VR Stealth Game ‘Espire 1’ Coming to Vive & Rift in 2019, Teaser Trailer Here

Espire 1: VR Operative is an upcoming single-player Metal Gear Solid-style stealth game developed by Melbourne-based Digital Lode and published by Tripwire Interactive. It not only aims to be the “definitive VR stealth experience,” but also looks to kill VR-related nausea with its unique locomotion system.

Players take on the role of a drone operator of the future in Espire 1: VR Operative, wherein you remote-operate the ‘Espire model 1’ stealth robot from the safety of what the studios call the ‘Control Theatre.’ Outside of silently shooting down baddies with an arsenal of silenced weaponry, Espire 1 offers up a locomotion system that Tripwire and Digital Lode say eliminates VR motion-related sickness “for almost everyone.”

When a player wants to move across the map, an extreme version of what some developers call a ‘comfort cage’ will automatically pop up, reducing the size of the game world to a small window.

Image courtesy Digital Lode

Once you’ve made your move, chosen your angle of attack and come to a full stop, your peripheral vision comes back in. Tripwire and Digital Lode maintain that the Control Theatre is fully customizable, and depending on player comfort, can be completely disabled provided you can handle full locomotion.

The game is said to include a single-player story and scenario missions that reuse story environments for short challenges. Dozens of weapons will be available including assault rifles, silenced pistols, tranquilizer pistols, and deployable spy cameras in order to complete your mission objectives. A global leaderboard will also award players a competitive score based on mission time, movement, stealth, ammo conservation, and takedowns.

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Using the VR headset’s on-board microphone, you can also make commands and perform actions simply by speaking, although any noise could draw the enemy to your location. AI will respond to light, sound and other factors that could end your mission.

Espire 1 is Digital Lode’s debut title. Besides acting as publisher of the game, Tripwire has also lent Digital Lode its producers, marketing, tech, art and audio leads to assist on Espire 1’s development.

There’s no exact release date yet, although the studio is shooting for release sometime in 2019.

The post VR Stealth Game ‘Espire 1’ Coming to Vive & Rift in 2019, Teaser Trailer Here appeared first on Road to VR.

Zen-like Adventure ‘Arca’s Path’ to Launch December 4th on All Major VR Platforms

Arca’s Path is a controller-free VR adventure that takes you into a mysterious world, and tasks you with solving puzzles by leading a ball through obstacles using your gaze. The game, produced by Rebellion and developed by Dream Reality Interactive, is slated to launch on December 4th on all major VR platforms.

Arca’s Path follows the story of a young girl who finds a VR video game in a trash heap. While the gameplay itself is based entirely around leading the ball with the game’s gaze-based mechanic, there’s also some story here as well, told through manga-style stills that are dispensed as you make your way through the crumbling road ahead.

The game, launching globally on December 4th, is supporting a wide array of VR platforms including PSVR, HTC Vive, HTC Vive Focus, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, Gear VR, and Windows VR headsets.

Rebellion is best known in the VR industry for its adaptation of Battlezone (2016), among numerous other PC and console titles including the Sniper Elite series and Rogue Trooper Redux (2018).

Developers Dream Reality Interactive previously worked on VR experience Hold the World (2017) starring iconic broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, and Orbu, an AR game for iOS using Apple’s ARKit. Dream Reality Interactive’s core team previously worked at Sony’s London Studio, with titles such as PlayStation VR Worlds and AR games for Wonderbook.

The post Zen-like Adventure ‘Arca’s Path’ to Launch December 4th on All Major VR Platforms appeared first on Road to VR.

‘CREED: Rise to Glory’ to Include PvP Multiplayer at Launch Next Week

CREED: Rise to Glory, the upcoming arcade boxing game from VR studio Survios, is getting a PvP mode that will let you duke it out with other players in online matches. It was previously thought that the game would only feature single-player modes such as the game’s campaign, where you battle against NPC contenders on your quest to become light heavyweight champion of the world.

Revealed on the PlayStation blog, the online multiplayer mode will arrive at launch, at least on PSVR when the game arrives on September 25th. Creed will support PSVR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive.

