Vox Machinae, a long running indie VR project, is available right now on the Oculus Rift, SteamVR, and PC. The game received a surprise launch into Early Access today at Oculus Connect 5, bringing a new beginning to a title that’s been in the works for nearly four years.
Available now on Oculus (Rift), SteamVR (Vive, Rift, and Windows VR), and PC (non-VR mode), Vox Machinae is a multiplayer mech combat game that leans decidedly toward the ‘simulator’ end of the mech spectrum, contrasting faster-paced and more arcade-like mech games like Archangel: Hellfire (2017).
Vox Machinae delivers a weighty mech experience where you’ll feel more like you’re operating a giant machine rather than actually being the machine itself. This is achieved with a cockpit full of controls which are manipulated using your motion controllers. That includes the throttle, rotation stick, jump jet control, and even a CB radio microphone which you need to pick up to communicate with your team.
Image courtesy Space Bullet
As your mech has serious momentum, you’ll need to plan your movements carefully if you don’t want to go stumbling into walls or totally botch the landing after using your jump jets. For those who want to be a bit less lumbering, the choice of a smaller mech will increase speed and maneuverability, but of course comes means you won’t be able to take as much damage as the larger mechs.
Image courtesy Space Bullet
Alongside a handful of different mech chassis to choose from, customizable weapons include the likes of machine guns, rockets, lasers, and railguns—the latter being extra effective when paired with a special targeting monitor in the cockpit which offers a zoomed in view of your reticle.
Image courtesy Space Bullet
Vox Machinae is available today in Early Access priced at $25 and supports multiplayer matches with up to 16 players, including bot support, mid-match joining, and full crossplay between Oculus, SteamVR, and non-VR PC players. Developer Space Bullet confirmed to Road to VR that both the Oculus and Steam versions of the game can also be played in the non-VR PC mode.
CREED: Rise to Glory is a boxing game that aims to get you up and sweating with what promises to deliver the Rocky-style underdog victory that couch jockies like me have always dreamed about. While the campaign is both shorter and lighter on story than it probably could have been, it delivers some heavy-hitting game mechanics that do pretty well considering you’re effectively punching at air.
Developer: Survios Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift,), Oculus Store (Rift), PlayStation Store (PSVR) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Release Date: September 25th, 2018
Gameplay
There’s not much to know about the story behind Creed: Rise to Glory. Like in the films, you follow series protagonist Adonis “Hollywood” Creed, the son of Apollo Creed, and fight to become the champ.
Story elements are told through a radio program playing in the gym, which serves as your sanctuary where you can train before fights and hear a little bit about the boxing world outside of the gym’s four walls. A single flashback of you punching out a bouncer and presumably losing a love interest are light padding to the game’s main event: dodging and making sure your stamina isn’t too low so you can land effective punches during matches. And while I felt the story definitely could have played out to a grander, more dramatic effect with a longer arc than what its six primary enemies provided, the most important things are strong fundamentals and being engaging enough to revisit, which is clearly the case in Creed: Rise to Glory.
Image courtesy Survios
As someone who’s never boxed before, I can’t really say with much certainty how true Creed VR is to the actual sport, but it appears to have been game-ified well into arcade territory. The Rocky films, and by extension the Creed films, are fantastical fights that probably could never happen in reality anyway. Like with many sports films, the technicality of the sport is mostly lost in those big dramatized moments that challenge the main character, and help them come to a hard-won resolution. Stepping into the ring with the lights, the crowd, and the announcer, it easily matched up to my already warped expectations of how boxing is portrayed in film—that much I can say with confidence; I felt like I was in a movie, and it was awesome.
Iconic training montages with Rocky Balboa, voiced with a convincing-enough impression of Sylvester Stallone, prefaced most fights, giving you that all important cinematic touchstone.
Image captured by Road to VR
Introducing what 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. Low stamina is indicated by the color of your gloves, which will flash red to make sure you know your punches will be slower than your actual physical ability to shadow box. This keeps you on the guard more than you might otherwise be, as the only way to recuperate stamina is by holding you hands still. Enemies will also dodge and block your hits too, making them more than just simple punching bags.
Getting staggered happens in two stages. A powerful punch can put you in a quick out-of-body experience that requires you to match up your hands to two targets, allowing you to pop back into the fight.
