Schell Games today announced that I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar, the upcoming sequel to the breakout VR spy adventure game, will launch at some point this summer on SteamVR headsets, Oculus Quest, Rift, and PSVR. The studio also revealed that Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation) is also set to lend his voice talent to the game.
Picking up where the first game left off, I Expect You To Die 2 is said to offer six new missions where you try to foil Zoraxis’ evil plans of world domination. Like the original, Schell Games says each mission features “ingenious puzzles, cunning villains, dangerous locales,” and promises both a cohesive story and “explosive” ending.
Schell Games also published a new trailer, which you can check out below:
A playable demo supporting SteamVR headsets is coming to Steam Next Fest on June 16th, and will feature a tutorial, a new intro credits music experience, and a brief taste of the first mission. While protecting the prime minister at a theater production, you’ll get a chance to meet world famous actor John Juniper, who is voiced by Wil Wheaton.
The patently James Bond-style opening credit scene also features the musical stylings of Puddles Pity Party, aka “the sad clown with a golden voice.”
Like the first in the series, I Expect You To Die 2 is focused on keeping the player seated, which is thanks to clever level design and the use of telekinesis to reach far-away puzzle elements.
For now, the only store listing available is on Steam. You can wishlist the game here.
Looking for some mind-bending puzzle games to play through on Quest 2? Here are our picks.
The Oculus Quest library is only growing larger and stronger by the day with a few options available in most genres. For puzzle fans, we’ve put together this list of some of the best in the genre available on Quest. Some are inventive and creative, some are mind-bending and challenging, but there should be something for everyone.
Here are our picks for the best puzzle games available on Oculus Quest.
A Fisherman’s Tale
Before its more recent game Maskmaker, Innerspace released the acclaimed A Fisherman’s Tale on Quest in 2019. It’s a short yet incredibly charming puzzle game, with ingenious puzzles will make you rack your brain until you finally reach that critical ‘a-ha’ moment that feels so satisfying.
Cubism is a deceptively simple game. Each level features a 3D wireframe shape into which you have to fit different Tetris-like block pieces. The puzzles get harder and the pieces more complex – it’s a slow and measured puzzle experience.
Even better, the game’s recent updates include 120Hz and hand tracking support. The latter in particular is a near-perfect fit for Cubism – all you’re doing is picking up pieces and placing them into the wireframe, but it’s enough to create a sublime hand tracking experience. This isn’t a ranked list, but if it were, Cubism would be my personal #1.
Floor Plan 2 feels like a VR episode of The Muppet Show, not just in the hilarious absurdity of its world but also in the constant, invigorating ingenuity of its puzzles. It is a logic-based puzzle game in a completely illogical world and one of the best recent releases on the Quest platform.
This game takes the staples of 2D jigsaw puzzles and brings them into VR with a new element — all of the puzzles are 3D models of real-life places, brought to life through highly detailed photogrammetry captures. The 16 included puzzles range from landscapes to individual objects, each with accompanying ambient sounds that build up as you solve. It’s a slow, meditative but also appropriately challenging puzzle game that offers a similar yet fresh take on traditional jigsaw puzzles.
This is a tough, short (1-2 hours), claustrophobic puzzler that will set you stuck in the cramped confines of a submerged submarine. There’s no hand-holding here, resulting in an immersive yet excruciatingly slow set of submarine-based puzzles. If you’re looking for an incredibly short but difficult experience, then this might be the best option.
If you’re a fan of Tetris, then Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Tetris Effect is an absolute must-play. It launched first on PSVR and PC VR before finally making its way over the Quest platform in 2020.
It is exactly what it sounds like – it’s Tetris in VR. However, it’s matched with a spectacular, powerful and at times hypnotic amount of visual and audio flair. While these visuals have had to be pared down slightly for the Quest release, we still deemed it the definitive version of the game across all platforms – the lack of tethered wires on Quest remains priceless.
Five years on from the release of the original, I Expect You To Die 2 is a game that executes a specific style of grueling puzzle game incredibly well. It’s a trial-and-error affair where you’ll spend an hour testing things, only to realize that the solution was obvious and right in front of you the whole time. It’s the mark of a quality puzzle — one where the solution is hidden not through obscure design, but through your own short-sightedness — but it can also mean a slow burn and periods of heavy frustration.