We’ve reached out to Survios to confirm that both Steam and Oculus Store versions will also have PvP, and will update this piece as soon as we learn more.

Creed: Rise to Glory puts you in the shoes of the Adonis Creed, the main protagonist played by Michael B. Jordan in both Creed (2015) and the upcoming sequel Creed II, which is slated to release on November 21st. We went hands-on with Creed: Rise to Glory at GDC earlier this year, and its core boxing mechanic seemed really promising.

Featuring a combat scheme Survios calls ‘Phantom Melee Technology’, Creed uses a sort of body desynchronization when either your stamina is low, or when you’re staggered from a powerful punch. This essentially makes it so you don’t throw punches willy-nilly and really narrows your focus so you fight tactically.

Creed: Rise to Glory is also said to arrive at “more than 500 VR arcades” starting on September 25th, although no comprehensive list of participating locations is available at this time.

Developing studio Survios is best known for their VR titles Raw Data (2017) and Sprint Vector (2018), and have recently released VR music tool Electronauts (2018).

The post ‘CREED: Rise to Glory’ to Include PvP Multiplayer at Launch Next Week appeared first on Road to VR.

Fantasy VR Adventure ‘Karnage Chronicles’ Gets 4-Player Co-Op in Latest Update

Karnage Chronicles, the sword and sorcery VR adventure in Early  Access from Beijing-based Nordic Trolls, recently received a long-awaited update that now includes multiplayer co-op for up to four players.

The co-op mode lets players team up with friends or strangers to experience the campaign together. The game is also said to include “drop-in/drop-out” support, so you can simply create a character, complete the tutorial, and head into the goblin-shooting and bashing action. Depending on the number of people in the party, monsters’ strength and number scales to keep things challenging.

The news was announced via a Steam update post, which includes a host of improvements, tweaks, and bug fixes to hit the game this month.

Karnage Chronicles first launched into Steam Early Access back in April 2017, boasting support for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows VR headsets. The co-op mode was first made available on the game’s test branch early last month, although now it’s been deemed stable enough for the base game. There’s still no word on when Karnage Chronicles is headed out of EA, although the addition of co-op certainly helps flesh out the episodic action RPG’s feature set.

Image courtesy Nordic Trolls

In case you’ve never heard of it, here’s how Nordic Trolls describes Karnage:

Every five thousand years the planets align and create a rift in the fabric of cosmos. It’s prior to such an event that this story unfolds. Play as a Murkwraith, an undying knight barred from Death’s domain, and cursed to eternal servitude for sins committed eons ago. Experience a rich story that takes you on a perilous journey through dark dungeons filled with monsters, traps, puzzles, treasure and more.

Karnage Chronicles, priced at $25, currently has over 150 reviews on Steam, which has earned it an aggregate score of ‘Very Positive’.

The post Fantasy VR Adventure ‘Karnage Chronicles’ Gets 4-Player Co-Op in Latest Update appeared first on Road to VR.

‘Transference’ Review: A Thrilling Film-like Adventure for the Digital Age

Transference (2018) is a single-player psychological thriller that takes place in a shadowy reflection of reality—the  simulation of a family’s collective minds who’ve presumably been corrupted after the father, a scientist, tests his breakthrough procedure on himself, his wife, and child. While fairly short in length, the game’s intense themes and film-like quality will leave you reeling well after the credits roll.

Transference Review Details:

Official Site

Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer:
 SpectreVision, Ubisoft Montreal
Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift), Oculus Store (Rift), PlayStation Store (PSVR)
Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive
Release Date: September 18th, 2018

Gameplay

In a live action sequence, we learn that scientist Raymond Hayes has invented a way to replicate organic consciousness in a virtual environment. There’s some room for interpretation, but judging from Hayes’ opening speech it appears we were either a test subject, or a colleague that signed on to help him realize his dream of eternal life. Either way, he thanks us for our role in making it possible. An eerie misalignment of the video’s tracking hints that Hayes’ eternal paradise is everything but.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

Awakening on the street corner in front of Hayes’ home, it’s clear we’ve been tossed into a degrading virtual reality that needs your help to fix. Missing assets like door knockers and entryways show up as big black voids sporting red error messages.

