Schell Games, the team behind the I Expect You To Die franchise, announced the third game in the series is slated to arrive on VR headsets this year.
Called I Expect You To Die 3: Cog in the Machine, the latest installment of the spy-flavored puzzle-adventure is expected to come to Meta Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets later this year.
The studio hasn’t mentioned PSVR 2 support yet, although it’s likely we’ll be waiting on a bigger announcement surrounding PSVR 2 versions of both the first and second I Expect You To Die games.
In I Expect You To Die (both one and two), the player is confronted with escape room-style puzzles, requiring you to use your wits to defy death as you defuse bombs, solve complex object-oriented puzzles, and maneuver your way ever closer to defeating the evil Dr. Zor and his henchmen.
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Image courtesy Schell Games
Image courtesy Schell Games
Image courtesy Schell Games
Image courtesy Schell Games
Here’s how Schell Games describes the upcoming sequel:
Outwit your most cunning adversary to date in the latest installment of this award-winning, spy-themed VR puzzle series. Wield new gadgets, visit action-packed locales, and wear custom disguises as you dive back into the world of espionage in this escape room game.
Your skills, and survival rate, make you one of our most capable agents, and you’ve resurfaced right on time. Zoraxis, our sworn enemy, has something new up its sleeve and we fear dire consequences if we don’t stop its diabolical schemes. We’re counting on you to throw a wrench into whatever evil is brewing. In this escape-the-room VR puzzler, you need to protect the Agency and the world as we know it, without losing your wits…or your life!
In a Meta blog post, I Expect You To Die 3 Project Director Matt Mahon said this:
“We have some unique and exciting locations in I Expect You To Die 3, and we can’t wait to see how players creatively solve puzzles in a race to beat Dr. Zor at their own game,” said Mahon. “Players new to the series can jump right in and have a great time, and returning fans will appreciate some fun nods to the prior games.”
I Expect You To Die 3 is scheduled to launch later this year. In the meantime, you can wishlist the game on Steam.
What a year it has been for the Oculus Quest 2, sorry, Meta Quest 2, with that name change being one of the more defining – and confusing – moments. Whatever you want to call it, the Quest 2 has had a stunning year when it comes to content, with some truly huge videogames making their way to the platform. So if you’ve just picked one up or were very good this year and got one as a present, then these are just some of the titles you should be adding to your library.
Apart from being awesome, one critera for VRFocus’ favourite Quest videogames meant that all of them had to be natively available on the Oculus Store. So titles like Lone Echo II that require a PC connection won’t make this selection.
The Best Meta Quest Games of 2021
Resident Evil 4
Let’s start with probably the biggest exclusive that hit the standalone headset this year, Capcom’s Resident Evil 4. Rebuilt by Armature Studio specifically for the Quest 2, this version of Resident Evil 4 – and there’s been a couple – is the definitive version by a mile. Whether you already love the Resi franchise or are completely new to it, this puts you in the heart of the survival horror, with plenty of accessibility options to cater to all players.
Resident Evil 4 takes you to a remote region of Europe as Leon S. Kennedy who’s on a mission to rescue the U.S. President’s daughter from a dangerous cult called the Los Illuminados. All the action from the original is there, whether that’s dealing with rabid villagers, monstrous mutations or taxing boss fights. Plus all the puzzles and Quick Time Events (QTE’s), the latter is the only real annoyance.
There’s lots of new stuff too. You can physically grab and reload guns, dual wield to mix weapon combinations up, and interact with the environment, opening doors and pushing stuff out the way. Oh, and it’s now entirely in first-person, for that fully immersive experience.
For those that love survival adventures that offer hours of entertainment and a proper bang for your buck game look no further than 17-BIT’s Song in the Smoke. The first VR title from the Japan-based team, Song in the Smoke takes place in a mystical, primordial wilderness where you’re given only basic tools and an understanding of how things work before being let loose.
While there are mysterious, magical elements at play, the gameplay is heavily survival-based, so you’ll need to forage or hunt for food so you don’t starve, make weapons to defend yourself, make cloths so you don’t freeze, and most importantly of all, gather resources to build fires and make it through the night, because when darkness comes the jungle wakes up.
Song in the Smoke is made up of eight biomes, ranging from lush forests and ancient valleys to frozen peaks. Each more inhospitable than the last, it’s easy to get lost in the experience, you can be so engrossed in surviving that unlocking the narrative almost plays second best.
Time for a far more chilled and relaxing VR experience. After a stint on Oculus’ App Lab, Puzzling Places arrived on the official store in September, offering a tranquil slice of 3D jigsaw gameplay.
With 16 puzzles to complete, you can up the difficulty from 25 pieces to 400 pieces for each puzzle. Whilst 400 may not sound a lot compared to traditional jigsaws, the three-dimensional element further helps to scale that difficulty. The charm of Puzzling Places also comes from the fact that each puzzle is a realistic, scanned location using photogrammetry with plenty of detail. And to aid immersion, they each have audio tracks make the setting even more lifelike.
So if you’re looking for a more modern take on a classic, then check out Puzzling Places.
Time for some multiplayer action with Resolution Games’ turn-based board game Demeo. This is a dungeon crawler where up to four players choose their characters and then battle monstrous foes, think D&D but in VR.
Taking on the roles of characters like the mystical sorcerer who can summon area-of-effect (AOE) spells or a knight with loads of armour, each has their own particular specialities to aid the quest. You can pick up your player piece to move the character around the dungeon whilst utilising ability cards to attack opponents.
Originally released in May 2021 with one dungeon, the studio has now expanded that to three, Roots of Evil arriving in December, taking players above ground for the first time. And don’t worry if your mates are busy, Demeo can be played solo to get some practice in before the next team meetup.
Another big blockbuster title that made its way to Quest 2 in 2021 – but not the original Quest at the moment – After the Fallis a co-op shooter in a similar vein to videogames like Left 4 Dead.