The latest installment in The Room series is also its first installment in VR. This isn’t a mobile or PC port either – The Room VR: A Dark Matter is made entirely for VR from the ground up.
Developer Fireproof hasn’t lost its penchant for incredibly clever and creative puzzles in the transition. Read more in our review.
Myst
This seminal PC game made its way over to the Oculus Quest late last year. It’s an upgraded and all-around solid port of the original PC title that will have you reaching for a notebook or a friend to help work your way through the tough puzzles.
It’s a game everyone should play once and the Quest 2 port provides you with a modern but faithful way to do so. You can read more in our review.
Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs
While the Angry Birds franchise started on mobile, its first foray into VR is a completely natural transition and results in an extremely fun VR puzzle game. It’s an intuitive VR title that’s perfect for VR beginners and veterans alike.
The campaign levels do veer slightly to the easy end of the spectrum, but it’s also a game primarily targeted at kids. This isn’t to say it’s not enjoyable for all ages though, and the custom level builder and online sharing functions mean that you’ll be able to create and play more levels long after you’ve finished the campaign.
In 2019, VR wasn’t where Jesse Schell thought it would be.
We all know this story; slow uptake of PC VR headsets and the modest launch of Sony’s PSVR didn’t measure up to the analyst projections and business bets. Even decades of experience in VR — spanning all the way back to his time at Disney Imagineering in the mid-90’s — hadn’t given the Schell Games CEO the insight to buck that trend. He admitted as much to Upload when we spoke in January 2019.
In that same interview, though, Schell cited a new hope in Facebook’s Oculus Quest. The then-soon-to-launch standalone headset represented a turning point for the VR industry, doing away with the need for PCs and consoles. And so Schell once again made a bet on the speed of VR’s growth.
Today he says he was wrong again – this time in a good way.
“I made some predictions a few years ago about how VR was going to play out and it’s been going more slowly than I had predicted,” Schell says over a web call. “But then at the same time, the Quest has taken it the other direction and the growth that is happening due to that platform is going faster than what I predicted.”
Sales stats for Quest and the recently-launched Quest 2 aren’t known, though Schell Games’ Until You Fall and I Expect You To Die have both generated more than $1 million in revenue on the platform. It’s encouraging enough that Schell is investing in a sequel to the latter, due to hit headsets later this year. That’s something the company isn’t sure it would have done so boldly were it not for the new platform.
“[Quest] is designed for this specific purpose and is meeting that purpose really, really well,” the developer continued. “And so while I predicted that that was the future, that that’s where things were going, I didn’t think it would be adopted this fast. I didn’t think the price point would be this low. And I certainly didn’t think we’d see such a change in the buying and playing behavior because that’s, this is something that I think a lot of people aren’t aware of.”
This is key. Much of the focus behind VR developer success stories has been paid to how well Quest is selling. But it’s not just that there are lots of units out there, Schell says, its also that owners are buying lots of content. “The people who have a Quest buy more games and play more games than people on PSVR or on PC VR and as a result that makes it just a great environment for developers because you move more units and people are engaging with your game more.”
Schell’s also supportive of Facebook’s strict curation policy for the platform, which he says has helped drive those strong sales, but expresses concern about the company being “the only force” in VR right now. Quest, he says, caught people on the backfoot after other headsets failed to capture the market. “They watched the Oculus Go and then watched it go. And they said, ‘Well, there it goes.’ And it didn’t impress anybody. And then the Quest came after that people thought this is going to be another Go.”
It’s a sequence of events that Schell thinks has bought Facebook “at least a year” to take hold of the market.
One thing Schell is sure of now, though, is that VR will make it to mainstream. It might be three years, it might be five, but he’s certain headsets like Quest will get to a point that they sell 10 million units. Why such a specific number? “When there’s 10 million of something out in the world, probably one of your friends has it,” Schell reasons. “And when there’s less than 10 million, probably none of your friends has it. And VR is in that less than 10 million zone right now.”