The broken file is fixed by solving the relevant puzzle, such as playing a few musical notes on the apartment building’s buzzers, or tuning a radio so you can temporarily link two family members together for a panicked chat. It’s not so simple though, as you soon learn that switching off the light lets you traverse one of three inner realities coexisting separately, each of them fractured reflections of the family’s real apartment as seen through the eyes of Hayes, his son Ben, and his wife Katherine.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

Puzzles have a good range of difficulty, and there are only few moments when the solution is immediately obvious. There’s little to no help from Hayes’ video logs or his memories, so you’re basically on your own to figure out how to escape the progressively horrifying simulation.

The back drop is nothing short of unsettling, with its rattling doors, and voices calling out for help. The worst bit though is terrifying beast that’s ostensibly corrupted the three digital replicants, popping out at disturbingly inconsistent moments of high tension. And you can’t run or hide either; you walk at an eerily slow pace throughout the game, searching for the next puzzle solution and hoping the beast doesn’t appear again for another one of its truly terrifying jump scares.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

That said, jump scares are very few, making the horror aspect more reliant on the narrative and the game’s fractured setting. A glut of video recordings featuring Hayes are scattered throughout the game, and really start to drive home just how disturbed he became in his search for the ultimate solution. Found objects like USB drives, audio recordings, notes, and books act as supporting material, letting Hayes offer the viewer brief peeks into his family life and why he continued on with his work after everyone doubted him.

Although it’s an object-oriented experience, there isn’t any inventory to speak of, requiring you to carry key objects by hand through the digital rifts by turning on and off the light switches in the house. Sometimes it’s not entirely clear which objects are important puzzle pieces though, so a complete exploration of the available dimensions is necessary to really understand what’s missing. This can be frustrating in some puzzles, but thankfully the apartment isn’t so large that you’ll be hunting for too long.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

The game is short and sweet at one and a half hours length for my personal playthrough. While I stopped to inspect many of the found objects, I wasn’t overly thorough, so your mileage may vary. In the end, SpectreVision and Ubisoft are trying to walk a fine line between an adventure game and a small budget indie film, so I didn’t really mind the tighter nature of the game’s pacing to fit that specific style. That said, I could have easily dove back in for at least another two to three hours, but I’m willing to admit that a longer format might have ultimately desensitized a user from staying fully engaged with the non-stop thrills and quick pacing.

Immersion

Visuals aren’t everything, but they certainly carry a lot of weight when it comes to forgetting you’re actually in your underwear in a wheely chair wearing a VR headset. To that end, visual fidelity in Transference is clearly at, or very near to ‘AAA’ territory.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

Excellent lighting, high-quality assets and textures, and extremely well-realized audio cues help create one of the best-looking and sounding adventure games to date. And while it’s clearly corrupted simulation, all of this brings you into the moment, irregardless of the fact that you can’t actually die or get hurt.

Characters feel real too, which is in no small part due to excellent character animations for brief but startling interludes, and competent voice overs that rattle your brainpan throughout.

Image captured by Road to VR

Object interaction is fairly standard, and the world’s many objects seem solid enough in how they interact with the world. Your hands are represented in a ghostly neon blue hue, giving you just enough of a visual cue to use them accurately, but not so overt that it clashes with the wacked out simulation that is the world of Transference.

Comfort

Transference presents a few comfort options so all experience levels can play without too much worry. The game includes optional ‘blinder’ vignettes that can be toggled to reduce your field of view during both forward movement and turning—something heavily used in Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight (2016). Users can fiddle with the blinder’s strength to get the feel that’s right for them.

There’s also smooth turning and a variable angle snap-turn available, the latter of which is suitable for new users, or those with temperamental stomachs.

Thankfully the game seems to recognize if the user is seated, and automatically adjusts your height in-game so there’s no odd stretching in order to interact with found objects or puzzles. There is a crouch toggle so you can easily access lower cabinets, although from an immersion standpoint this is less advantageous than a ‘force grab’ ability.

The post ‘Transference’ Review: A Thrilling Film-like Adventure for the Digital Age appeared first on Road to VR.