From Vertigo Games, the same team behind Arizona Sunshine, After the Fall is set in a dystopian future where a climate disaster has taken place and Los Angeles is now a winter hellscape. Just to make things worse, a large chunk of the population has turned into horrific monsters called Snowbreed, and they’re less than friendly. The core gameplay revolves around going on Harvest Runs to collect valuable supplies to upgrade weapons and such. Up to four players can team up – AI bots fill in if there’s not enough – with the main hub enabling up to 32 players to socialise before each Harvest Run.
Out in the field, it’s a non-stop action fest as you cull hordes of Snowbreed before encountering at least one of four special mutations that can do some serious damage. Or if you want a different challenge, After the Fall has a competitive PvP mode where you can fight other players instead.
Another great title if you have a few buddies into VR.
A Township Tale
Looking for an entirely different multiplayer experience from those previously mentioned? Well, take a look at A Township Tale by Alta. Taking the idea of building a fully-functioning village where everyone can specialise in a particular task, A Township Tale makes co-op gameplay an essential component to truly unlock its potential.
Up to eight friends can team up on one virtual server to build their town and head out on quests. Choose to become a blacksmith, woodcutter, miner, archer or warrior, each essential to the running of the town and to the success of quests. While you can mix and match, professions like the blacksmith require a lot of work, becoming easier if some players collect resources whilst others build tools or other items.
Then you can explore, heading into the forests or mines to collect new, rare resources to craft enhanced weapons to deal with the various monsters you’ll encounter on route. Or you can try and tackle A Township Tale solo, which is when you’ll realise how much there is to the experience. One to lose hours and hours in.
Schell Games’ original puzzler I Expect You to Die has become a VR classic and its 2021 sequel is no different. Continuing the narrative where you step into the shoes of a secret agent trying to save the world from an evil villain, you don’t need to have played the first to enjoy what’s on offer here.
I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy And The Liar is all about foiling the evil plans of Dr. Zor and his Zoraxis empire across six deadly six missions. The title is very literal in its description that death is expected and expected frequently, as any wrong move can result in an instant, elaborate death. Poison gas, explosives, giant swinging axes, a suspicious sandwich or simply just getting shot, death is around every corner, sometimes you can take your time but there are moments where quick reflexes are essential.
Whilst each mission has a plethora of primary and secondary objectives, what makes I Expect You To Die 2 an essential VR experience is the fact that any player should find it accessible. There’s no locomotion whatsoever, so you can play it seated or standing (best seated) with everything within arms reach, ideal for those new to VR but with enough difficulty for veteran gamers.
Resident Evil 4 might be on this list but if you want to really feel chills down your spine then Cosmodread is the place to be. From the indie studio behind Dreadhalls, Cosmodread is a sci-fi horror that evokes atmospheric movies such as Aliens or Event Horizon.
You’re stuck on a dying spaceship completely alone, which you have to explore to find and fix critical systems in a bid to get home to Earth. The only problem, an alien entity is aboard the ship transforming the crew into monsters. Armed with one weapon initially, scouring the ship for resources will unlock new items, oxygen to keep you alive and crafting resources.
However, Cosmodread is a roguelite VR experience just like In Death: Unchained or Until You Fall, where death means returning back to the start. You might be a little wiser but the levels are procedurally generated, so the environment, item locations and enemy spawn points alter for each run. If you love a good scare then give Cosmodread a try if you dare.
Want a gorgeous looking VR videogame for your new Quest 2 as well as a physical workout? That’s where Crytek’s The Climb 2 comes in. Expanding upon the 2016 original with new locations and features, The Climb 2 for those who love extreme sports but maybe not the death-defying climbing so much.
With locations taking you atop beautiful snowy vistas, up towering skyscrapers, and sun-soaked mountain ranges, The Climb 2 challenges you to find small cracks and ledges to grab hold of and work your way up. You’ll need to chalk your hands to maintain grip and as the levels progress you’ll be offered multiple routes to the top, so you can choose your own route each time.
To make the climbing experience even more realistic, new features include dynamic objects like ropes, containers, ladders, and climbing equipment that react to your weight. There are also customisation options with 32 gloves, 25 watches, and 36 wristbands to unlock along the way. A visually sumptuous VR experience that’ll give your arms a nice workout.
You can’t own a VR headset without owning at least one rhythm action title. One of the best to arrive in 2021 for the Meta Quest was Ragnarock. With a Viking theme, Ragnarock puts you at the helm of a Viking longboat, hammering away at a set of four drums to inspire your crew to row. The faster they row the more likely you are to achieve a gold medal.
Another VR project that arrived by way of Oculus App Lab, Ragnarock’s gameplay is delightfully simple, hit the drums in time with the music to unlock speed boosts and speed those rowers up. Developer WanadevStudio went for a far more rock-themed rhythm action game in comparison to others, with songs from Alestorm, Gloryhammer, Saltatio Mortis, Wind Rose and more.
Offering both solo and multiplayer modes, solo you can race against your ghost once you’ve completed a song. Multiplayer pits you in a race against five other players to the finish line across various difficulty levels.
Its mix of Celtic rock and metal tracks alongside that drumming action makes Ragnarock a compelling VR experience that’s hard to put down.
What a year it has been for the Oculus Quest 2, sorry, Meta Quest 2, with that name change being one of the more defining – and confusing – moments. Whatever you want to call it, the Quest 2 has had a stunning year when it comes to content, with some truly huge videogames making their way to the platform. So if you’ve just picked one up or were very good this year and got one as a present, then these are just some of the titles you should be adding to your library.
Apart from being awesome, one critera for VRFocus’ favourite Quest videogames meant that all of them had to be natively available on the Oculus Store. So titles like Lone Echo II that require a PC connection won’t make this selection.