Reaching the milestone is critical for where Schell sees VR going next. “One of the things I always think about is the people who own a technology are the people who are teenagers when it comes out,” he says. “They’re the ones that are going to own that technology for the rest of their life. People who are older than that, they can kind of start to use it but they don’t own it in the same way.”
One day, Schell reasons, it’s that audience that will popularize the content that will really set VR apart. “You watch these kids doing Roblox. Most adult gamers have no concept of Roblox and when they see it, they’re like, that looks ugly and weird, but it is this force, right? People say, ‘Oh, the metaverse. One day, we’re going to have these social things happening online and people building worlds.’ Like, it’s happening now in there.”
“So what I feel like we’re seeing is you’ve got these 10 to 15 year olds who were in there playing Roblox in a couple of years they’re going to start to be able to afford and start to try VR. And when that 10 million mark gets crossed, they’re going to be like, ‘Where’s my VR Roblox?’ And we’re going to start to see these user-generated content societies start to kind of form and become really solid and really powerful because of the way people will be able to interact and connect.”
Before Schell Games’ I Expect You To Die came to virtual reality, it was first realized in CR – cardboard reality.
The team constructed crude physical versions of its levels out of old boxes. Scribbled labels turned leftover Amazon parcels into complex machinery, with bottle tops becoming the dials and buttons to operate them. It’s not unlike how Hideo Kojima made Lego dioramas to plan out levels of Metal Gear Solid 2, only Schell’s sets were life-size.
This process helped the team map out space and interactions for some of the most inventive puzzles VR has yet seen, highlighting just how different the medium is to traditional games.
I was eager to know if Schell had repeated the process for its sequel, I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy And The Liar, which has been in development for the past year and a bit. But, as I open my mouth to ask that question of Project Director Charlie Amis, I’m reminded a global pandemic would have made that impossible. Fortunately, Schell was already kitted out with the latest gadgets when COVID-19 took hold.
“In cases of wanting to rapidly and cooperatively make a level design — a set — especially one that’s in a first-person VR perspective, we used a couple of other tools like SculptrVR,” Amis explains.
SculptrVR is a VR creation app similar to Tilt Brush or Quill with a specific focus on making 3D models like game assets or even entire environments. Crucially, the platform allows multiple people to explore creations. Schell was essentially trading in cardboard sets for virtual ones.
“It did get us very quickly to realize [different team members] were thinking of different spaces or the scale of spaces was often in our imaginations and by all being in there and sitting in the seats like: “Oh yeah, I see it. We should see a little bit of the wing over to our left and if the cabin’s this big, that could work.” So it got us to like a vision alignment way, way faster,” Amis says.
Like countless other developers around the world, Schell faced several challenges when it moved to remote work in the early months of 2020. But both Amis and studio CEO Jesse Schell count themselves lucky they A. started work on the sequel before lockdown and B. were working on a previously-established foundation instead of an all-new property.
“I think in general, we’ve found that during the pandemic, working from home is really hard when you’re trying to spin something new up,” Schell explains. “But when you got momentum on something and everybody can kind of go home and do it, and everybody’s already on the same page and everybody already has a sense of best practices? Those are the projects that have been easier to do during the pandemic.”
Work on I Expect You To Die 2 started up right after Schell released the final bonus level of the original game in late 2019. Amis wants the sequel to feel more “cinematic” than the original. It aims to be less a collection of levels released far apart (the first game released with four missions and released three free ones over the next three years) and more something that was “built from the beginning as a single whole to feel like one experience, as opposed to episodic.”
Amis hopes that’s what makes the game feel like a sequel. Schell is coy on the number of levels and what’s contained within them, though the trailer above shows a clipboard stopping an arrow dead in its tracks, and one puzzle seems to involve an inviting selection of cheeses.
Another perhaps more ambitious aim for the sequel is to unite the two warring factions behind any puzzle game – those that want hard puzzles and those that don’t. Amis says it’s “really important” that people aren’t hitting roadblocks but also ensuring that solutions are satisfying to appease hardened problem-solvers. That means building worlds, interactions and challenges that are intricate, immersive and feel organic to navigate. In VR, that’s no easy thing.