‘Transference’ Review: A Thrilling Film-like Adventure for the Digital Age

Transference (2018) is a single-player psychological thriller that takes place in a shadowy reflection of reality—the  simulation of a family’s collective minds who’ve presumably been corrupted after the father, a scientist, tests his breakthrough procedure on himself, his wife, and child. While fairly short in length, the game’s intense themes and film-like quality will leave you reeling well after the credits roll.

Transference Review Details:

Official Site

Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer:
 SpectreVision, Ubisoft Montreal
Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift), Oculus Store (Rift), PlayStation Store (PSVR)
Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive
Release Date: September 18th, 2018

Gameplay

In a live action sequence, we learn that scientist Raymond Hayes has invented a way to replicate organic consciousness in a virtual environment. There’s some room for interpretation, but judging from Hayes’ opening speech it appears we were either a test subject, or a colleague that signed on to help him realize his dream of eternal life. Either way, he thanks us for our role in making it possible. An eerie misalignment of the video’s tracking hints that Hayes’ eternal paradise is everything but.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

Awakening on the street corner in front of Hayes’ home, it’s clear we’ve been tossed into a degrading virtual reality that needs your help to fix. Missing assets like door knockers and entryways show up as big black voids sporting red error messages.

The broken file is fixed by solving the relevant puzzle, such as playing a few musical notes on the apartment building’s buzzers, or tuning a radio so you can temporarily link two family members together for a panicked chat. It’s not so simple though, as you soon learn that switching off the light lets you traverse one of three inner realities coexisting separately, each of them fractured reflections of the family’s real apartment as seen through the eyes of Hayes, his son Ben, and his wife Katherine.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

Puzzles have a good range of difficulty, and there are only few moments when the solution is immediately obvious. There’s little to no help from Hayes’ video logs or his memories, so you’re basically on your own to figure out how to escape the progressively horrifying simulation.

The back drop is nothing short of unsettling, with its rattling doors, and voices calling out for help. The worst bit though is terrifying beast that’s ostensibly corrupted the three digital replicants, popping out at disturbingly inconsistent moments of high tension. And you can’t run or hide either; you walk at an eerily slow pace throughout the game, searching for the next puzzle solution and hoping the beast doesn’t appear again for another one of its truly terrifying jump scares.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

That said, jump scares are very few, making the horror aspect more reliant on the narrative and the game’s fractured setting. A glut of video recordings featuring Hayes are scattered throughout the game, and really start to drive home just how disturbed he became in his search for the ultimate solution. Found objects like USB drives, audio recordings, notes, and books act as supporting material, letting Hayes offer the viewer brief peeks into his family life and why he continued on with his work after everyone doubted him.

Although it’s an object-oriented experience, there isn’t any inventory to speak of, requiring you to carry key objects by hand through the digital rifts by turning on and off the light switches in the house. Sometimes it’s not entirely clear which objects are important puzzle pieces though, so a complete exploration of the available dimensions is necessary to really understand what’s missing. This can be frustrating in some puzzles, but thankfully the apartment isn’t so large that you’ll be hunting for too long.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

The game is short and sweet at one and a half hours length for my personal playthrough. While I stopped to inspect many of the found objects, I wasn’t overly thorough, so your mileage may vary. In the end, SpectreVision and Ubisoft are trying to walk a fine line between an adventure game and a small budget indie film, so I didn’t really mind the tighter nature of the game’s pacing to fit that specific style. That said, I could have easily dove back in for at least another two to three hours, but I’m willing to admit that a longer format might have ultimately desensitized a user from staying fully engaged with the non-stop thrills and quick pacing.

Immersion

Visuals aren’t everything, but they certainly carry a lot of weight when it comes to forgetting you’re actually in your underwear in a wheely chair wearing a VR headset. To that end, visual fidelity in Transference is clearly at, or very near to ‘AAA’ territory.

Image courtesy Ubisoft

Excellent lighting, high-quality assets and textures, and extremely well-realized audio cues help create one of the best-looking and sounding adventure games to date. And while it’s clearly corrupted simulation, all of this brings you into the moment, irregardless of the fact that you can’t actually die or get hurt.