The Best Meta Quest Games of 2021
Resident Evil 4
Let’s start with probably the biggest exclusive that hit the standalone headset this year, Capcom’s Resident Evil 4. Rebuilt by Armature Studio specifically for the Quest 2, this version of Resident Evil 4 – and there’s been a couple – is the definitive version by a mile. Whether you already love the Resi franchise or are completely new to it, this puts you in the heart of the survival horror, with plenty of accessibility options to cater to all players.
Resident Evil 4 takes you to a remote region of Europe as Leon S. Kennedy who’s on a mission to rescue the U.S. President’s daughter from a dangerous cult called the Los Illuminados. All the action from the original is there, whether that’s dealing with rabid villagers, monstrous mutations or taxing boss fights. Plus all the puzzles and Quick Time Events (QTE’s), the latter is the only real annoyance.
There’s lots of new stuff too. You can physically grab and reload guns, dual wield to mix weapon combinations up, and interact with the environment, opening doors and pushing stuff out the way. Oh, and it’s now entirely in first-person, for that fully immersive experience.
For those that love survival adventures that offer hours of entertainment and a proper bang for your buck game look no further than 17-BIT’s Song in the Smoke. The first VR title from the Japan-based team, Song in the Smoke takes place in a mystical, primordial wilderness where you’re given only basic tools and an understanding of how things work before being let loose.
While there are mysterious, magical elements at play, the gameplay is heavily survival-based, so you’ll need to forage or hunt for food so you don’t starve, make weapons to defend yourself, make cloths so you don’t freeze, and most importantly of all, gather resources to build fires and make it through the night, because when darkness comes the jungle wakes up.
Song in the Smoke is made up of eight biomes, ranging from lush forests and ancient valleys to frozen peaks. Each more inhospitable than the last, it’s easy to get lost in the experience, you can be so engrossed in surviving that unlocking the narrative almost plays second best.
Time for a far more chilled and relaxing VR experience. After a stint on Oculus’ App Lab, Puzzling Places arrived on the official store in September, offering a tranquil slice of 3D jigsaw gameplay.
With 16 puzzles to complete, you can up the difficulty from 25 pieces to 400 pieces for each puzzle. Whilst 400 may not sound a lot compared to traditional jigsaws, the three-dimensional element further helps to scale that difficulty. The charm of Puzzling Places also comes from the fact that each puzzle is a realistic, scanned location using photogrammetry with plenty of detail. And to aid immersion, they each have audio tracks make the setting even more lifelike.
So if you’re looking for a more modern take on a classic, then check out Puzzling Places.
Time for some multiplayer action with Resolution Games’ turn-based board game Demeo. This is a dungeon crawler where up to four players choose their characters and then battle monstrous foes, think D&D but in VR.
Taking on the roles of characters like the mystical sorcerer who can summon area-of-effect (AOE) spells or a knight with loads of armour, each has their own particular specialities to aid the quest. You can pick up your player piece to move the character around the dungeon whilst utilising ability cards to attack opponents.
Originally released in May 2021 with one dungeon, the studio has now expanded that to three, Roots of Evil arriving in December, taking players above ground for the first time. And don’t worry if your mates are busy, Demeo can be played solo to get some practice in before the next team meetup.
Another big blockbuster title that made its way to Quest 2 in 2021 – but not the original Quest at the moment – After the Fallis a co-op shooter in a similar vein to videogames like Left 4 Dead.
From Vertigo Games, the same team behind Arizona Sunshine, After the Fall is set in a dystopian future where a climate disaster has taken place and Los Angeles is now a winter hellscape. Just to make things worse, a large chunk of the population has turned into horrific monsters called Snowbreed, and they’re less than friendly. The core gameplay revolves around going on Harvest Runs to collect valuable supplies to upgrade weapons and such. Up to four players can team up – AI bots fill in if there’s not enough – with the main hub enabling up to 32 players to socialise before each Harvest Run.
Out in the field, it’s a non-stop action fest as you cull hordes of Snowbreed before encountering at least one of four special mutations that can do some serious damage. Or if you want a different challenge, After the Fall has a competitive PvP mode where you can fight other players instead.
Another great title if you have a few buddies into VR.
A Township Tale
Looking for an entirely different multiplayer experience from those previously mentioned? Well, take a look at A Township Tale by Alta. Taking the idea of building a fully-functioning village where everyone can specialise in a particular task, A Township Tale makes co-op gameplay an essential component to truly unlock its potential.
Up to eight friends can team up on one virtual server to build their town and head out on quests. Choose to become a blacksmith, woodcutter, miner, archer or warrior, each essential to the running of the town and to the success of quests. While you can mix and match, professions like the blacksmith require a lot of work, becoming easier if some players collect resources whilst others build tools or other items.
Then you can explore, heading into the forests or mines to collect new, rare resources to craft enhanced weapons to deal with the various monsters you’ll encounter on route. Or you can try and tackle A Township Tale solo, which is when you’ll realise how much there is to the experience. One to lose hours and hours in.
Schell Games’ original puzzler I Expect You to Die has become a VR classic and its 2021 sequel is no different. Continuing the narrative where you step into the shoes of a secret agent trying to save the world from an evil villain, you don’t need to have played the first to enjoy what’s on offer here.
I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy And The Liar is all about foiling the evil plans of Dr. Zor and his Zoraxis empire across six deadly six missions. The title is very literal in its description that death is expected and expected frequently, as any wrong move can result in an instant, elaborate death. Poison gas, explosives, giant swinging axes, a suspicious sandwich or simply just getting shot, death is around every corner, sometimes you can take your time but there are moments where quick reflexes are essential.
Whilst each mission has a plethora of primary and secondary objectives, what makes I Expect You To Die 2 an essential VR experience is the fact that any player should find it accessible. There’s no locomotion whatsoever, so you can play it seated or standing (best seated) with everything within arms reach, ideal for those new to VR but with enough difficulty for veteran gamers.