“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,” Schell says. “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.”
And that’s perhaps the most fascinating thing about VR development and the reason I’m looking forward to Schell’s sequel. It’s a journey of discovery as much for the developer as it is the player. Amis says the game isn’t just about certain scenarios that the team internally thought would be cool but the alternate solutions that handing agency over the players results in.
The more you make, the more problems you solve, the more interactions you discover, the closer you’re pushing virtual reality toward our reality. Schell notes that the first game’s submarine level was made possible by the coincidental work it had done on liquids, for example.
Now it’s building an entire game on the rules and breakthroughs that have come before. Here’s hoping it’ll make for Schell’s best mission yet. I Expect You To Die 2 hits VR platforms later on this year.
Facebook made some big announcements yesterday regarding its Oculus Quest platform and how well some developers were doing. Over 60 titles have managed to exceed the $1 million USD marker with the company naming several of them. Since that announcement, studios have taken to Twitter to confirm which of them had managed to be part of this coveted group.
Some weren’t that surprising like nDreams’ stealth shooter Phantom: Covert Ops. Available on both Oculus Quest and Rift, it launched in June last year and only a month later had achieved over $1m in gross revenue from both platforms. The studio Tweeted that Oculus Quest revenue has exceeded $1 million on its own.
Fitness titles OhShape and Synth Riders are also part of that list. The Synth Ridersteam also confirmed to VRFocus in an email that since the release of the Oculus Quest 2 monthly active players had tripled and that monthly revenue showed a 9x increase.
This type of jump in figures was echoed by others in the community. Hrafn Thorisson, CEO and co-founder of Aldin Dynamics – the studio behind Waltz of the Wizard – Tweeted: “Our sales on December 25th 2020 were 5x greater than on December 25th in 2019. January 2021 was our biggest sales month on Quest to date. More than 4x greater than January 2020.”
Good news all around then, with some of these managing to make their way even higher up the revenue pile. It’s important to note that while Facebook might be using $1 million as a positive marker, for long term videogame development that figure is a drop in the ocean. For further updates on the health of Oculus Quest’s ecosystem, keep reading VRFocus.
Schell Games today announced that its breakout VR spy adventure game, I Expect You to Die (2016), is getting a sequel sometime this year.
The studio unveiled the game, called I Expect You to Die 2: The Spy and The Liar, without mention of specific target platforms for the espionage-themed escape game.
For now, the only store listing is on Steam, ostensibly for PC VR headsets. Considering its massive success on all VR platforms, we expect to see it on PSVR, Oculus Quest, and Oculus Rift as well. Notably, the original game generated millions in revenue on the Quest platform alone—strong incentive to get it in the hands of users with Facebook’s latest standalone headset, Quest 2.
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Image courtesy Schell Games
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:
I Expect You To Die 2 is the thrilling encore to the award-winning virtual reality franchise, I Expect You To Die. In this sequel, prepare for new missions, more villains, and more ways to… well, you know – die. The Agency is thrilled to see you’ve returned… and in one piece! Let’s keep it that way, shall we?
The immersive spy-flavored puzzle game is also said to include new locations, a new story featuring diabolical missions directed by archenemy Zoraxis, and a chance to use your “telekinetic powers and cunning” to complete missions.
Schell Games has been ardent about pushing out free DLC to the original game over the years, and we expect the same level of dedication to what could be a big win for the studio.
Schell Games is returning to its popular VR puzzling series with I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy And The Liar, coming later this year.
The surprise sequel will build on the original game’s spy-themed puzzles, in which players would solve various, often dangerous trials and challenges. We really loved the original game’s inventive design (Schell Games built physical versions of some of its levels out of cardboard for prototyping), and it looks like the team will be building on that here. Check out the first gameplay teaser below (though I’ll warn you that there are some puzzle solutions shown).
I Expect You To Die 2 Reveal Trailer
The game will once again pit players against the evil Zoraxis. In a prepared statement, Project Director Charlie Amis said the team plans to “improve and expand upon the mechanics and characteristics” of the original game. “New and returning players will experience new puzzles in fully immersive environments, complete with an in-depth storyline that makes the thrill of being an elite, super spy a reality,” he said.