Characters feel real too, which is in no small part due to excellent character animations for brief but startling interludes, and competent voice overs that rattle your brainpan throughout.

Image captured by Road to VR

Object interaction is fairly standard, and the world’s many objects seem solid enough in how they interact with the world. Your hands are represented in a ghostly neon blue hue, giving you just enough of a visual cue to use them accurately, but not so overt that it clashes with the wacked out simulation that is the world of Transference.

Comfort

Transference presents a few comfort options so all experience levels can play without too much worry. The game includes optional ‘blinder’ vignettes that can be toggled to reduce your field of view during both forward movement and turning—something heavily used in Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight (2016). Users can fiddle with the blinder’s strength to get the feel that’s right for them.

There’s also smooth turning and a variable angle snap-turn available, the latter of which is suitable for new users, or those with temperamental stomachs.

Thankfully the game seems to recognize if the user is seated, and automatically adjusts your height in-game so there’s no odd stretching in order to interact with found objects or puzzles. There is a crouch toggle so you can easily access lower cabinets, although from an immersion standpoint this is less advantageous than a ‘force grab’ ability.

The post ‘Transference’ Review: A Thrilling Film-like Adventure for the Digital Age appeared first on Road to VR.

‘Chiaro and the Elixir of Life’ Review: a Thin Slice of Ghibli With a Side Order of Corn

Chiaro and the Elixir of Life (2018) is a single-player, story-driven adventure game with emphasis on puzzle-solving and some light platforming. Accompanied by your penguin robot pal Boka, you go out in search of the Elixir of Life, a special alchemical brew that brings life to machines like Boka. Grand Studio Ghibli-style set pieces, mostly fun characters, and some interesting puzzles are however hobbled by finicky object interaction and a tone-deaf script that doesn’t ever quite deliver the punch it promises.

Chiaro and the Elixir of Life Review Details:

Official Site

Developer: Martov Co.
Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR), Oculus Store (Rift)
Reviewed On: Rift, Vive
Release Date: September 14th, 2018

Gameplay

Chiaro and the Elixir of Life features a unique portaling mechanic that drives most of the action. During the course of the game, you happen upon a knife that contains a portal-opening ball at its base; when you dislodge the ball from the knife and throw it, you can then connect a few floating dots that appear in front of you with the knife’s blade, letting you open a portal to where your ball landed.

Drawing the portal, Image captured by Road to VR

The knife’s portal-ball eventually also doubles as an incendiary device, which will help you blow up obstacles like ice walls, and the game’s few bad guys which you meet later on. While not a combat-driven game per se, locomotion, clearing obstacles, and blowing up the odd robot require you to throw the portal-ball accurately so you can land a hit where it counts. The game smartly prefaces all of this by getting you to play catch with Boka first, doubling as a bonding moment between you and the quippy bot-buddy before you head out on the adventure. Throwing the portal-ball generally worked well, and while the wholw mechanic begins to wear a little thin in the ‘wow’ department after you 50th time, it’s still a fun and creative way of getting around.

Image captured by Road to VR

Much of the portal-ball movement mechanic culminates in time-sensitive puzzles, the bulk of which take place in the middle of the game where you need to activate disparate energy boilers with the help of your ‘Salamander’s Breath’ blowtorch. Activating all of the boilers in a given room more often than not opens a door to the next puzzle. There are a few other one-off puzzle types throughout—most of them simple—that keep things from getting too repetitive.

Even when object interaction suffers (more on that later), puzzles are mostly rewarding enough to keep you pushing forward. There are some basic issues though that would stop even the most resourceful players from getting through the game without feeling a bit frustrated.

Inventory, Image captured by Road to VR

I encountered several bugs throughout my testing of game’s final consumer version: a power receptacle that needed to be open was closed shut and wouldn’t budge. A key item fell through the world and never reappeared. A character was in the middle of explaining how a large 3D printer worked, but disappeared mid-sentence, only to be found a few meters away sitting in a chair humming a tune ad infinitum, leaving me to figure out the contraption without any explanation. In these moments, I did everything I could to continue, although in the end the only fix was to restart the chapter from scratch; no mid-chapter saves are allowed.