Resident Evil 4 might be on this list but if you want to really feel chills down your spine then Cosmodread is the place to be. From the indie studio behind Dreadhalls, Cosmodread is a sci-fi horror that evokes atmospheric movies such as Aliens or Event Horizon.
You’re stuck on a dying spaceship completely alone, which you have to explore to find and fix critical systems in a bid to get home to Earth. The only problem, an alien entity is aboard the ship transforming the crew into monsters. Armed with one weapon initially, scouring the ship for resources will unlock new items, oxygen to keep you alive and crafting resources.
However, Cosmodread is a roguelite VR experience just like In Death: Unchained or Until You Fall, where death means returning back to the start. You might be a little wiser but the levels are procedurally generated, so the environment, item locations and enemy spawn points alter for each run. If you love a good scare then give Cosmodread a try if you dare.
Want a gorgeous looking VR videogame for your new Quest 2 as well as a physical workout? That’s where Crytek’s The Climb 2 comes in. Expanding upon the 2016 original with new locations and features, The Climb 2 for those who love extreme sports but maybe not the death-defying climbing so much.
With locations taking you atop beautiful snowy vistas, up towering skyscrapers, and sun-soaked mountain ranges, The Climb 2 challenges you to find small cracks and ledges to grab hold of and work your way up. You’ll need to chalk your hands to maintain grip and as the levels progress you’ll be offered multiple routes to the top, so you can choose your own route each time.
To make the climbing experience even more realistic, new features include dynamic objects like ropes, containers, ladders, and climbing equipment that react to your weight. There are also customisation options with 32 gloves, 25 watches, and 36 wristbands to unlock along the way. A visually sumptuous VR experience that’ll give your arms a nice workout.
You can’t own a VR headset without owning at least one rhythm action title. One of the best to arrive in 2021 for the Meta Quest was Ragnarock. With a Viking theme, Ragnarock puts you at the helm of a Viking longboat, hammering away at a set of four drums to inspire your crew to row. The faster they row the more likely you are to achieve a gold medal.
Another VR project that arrived by way of Oculus App Lab, Ragnarock’s gameplay is delightfully simple, hit the drums in time with the music to unlock speed boosts and speed those rowers up. Developer WanadevStudio went for a far more rock-themed rhythm action game in comparison to others, with songs from Alestorm, Gloryhammer, Saltatio Mortis, Wind Rose and more.
Offering both solo and multiplayer modes, solo you can race against your ghost once you’ve completed a song. Multiplayer pits you in a race against five other players to the finish line across various difficulty levels.
Its mix of Celtic rock and metal tracks alongside that drumming action makes Ragnarock a compelling VR experience that’s hard to put down.
It’s nearly time for Keighley – The Game Awards returns on December 9 and nominations have just been revealed, including for Best VR/AR titles.
Well, it’s not really the best AR titles because there aren’t any listed, but you get the point. There are five nominees this year, including the PSVR-exclusive support for Hitman 3, Oculus Rift exclusive swansong Lone Echo 2, the recent port of Resident Evil 4 VR and then Schell Games’ excellent I Expect You To Die 2 alongside the equally-enjoyable Sniper Elite VR.
It’s not a bad list of titles and we’re definitely relieved not to see Beat Saber somehow sneaking its way into the nominations for another year. We gave each of these titles UploadVR’s coveted ‘Great’ label save for Lone Echo 2, which we enjoyed but ultimately thought was too slow-paced and gave a ‘Good’.
As with any awards show, there are some omissions we can’t help but bring up. Demeo is the only new VR game to earn an ‘Essential’ label from us in 2021 so it’s a shame not to see it listed here, and the recent launch of 17-Bit’s Song In The Smoke feels like it deserves a mention, too. But these things are subjective and, even though we’re right, we’ll allow others to speak their opinions.
Still, this isn’t the only show to recognize VR achievements coming up soon. AIXR’s own VR Awards returns on November 18, too. Expect to see more VR awards prop up as we move into the new year, too.
The biggest event in the videogame calendar, The Game Awards, has announced all of its nominees across 30 categories. Of course, the Best VR/AR category returns with entrants from across the year and multiple platforms, the one omission being no augmented reality (AR) content has made the cut.
Each category is made up of five nominees with Sniper Elite VR, Resident Evil 4, Lone Echo II, Hitman 3 and I Expect You to Die 2 all making the cut. It’s great to see I Expect You to Die 2 getting a nomination as it’s the most niche of the lot, a comedic escape room title rather than big AAA adventures like the rest.
The rest aren’t too surprising as they do offer up some of the best VR gaming around. Oculus owners may also notice that the platform dominates with two exclusives, Resident Evil 4 and Lone Echo II. Only Hitman 3 doesn’t support an Oculus headset as its PlayStation VR exclusive.
Resident Evil 4 (Armature Studio/Capcom/Oculus Studios) arrived only a month ago for Oculus Quest 2, while Lone Echo II (Ready at Dawn/Oculus Studios) also dropped in October for Oculus Rift after several delays. Sniper Elite VR (Coatsink/Just Add Water/Rebellion Developments) and I Expect You To Die 2 (Schell Games) were both well-received summer releases, whilst Hitman 3 (IO Interactive) dropped in January.
As for the other categories, no other dedicated VR title has appeared elsewhere, unfortunately. Only Microsoft Flight Simulator with its optional VR support appears in the Best Sim/Strategy segment.
The Game Awards 2021 will be taking place on 9th December 2021 with a live stream usually filled with big announcements of what’s to come in the following year. Free public voting is now open. For continued updates, keep reading VRFocus.
I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar is the latest instalment of the virtual reality (VR) escape room series by Schell Games, arriving for multiple headsets a couple of weeks ago. The studio has now revealed that the launch has been a success, managing to surpass $1 million USD in revenue in under a week.