Schell isn’t confirming platforms for I Expect You To Die 2 today, but the original came to PC VR, PSVR and Quest over the course of its life. In June of 2020, Schell revealed that the game had generated $2 million in revenue on Quest alone. The developer is also putting the first title on sale as Quest’s Daily Deal on January 28th, with 20% off. From January 29th – February 5th you can also get the game in an Oculus bundle with the also-excellent Until You Fall at 20% off too.
Are you looking forward to I Expect You To Die 2? Let us know in the comments below!
Schell Games is returning to its popular VR puzzling series with I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy And The Liar, coming later this year.
The surprise sequel will build on the original game’s spy-themed puzzles, in which players would solve various, often dangerous trials and challenges. We really loved the original game’s inventive design (Schell Games built physical versions of some of its levels out of cardboard for prototyping), and it looks like the team will be building on that here. Check out the first gameplay teaser below (though I’ll warn you that there are some puzzle solutions shown).
I Expect You To Die 2 Reveal Trailer
The game will once again pit players against the evil Zoraxis. In a prepared statement, Project Director Charlie Amis said the team plans to “improve and expand upon the mechanics and characteristics” of the original game. “New and returning players will experience new puzzles in fully immersive environments, complete with an in-depth storyline that makes the thrill of being an elite, super spy a reality,” he said.
Schell isn’t confirming platforms for I Expect You To Die 2 today, but the original came to PC VR, PSVR and Quest over the course of its life. In June of 2020, Schell revealed that the game had generated $2 million in revenue on Quest alone. The developer is also putting the first title on sale as Quest’s Daily Deal on January 28th, with 20% off. From January 29th – February 5th you can also get the game in an Oculus bundle with the also-excellent Until You Fall at 20% off too.
Are you looking forward to I Expect You To Die 2? Let us know in the comments below!
If you’re looking for a good deal on virtual reality (VR) videogames for PC VR headsets then Humble Bundle’s latest offer is hard to beat. The Humble Fall VR Bundle provides up to eight titles depending on how much you want to spend, whilst supporting charities in the process.
Continuing its practice of offering great collections of videogames at a price determined by the customer, this fall VR deal starts from less than £1 GBP, with A-Tech Cybernetic, Archangel: HellfireandKilling Floor: Incursion on offer. Increase your payment to £7.73 and you’ll unlock Survios’ Raw Data. Step that up further to £11.78 and you’ll then unlock I Expect You To Die and Creed: Rise to Glory.
Finally, going for the maximum unlock price of £13.14 and you’ll get XREAL Games’ Zero Caliber and one of the best VR experiences of 2020,Skydance Interactive’s The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. Whichever tier you choose you’ll get Steam keys for those titles. All these prices are the bare minimum, you can donate more at your discretion.
As Humble Bundle also likes to give back, the supported charity this month is Movember, focusing on men’s health such as mental health, suicide prevention, prostate cancer and testicular cancer. You can also select other charities and tip Humble Bundle for doing a good job.
All in all that’s a decent deal by anyone’s standards and like anything that good the offer is limited, ending in a couple of weeks. Of course, by then it won’t be long until all the winter sales start on Steam and the Oculus Store although VRFocus isn’t sure the deals will be quite this tempting.
As further bundles and VR discounts are rolled out, VRFocus will let you know.
Just like all Humble Bundles, you get to choose the amount you pay and customize how much of your money goes towards Humble, how much goes towards charities, and how much goes towards the developers.
All games are provided via Steam keys, so they should work using an SteamVR headset such as a Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, or Windows MR device.
There have been lots of great VR game deals this year, but this might take the cake for sheer value. Each of the games in this bundle are quite good and worth playing, so getting them all so cheaply is a real steal. The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is, without a doubt, one of the best VR games to date so it’s worth the price of the bundle alone for sure. Everything else is just gravy.
Do you plan on grabbing the Humble Fall VR Bundle? The deal is live for two weeks so you have until around November 24th to pull the trigger. Let us know down in the comments below!