While the bugs I found are likely to be fixed in future updates, the game’s inconsistent object interaction really left much to be desired, which I’ll talk more about in the Immersion section below.

Finishing Chiaro in around three hours, I never really got that Studio Ghibli-esque emotional punch the game wanted me to feel. There’s some clear intention to make characters as endearing as possible and even put them in harm’s way, but it oftentimes lands an ineffectual hit. When a dramatic moment happens that’s supposed to deliver genuine wonder or even loss, it’s invariably punctuated with unabashed cringe-inducing songs, or corny dialogue that all feels shoehorned into what otherwise should have been a moment to reflect on something important.

Immersion

The game’s cartoony set pieces and character design are competent, albeit a bit low resolution in terms of textures used; the overall effect though really helps visually build the Studio Ghibli-inspired world developers were looking to create. The game’s orchestral soundtrack is also a delight to hear, as it accompanies you along your trials through the game’s varying areas, be it a dangerous fire temple or a serene lake.

Image captured by Road to VR

Interior level design is mostly good, however much of the game features conveniently placed barriers like crashed planes and even invisible walls that keep you confined to a certain area, making you take the game’s very specific path through the narrative. These barriers are an absolute detriment to immersion, as you curiously try to walk in an open field only to be met with invisible wall, or see a downed plane that you would otherwise easily teleport over or create a portal to bypass. It’s a lazy touch to level design that becomes even more frustrating in VR, as your expectations of existing in the world are entirely thwarted.

Object interaction is also inconsistent, and at times very frustrating. Oftentimes I experienced objects wigging out and clashing with the game’s geometry (retrieving anything from a drawer can be hit and miss). Hand presence is also fairly low due to the over-sized hand models that are anchored strangely to your controller, making the game’s smaller control panels, levers, and knobs extremely fiddly to operate.

Teleportation (not counting the portaling mechanic) is the sole way of moving around the world of Chiaro, which not an entirely bad thing, would have been better serviced with some

Comfort

That said, teleportation is one of the most comfortable ways to move around in VR, although some options would have been greatly appreciated in that department. Rift users have snap-turn at their disposal (for 180-degree setups), while Vive users simply look in their desired direction. An option for smooth-turning was grayed out in the settings menu, which I assume will come in a future update.

Chiaro is decidedly missing some ‘quality of life’ options that would help it overcome some of its inherent awkwardness of toggling the crouch button and seeing the world lower by a few feet. Without a ‘force grab’ to reach objects, you’re basically toggling the crouch button every so often to pick up something from the floor, which can be both annoying from a comfort standpoint and a break in immersion.

The post ‘Chiaro and the Elixir of Life’ Review: a Thin Slice of Ghibli With a Side Order of Corn appeared first on Road to VR.

Puzzle-Adventure ‘Twilight Path’ to Arrive Next Month on Rift & Vive, From Studio Behind ‘FORM’

Charm Games, the studio known for the critically-acclaimed VR puzzle game FORM (2017), today announced their upcoming puzzle-adventure Twilight Path is slated to release arrive soon on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Arriving October 2nd on Steam (Vive, Rift) and the Oculus Store (Rift), Twilight Path is a single-player adventure that throws you into a mystical purgatory where you have to escape by solving a variety of VR puzzles while restoring massive stone structures, opening sealed passageways, and rescuing magical creatures from danger along the way.

Twilight Path, at least from our hands-on with an early alpha, appears to have departed entirely from FORM’s inherently dark sci-fi aesthetic, although it has plenty puzzle-oriented gameplay and attention to detail that fans of FORM should recognize despite the new, Studio Ghibli-inspired environment, including anthropomorphic buddies to keep you company along the way.

Here’s a quick blurb of what Road to VR’s Ben Lang experienced while playing the first two chapters of the early alpha:

“My preview lasted about 25 minutes and the interactions throughout were clearly indicated and satisfying to execute. Several moments showed the studio’s FX skill, like when holding the gem from the bracelet and seeing glowing runes floating in the air around it, or when activating the fortune teller machine and seeing a pane of cracked glass appear creating convincing distortions of the image behind it.”