Supporting Oculus Quest and Rift, PlayStation VR and PC VR headsets, I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar continue the storyline where you play a secret agent trying to foil the evil plans of Dr. Zor and his Zoraxis empire. Featuring six missions, the gameplay is all about solving evermore fiendish puzzles that try to kill you at every turn. It’s also designed to be comfortable for all players as there’s no locomotion whatsoever.
The original I Expect You To Die became an instant hit and VR classic thanks to its mix of puzzling and witty dialogue. Hence why it generally topped the sales charts and regularly featured in high grossing sales charts.
“We have been blown away by the support of gamers and VR enthusiasts from all over the world. We’ve received countless heart-warming messages from our players sharing their stories with the game, and we are so grateful to our existing fans and new agents who used their creativity and cunning to put a stop to Zoraxis’ nefarious schemes,” said Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games in a statement. “This is an important milestone, not just for us and our business, but for the ever-growing VR market. VR-first franchises like I Expect You To Die can succeed and studios should pay attention to where this market is going.”
Reviewing the Oculus Quest version of I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the LiarVRFocus said: “If you’re looking for a VR puzzler that really pushes the technology then this isn’t it, I Expect You To Die 2 is all about playing to the masses and that’s no bad thing either.”
I Expect You To Die 2 is available on most VR digital storefronts for $24.99. As further updates are released, VRFocus will let you know.
I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar (2021) launched in late August across all major VR headsets, bringing fans of the original game a fresh taste of spy-flavored puzzles and adventure. Now developers Schell Games say it’s done so well that the sequel has broken past the $1 million revenue milestone only a few days after launch.
I Expect You to Die 2 launched simultaneously on all major VR platforms on August 24th, including Oculus Quest, Oculus PC, SteamVR, and PSVR. At $25 a pop, that would mean it sold 40,000 units over the course of “less than a week,” the studio says.
However you slice it, that means the sequel is performing very well. To put it in perspective, the first I Expect You to Die (2016) reached the $1 million revenue mark a few months after its initial launch in late 2016, first landing on PSVR and Oculus Rift, and then later coming to Steam.
Momentum appears to have sped up as Oculus Quest entered the scene in mid-2019. The original—an official launch title on Quest—generated $2 million in revenue on Quest alone in its first year.
The sequel’s success is well-deserved. When we went in for our full review, we noted that, although it felt like a direct extension of the original, it ultimately offered up another substantial slice of clever and intuitive puzzles wrapped around high quality, well, high quality everything. Set pieces, voice acting, musical numbers—the game seemed to hit every mark. Check out our full review to find out why we gave it an [8.5/10].
“We have been blown away by the support of gamers and VR enthusiasts from all over the world,” said Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games. “We’ve received countless heart-warming messages from our players sharing their stories with the game, and we are so grateful to our existing fans and new agents who used their creativity and cunning to put a stop to Zoraxis’ nefarious schemes. This is an important milestone, not just for us and our business, but for the ever-growing VR market. VR-first franchises like I Expect You To Die can succeed and studios should pay attention to where this market is going.”
I Expect You To Die 2 is available on Steam (Vive, Rift, Index), the Oculus Store (Rift, Quest), and the PlayStation Store (PSVR).
August’s launch of I Expect You To Die 2 seems to have gone down well for developer Schell Games.
The VR-exclusive puzzle title, which followed up the 2016 original, made over $1 million in revenue in less than a week after its launch on August 24. Schell announced the news today, confirming the game had topped charts on the Oculus store and Steam’s VR listings. The game also launched on PSVR, and went on sale the same day the Oculus Quest 2 returned to sale after a month-long recall.
“This is an important milestone, not just for us and our business, but for the ever-growing VR market,” studio CEO Jesse Schell said in a prepared statement. “VR-first franchises like I Expect You To Die can succeed and studios should pay attention to where this market is going.”
The first game in the series was also a big success for VR, generating $3 million in revenue over two years of sale on PC VR and PSVR headsets and earning a further $1 million when it launched on Oculus Quest a year later. Schell didn’t confirm where the sequel had seen the most sales thus far.
Jesse Schell is incredibly bullish about VR. He’s also often very wrong about it.
This is not something he hides, it’s actually something he seems to enjoy. In fact, Schell once revealed he thought VR would be a mainstream technology by around 2005. The jury’s still out but it’s looking like he was off by about 20 years or so.
And that’s far from the developer’s misfire; in 2016 he made 40 predictions about the future of VR during a GDC talk, some of them are yet to come to fruition, some of them were right, but many of them were staggeringly off the mark, like the prediction that PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive would sell a combined total of eight million units in 2016. Even now that VR is finally gaining steam, he admits it’s growing faster than his more recent, much more conservative predictions suggested.
So, why should you listen to Jesse Schell?
Well, aside from years of experience being incredibly charismatic and often electrifying to simply listen to, Schell knows that getting things wrong is not only okay, it’s actually part of life with new tech. It’s this spirit of trial and error that’s kept the developer invested in VR for nearly 30 years and, notably, even informed some of his studio, Schell Games, best titles. I Expect You To Die is all about persistence, experimentation and the eventual satisfaction that comes with success. Jesse Schell and the wider Schell Games’ story is much along the same lines.
In fact, Schell’s work with VR extends even further back than when he founded the studio in 2002. He can trace his first memories of hearing about VR back to an early-90’s issue of Mondo 2000 magazine (described in his own words as a “techno-hipster” vibe). From that spark would come three decades of on-again, off-again association with the tech. He attended Carnegie Mellon Information Networking Institute, where he met a professor that was exploring early work in VR. “I asked if he needed any assistance from people who were doing networking work and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m creating the Networked Virtual Art Museum.’ And I said ‘Wow, what’s that?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know but I could probably use some help.'”
