also teased is the possibility of further VR titles based on the Five Nights at Freddy’s universe. “I think there are so many possibilities to explore in Scott’s universe, and we love the opportunity to keep being part of it,” comments Dayton.
Arriving in November is Five Nights at Freddy’s AR: Special Deliverya smartphone version built by Illumix. It’ll be Early Access, to begin with, followed by a full launch in December. VRFocus will continue its coverage of the horror franchise, reporting back with the latest updates.
Ghost Giant
No Man’s Sky: Beyond
Tetris Effect
Trover Saves the Universe
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted
Vacation Simulator