There’s still no word on what sort of gameplay length to expect from Twilight Path, although it’s being priced at $15—the same as FORM, an hour-long experience. The studio’s upcoming game however promises more narrative elements which hopefully will have us puzzling and exploring for a bit longer in what promises to be a richly-detailed world.

However you slice it, if Twilight Path can offer up the same quality of experience seen in FORM, it appears we’re in for a highly-polished game that’ll easily appeal to newcomers and experienced VR users alike.

The post Puzzle-Adventure ‘Twilight Path’ to Arrive Next Month on Rift & Vive, From Studio Behind ‘FORM’ appeared first on Road to VR.

Mech Combat Game ‘Vox Machinae’ Coming Soon to VR & PC, New Trailer Here

The long-awaited Vox Machinae is almost here, as developing studio Space Bullet Dynamics Corporation recently announced that the multiplayer mech battle game is finally heading into Early Access soon, supporting traditional monitors, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows VR headsets starting in early fall.

First teased back in 2014 during the Rift DK1 and DK2 era, Vox Machinae has had plenty of time to gestate, not to mention learn from some of its less fortunate multiplayer forerunners which struggle to maintain a healthy pool of online players. According to a recent Steam post, to remedy this Vox Machinae will support crossplay between traditional monitors and its supported VR headsets.

Image courtesy Space Bullet Dynamics Corporation

Vox Machinae features offline single-player (bots only), and both local network and online multiplayer with up to 16 players. Modes include Salvage Mode, where you capture and protect your team’s ‘Decker machine’, and a mode called Stockpile that requires your team to control factories scattered across the battlefield so you can benefit from their increased production capabilities.

All modes can be played with 2-4 teams, meaning you could gather together a few buddies and take on other squads in a multi-team shootout. Bots are available in all modes to help fill out the ranks, so there won’t be any waiting around when you’re ready to strap in.

Image courtesy Space Bullet Dynamics Corporation

Designed from the ground-up for VR, the game’s mech cockpits are said to feature plenty of controls and displays to manipulate, as the game boasts full motion controller support; both gamepad and mouse and keyboard will be available for players on traditional monitors. Space Bullet says five customizable mechs will be available at launch, letting you outfit them with an array of weaponry.

There’s no official launch date yet, although as summer comes to a close on September 23rd, we’ll be sure to keep our eyes peeled for what promises to be the full-featured mech brawler that’s been sorely missing in VR to date.

The post Mech Combat Game ‘Vox Machinae’ Coming Soon to VR & PC, New Trailer Here appeared first on Road to VR.

Steampunk Adventure ‘Chiaro & the Elixir of Life’ Launches on Vive, Rift & Windows VR

Chiaro and the Elixir of Life (2018), a first-person VR adventure from Montreal-based Martov Co., launched today on HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows VR headsets. The result of a successful Kickstarter campaign, which saw a complete funding total of $10,088 CAD (~$7,730 USD), Chiaro is the new indie studio’s first game.

Stepping into the shoes of a young engineer named Chiaro, you’re accompanied by your little steam-powered robot pal named Boka, who you bring along with you as you open portals to traverse a world marred by a conflict that’s left ‘Neverain’ nearly uninhabited. Together they seek out the ‘Fountain of Elixir’ in effort to revive the lost race of alive machines, using alchemical powers and solving puzzles along the way.

Some bits worth noting: the game’s primary locomotion scheme is based on standard teleportation, although a mysterious artifact gives you the power to open up portals, which you prompt by tossing an orb to your intended spot. This essentially lets you travel to far away platforms that you couldn’t reach using teleportation. The game also is heavy on object interaction and room-scale movement.

After having popped in for about an hour, the scenery and characters really remind me of steampunk-inspired anime like Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Studio Ghibli’s LaputaCastle in the Sky (1986). We’ll have our full review out upon completion of the game, so check back soon.

Chiaro and the Elixir of Life is now live on Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR) and the Oculus Store (Rift), priced at $30.

The post Steampunk Adventure ‘Chiaro & the Elixir of Life’ Launches on Vive, Rift & Windows VR appeared first on Road to VR.