VR’s First Quest
The Aladdin ride at DisneyQuest featured a large headset and a haptic chair.
You might imagine that the VR of the 90’s was very different to where we are now. And it’s true that the hardware was clunkier, heavier and much more cumbersome than an Oculus Quest 2. But, to Schell, the differences stop there. “The tracking worked magnetically instead of with video, but you had head tracking, you had hand tracking, you had fewer polygons on the PC, but when you’re on the silicon graphics machine you had about what we have now. The difference is the cost is about 1000 times different. The machines we’re working with were typically $200,000 to $400,000 machines. and now we’re talking about machines that are like, $400 machines and do the same thing.”
And you can very much see that in the projects Schell would work on in the mid-90’s, when he joined the Walt Disney Imagineering team. Imagineering developed a range of projects but one of its primary focuses was on the virtual rides and attractions for DisneyQuest, a somewhat unique addition to Walt Disney World Resort in Florida and, for a time, a standalone location in Chicago too. DisneyQuest was essentially an immersive arcade, with themed rides that used 3D screens or other interactive elements. Two rides, however, used elaborate VR headsets. One was a melee combat game named Ride the Comix and the other was a virtual ride on Aladdin’s Magic Carpet.
Whilst Ride the Comix was developed by an outside studio (though Schell notes there are some interesting direct comparisons to draw with Until You Fall), the developer worked directly on the Aladdin experience. “I learned so much about both game design and VR during that experience,” Schell recalls. “Elements of it, and moments in it, I’m intensely proud of. It was groundbreaking in its use of audio, steering interface, and even a tactile seat.”
But DisneyQuest, overall, was a strange venture for Disney itself. As Schell points out, the Florida location was successful in its 19 years of operation, though the Chicago center was short-lived, struggling to find an audience outside of holidays and weekends. “The biggest problem DisneyQuest had was too much focus on first-time experience,” Schell reasons. “Again and again, we’d ask management, ‘Do you want us to focus on first impression, or on replay?’ And the answer was always first impression. As a result, it was a great time for tourists, but what it needed to survive was a mix of tourists and regulars.”
But the actual tech behind DisneyQuest’s VR experiences was solid, if cumbersome. “I remember sitting at Disney in 1995 and staring at the problem, these magnetic trackers, which were hard to work with, and talking to one of the senior engineers and saying, ‘Why don’t we just do this with video? Why don’t we just use video and track it?’ And he laughed and he’s like ‘Yeah, maybe in 20 years, but the CPU can’t do it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, no, I guess you’re right. It’s gonna be a lot of processing.’ Turns out he was right.”
Once DisneyQuest had launched, however, Schell wouldn’t return to the world of VR for some time. Imagineering’s next project was the family-friendly MMO, Disney ToonTown, and Schell left the group shortly ahead of launch to move out east taking a job back at Carnegie Mellon University to teach at the Entertainment Technology Center. There he would continue to teach about building virtual worlds and critique those his students created. During this time, though, he started up a side gig consulting for some companies on a freelance basis. Old contacts at Disney and others came through to offer some early work eventually, consulting turned into light development work. This became an increasing emphasis. He called the outfit Schell Games.
A New Beginning
But, even as Schell Games was born, Schell himself had no intention of diving back into VR development. “VR had gone really cold because we’d seen what was possible, knew how hard it was to do magnetic tracking and it was really expensive. So it could only work if you’re gonna do entertainment. It was only going to work in location-based situations.”
Instead, Schell Games toiled away for over a decade on various projects, including some different types of experiences that would prove formative to the developer’s identity. Alongside games for the Nintendo DS, the studio would also work on educational and medical apps, with a particular focus on the former. But it wouldn’t be until the summer of 2012, a decade into Schell Games’ existence, that VR would enter the conversation once more. That was, of course, with the help of Oculus’ historic $2.4 million Kickstarter campaign.
“I remember seeing that and thinking, ‘Oh wow, this might be ready’,” Schell recalls. “Because it was working with optical tracking and a number of problems that we had worried about were getting solved.”
And so Schell Games started to do what it does best, to tinker. The developer would host internal game jam weeks where members could work on passion projects. Some members started to work on VR content, but not without a push in the right direction from Schell himself. “That was actually a really important part of it because I was always hype on VR, but a lot of people in the studio were like, ‘Ah, it’s just bad. It’s going to be like the next Kinect.’ So I started working with Jason Pratt, one of our engineers here, and said ‘Hey, see if you can fold together the best of the best experiences we can show people.'”
Some of these experiments led to Schell’s first commercial VR games. A Gear VR port of its ‘choose your own adventure’ sci-fi spoof, Orion Trail, was born out of a joke about how the text-based game would work in VR. It turned out if you ported the game to a virtual screen and then sat players in a Star Trek-style bridge, it worked pretty nicely. Water Bears VR, meanwhile, was an idea Schell himself bought off of some of his students at CMU for an educational grant the studio was applying for. It came to mobile first but the team thought its logic-based, pipe-connecting puzzling would be a great fit for VR.
Despite discovering some incredible experiences (Schell fondly remembers Daniel Ernst’s Blocked In) and working on its own, there was still some pessimism about VR within Schell Games in these early years. Ironically, that skepticism would set the team on the path to its first fully native game designed for VR first and foremost.
“We had somebody working on a prototype and I was like, ‘Okay, now I don’t want any locomotion in this because it’s gonna make people sick. I don’t want to deal with motion sickness. So do teleporting, keep it limited, try and avoid it,'” Schell says.
“And they completely ignored me that they just had you flying all over the place. And I’m like, ‘Whoa, this really makes me sick’. And they’re like ‘Yeah, this is why VR sucks because you can’t go anywhere. You put on the headset and you feel like you’re going to be a superhero and you’re not a superhero, you’re tied to a chair. What kind of superhero gets tied to a chair?'”
“We all looked at each other and said that actually happens all the time, but nobody ever made a game about that.”
No Mr. Schell, I Expect You To Die
The bones of I Expect You To Die were in place much earlier than you might think. The game wouldn’t release until November 2016, when the Oculus Touch controllers first shipped for the Rift. In that iteration it would feature fully interactive levels designed for hand controllers. But, long before that, Schell actually published its prototypes for the game on the now-defunct Oculus Share platform, where developers could release free experiences for the first two Rift development kits.
Its first release was, in Schell’s words, a “weird bookcase room” with some initial mechanics in place. “No one really paid much attention,” he says. “And we were like, ‘That’s okay. Maybe we can do better.’ And so then we worked in one that was a lot richer and had a lot more detail and we put that up and people really started to notice it and it became the highest-rated experience on the site.”
In fact, the demo remained one of the platform’s most popular experiences right up until Share’s demise in early 2016.
For Schell Games, this was a sign it was onto something. And so the team kept pushing the boundaries of what was becoming an escape room-style spy game in which players would have the power of telekinesis. Objects would handle in realistic and expected ways, but you’d be able to grab them from afar and bring them back toward you, or fit puzzle pieces on the other side of the room right in place. This was I Expect You To Die’s super power, a game that delivers richly-detailed and highly interactive environments that you could explore from the comfort of your chair.
More than just a puzzle game, though, Schell was building out a world where challenges had to be solved with real world logic. That’s why the team built cardboard sets that would mimic their virtual levels, so they could more easily get a feel for how things should be proportioned in a world and what would be in the player’s peripheral vision. It’s a perfect distillation of how VR development gets much closer to replicating reality than is necessary on a flatscreen.
The team was also adamant that there should be as few discrepancies between the real and virtual as possible. When I interviewed Schell a little earlier on this year, he spoke a little about that: “I remember on the first game we put in a champagne bottle as a prop and people were like, ‘Oh, great. I want to open it!’ Oh, of course you do. Okay. Now it’s got a cork and you can open it. ‘Now I want to pour out the liquid into a glass!’ Of course you do, now we’ve got to support liquid. Okay. All right. We’re supporting liquid now and ‘Great I poured it out and I can drink this champagne and that’s so cool. Now I’ve got an empty bottle. I want to break it.’ Oh, of course you do. Okay. So now there’s a broken glass. ‘Oh, okay, I want to take this broken glass, use it as a knife and cut this wire.’ Oh, of course you do. Now this is impacting our puzzles, but oh, okay, actually, that’s kind of an interesting side solve that maybe we didn’t think of and think about.”
The attention to detail clearly paid off. Nearly two years after launch, I Expect You To Die had generated $3 million in revenue on PC and PSVR headsets. It went on to launch on Oculus Quest in late 2019, drumming up a further $2 million on that platform alone by mid-2020. Several free levels were released, which Schell says allowed the developer to keep the game at its current price point. And, of course, it’s sequel launched this week, something that precious few VR games have enjoyed in the past five years.
Keep On Fighting
But, for all its success and innovation, I Expect You To Die had been a difficult project. “So we had our success with I Expect You To Die, but we knew the problem of making [it] is that it’s really hard and slow,” Schell says.
“You can’t make good puzzle games fast. You gotta think about them hard, you gotta build prototypes, you gotta do it wrong 50 times, and then you’ve got to polish it and polish and add and add and polish. It just takes really long to do.”
And, for all that work, you don’t get something that’s intensely replayable. A first-time run of I Expect You To Die’s missions could take you a few hours to see through. But, once you know what you’re doing, repeated playthroughs could take mere minutes. For its next project, then, Schell Games wanted to make something that players could go back to time and again.
“I always felt like the fantasy of sword fighting is a strong fantasy,” Schell says. “It’s like core to Dungeons & Dragons and so many different games. It’s just a core thing that video games have always delivered on pretty poorly.”
Plenty of VR games had looked into sword fighting, of course. Early hits like Vanishing Realms remain some of the best experiences for headsets, even. But plenty of other experiences suffered from poor implementation. Schell calls it the “waggle problem”; the idea that you can just stick your hand in an enemy, waggle it about and they’ll die in no time. That, Schell points out, isn’t sword fighting. But, without haptic feedback to help inform a player’s movements, how could you possibly make sword fighting work in VR?
“We can create tactile feedback in VR because every human being is already wearing a tactile suit and it’s made of muscles,” Schell says. “And if we can figure out ways to activate it, we can actually create tactile feedback.”
That was the basis for Until You Fall, a radically different experience to I Expect You To Die. Players would tackle an endlessly replayable dungeon, facing down different types of enemies in arcade-style melee combat. But the key to the game’s fighting was that it was lightning quick and reactionary – players would first block a series of attacks telegraphed by on-screen indicators. Eventually an enemy would tire and you could get in some fast-fire swipes. By keeping the combat light with only momentary contact between blades, Schell wanted to trick players into a sense of impact.
“When you know [where an attack is coming from] it creates a desire in you to move your weapons to that spot and stop. And when you quickly move a muscle and then stop your body, does this kind of pulse thing at the end, because that’s just how muscles work. And it sounds silly, but that pulse thing feels tactile, not necessarily the conscious level, but it’s at an unconscious level. It feels the clunk as you move your arm around. So we basically built a whole game around this notion of this, in this feeling of a thing that’s halfway between a rhythm game and an action game.”
Until You Fall took this concept and ran with it, creating one of VR’s most playable experiences (that still sits in our list of the 25 best VR games). The entire game is one big exercise in wish fulfilment, from slicing through the hordes of enemies to even little things like picking up a powerup and crushing it in your hand to activate it.
“To me, honestly, it is my favorite VR game of all time,” Schell says. “I’ve played it more than I’ve ever played any other VR game and not just because I had to work on it, but just because I just really enjoyed it. The whole, the way it involves your whole body. It’s just exhilarating, like physical activity in a virtual world can be really exhilarating and be really rewarding.”
Until You Fall was successful on a sales front, if not the runaway hit Schell had seen with I Expect You To Die, but the studio is planning more content in the future.
VR’s Lift Off
Perhaps what’s most surprising about Schell Games is that it has these two tentpole VR releases, with a sequel out to one of them, but it’s far from the only work the team’s done and doing in VR. Alongside those early mobile VR releases there’s been work in AR with Lenovo’s Jedi Challenges and Magic Leap, partnerships with Google for Daydream titles and Lego for more VR. The team’s also retained its focus on educational experiences, putting out Chemistry experimentation app, HoloLAB Champions in 2018 and HistoryMaker VR last year.
“VR is a tool for education,” Schell told me in a previous interview. “It’s an incredible tool for that. However, practically, so far that’s been in the realm of experimentation, the platforms that have been out, the PSVR and the Vive, the Quest, none of them are particularly friendly to educational institutions. None of them are designed for that. So that’s a little bit of an uphill battle market-wise to figure that out, but that’s going to come, that’s going to happen.”
So, no, Schell hasn’t always got things right. And, like every other VR developer, the path hasn’t always been easy. Schell, prone to firing off great quotes, once said that if Oculus Quest couldn’t make it the industry should “hang it up”. But Quest has succeeded, and it’s succeeded faster than the developer had predicted. Now Schell Games doesn’t have any reservations about pushing on in VR.
“We spent years trying to get the rocket to take off and now the rocket is launching and flying across the sky and we’re not going to jump out now,” Schell says. “We’re going to go, we’re going to ride this thing.”
“And for me, this is personally important because I really believe in the medium of video games. I believe in video games as just a powerful means of artistic human expression and VR is the most immersive most powerful video game experience there is. It might not be the number one most lucrative, but it’ll be in terms of human experiences that can be had and artistic experiences that can be created it’s going to be the sort of the vanguard and the most powerful and the best in the world.”
The original I Expect You To Die was one of those must play virtual reality (VR) titles, showcasing in 2016 a delightful combination of wit and diabolical puzzles that any VR-newbie would feel comfortable playing. Fast forward five years and the immersive gaming landscape has certainly changed but Schell Games’ concept of an approachable escape room experience has remained true. And so it’s time to save the world again from the evil Dr. Zor in I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar.
As VR videogames have inevitably expanded in scope and freedom the adjustment curve for new players has increased in turn, whether that’s building up those “VR legs” to run around environments or adding a great selection of controls. Whilst there are new features, at its heart Schell Games’ latest doesn’t really care about any of that, keeping the general gameplay simplicity the series is known for, whilst providing some ingenious puzzles that wouldn’t be out of place in a Bond or Bourne movie.
Because that’s essentially what you’re in. There’s an unseen villain, his seemingly unstoppable evil organisation intent on world domination, a collection of stooges and, of course, you. The suave, sophisticated agent tasked with bringing the operation to its knees. This all means I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar has just the right level of pageantry, humour and theatrics to pull off this cheeky caper without descending into Austin Powers territory.
You don’t need to have played the original even though this is a direct sequel – although it can’t hurt – as a little catch up is there to fill in the blanks. Even so, I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar can still be appreciated in its own right as there’s plenty of sleuthing to be had.
There are only six levels which don’t sound like a great deal but each is its own little microcosm of hidden items and interconnecting challenges, each more intricate than the last. And just like before there’s absolutely no locomotion, you remain seated in the same location throughout, the only twist to this being the last level inside an elevator. So with no movement to worry about I Expect You To Die 2 has a telekinesis mechanic to pick up distant objects that can either save the day or kill you.
And die you will, most likely fairly often in fact. I Expect You To Die 2 isn’t all trial and error but there is an element of that, where pulling a drawer will unleash death or that tasty looking sandwich on the food cart seems to house a very dangerous resident; you’ll not get out alive, to begin with. The levels aren’t timed per se, so you can carefully mooch around to avoid a messy end. Yet, it’s not at all bothersome. It is actually quite fun finding all the various traps and machinations hiding just under the surface. What will likely frustrate is the complete lack of hints, there really is no hand-holding here and therefore getting stuck can crop up. Clues do surface if you can find them, just don’t expect them to drop on your lap.
Much like games such as Vacation Simulator, I Expect You To Die 2 weaves far more into the experience than you’d have initially thought. Sure you can solely focus on the challenge at hand and blast through the whole game in a couple of hours or less. But you’d miss chunks of well-placed humour and other little activities. Both of these play important roles within I Expect You To Die 2, the former adding charm and life to the experience whilst the latter much-needed depth.
Completing a level is only the start of the challenge as you then be presented with a list of smaller – sometimes much more difficult – tasks to complete, like trying to speed run the level, finding particular objects or solving a puzzle in a particular way. Sure, it’s regurgitating the same levels over and over again but a least the whole thing isn’t over in a couple of hours.
And let’s not forget about the whole theatrics of I Expect You To Die 2. As expected from Schell Games production quality is top-notch, with Wil Wheaton superbly stepping into the role of world-famous actor and celebrity John Juniper. The same must be said about the epic introduction sung by Puddles Pity Party, it really does set the whole experience up, putting most other VR videogame intros to shame.
I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar hasn’t come to reinvent the wheel and it didn’t need to, what was required was achieved; an entertaining puzzler that you can’t put down. An extra couple of levels would’ve been nice with the possibility of a handy nudge in the right direction yet they’re only minor quibbles. If you’re looking for a VR puzzler that really pushes the technology then this isn’t it, I Expect You To Die 2 is all about playing to the masses and that’s no bad thing either.