Image captured by Road to VR
More devastating punches can knock you way out of the ring, requiring you to ‘run’ back and jump back into your body. These are fun and truly creative ways of making you feel like you’re hanging on to a bare thread in the more difficult matches.
Image captured by Road to VR
A few methods of activating slow motion sequences really drive home the cinematic nature of the game, as you dodge a punch or land a big hit that places temporary target’s on your opponent’s body.
All of these systems work extremely well, but the learning curve is somewhat steep. There is no visible HP or stamina bar, so spending some extra time in training is probably a good thing so you can start to really feel out how many hits you can take and how many you can give before throwing yourself at the actual matches.
I beat the campaign mode in about an hour an a half on normal difficulty, although that was stretched out over several sessions simply based on my own admittedly out-of-shape cardio abilities. It’s easy to see using Creed: Rise to Glory in an actual cardio routine to get less than active people (like me) up from the chair and getting their heart pumping. I felt enemies weren’t terribly varied in the attack styles, as it seems difficulty is mostly based more on the NPC’s individual punch strength and HP.
While I was left somewhat disappointed by the shortness of the campaign mode, thankfully you can mix and match enemies, gyms, and boxing locales in free play. Another big addition recently announced to arrive on all platforms is PvP online multiplayer. Online multiplayer presents a good opportunity to really turn the technical difficulty up, as live players exploit tactics that NPCs simply can’t think of, like running around the ring and going for a drive-by punch. These online battles are intense, and provided some of my most tiring battles.
While at times on the cartoonish side, character models and their animations are very well-done and can be genuinely intimidating too. Seeing a near seven foot-tall guy trying to hit me in the face isn’t something I’m really used to, and even though nothing bad can happen outside of accidentally punching a wall/TV/monitor, there are some moments before the fight when you subconsciously size up the competition.
Image captured by Road to VR
Impressive and realistic set pieces help ground you in the world, although it’s clear Creed: Rise to Glory is definitely bucking up against some of the inherent limitations of the current state of VR. Without any bodily feedback outside of the controller’s haptics, it’s difficult to completely immerse yourself in the act of dodging and blocking, two things that require more than visual cues to accomplish. Oftentimes I had my gloves up, obscuring my vision, and without force feedback (which at this point isn’t possible), you just have to rely on the controller’s buzzy haptics and the game’s visual cues to tell if you’ve hit your opponent or pulled your punch too early. That said, it’s great to know that Creed VR has entirely bypassed the ‘waggle simulator’ trend of earlier titles, as it not only requires you to punch quickly, but do it accurately for the sake of lost stamina.
The game’s AI is pretty darn good. At moments I could feel the AI sussing out my head’s position and aiming accurately for my noggin despite I had dodged an earlier punch. NPCs feel mostly solid, although you can actually run through them if you want.
Image captured by Road to VR
While based mostly on room-scale movement, there are moments when you need to artificially move from point A to point B, including when you square off at the beginning of the fight and during moments when you’re knocked out and have to run back to your body to continue the fight. Moving in the game is accomplished by swinging your arms while holding down the applicable buttons on each controller, which sends you sliding forward. Artificial locomotion is generally useless during fights, so it usually comes down to standing in place and punching it out like rock’em sock’em robots, albeit with a little more finesse and dodging/blocking abilities.
Both room-scale and the game’s only other locomotion scheme, detailed above, are extremely comfortable ways of moving around VR.
That said, this is a very physical standing game that will get your heart beating, and definitely get you sweating through the padding on your headset if you’re not careful. That’s not so much a knock on the game’s comfort rating as it is an advisory to plan ahead. Pop on some gym shorts for an extended session, because you’ll soon be huffing and puffing with all the dodging, bobbing and punching you’ll be doing.
Like with many more physical VR games, there’s a risk of hyperextending your arms alla tennis elbow, so it may be best to take frequent breaks if you have some pre-existing joint issues.
Sairento VR (2018), the cyber-ninja VR combat game, just received an update that includes remastered graphics and better performance thanks to a game engine upgrade.
Sairento VR launched out of Early Access for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in February 2018. The game includes a single-player campaign mode that lets you hone your slow-motion, high-flying ninja moves as you shoot pistols and physically slice your katanas at the game’s ‘cyber ninja’ enemies; the game also includes a single-player arcade mode, multiplayer co-op, and PvP mode.
Thanks to a recent update, the following levels have been visually remastered: Shrine, Lab, Warehouse, Cemetary, Hall, Corporation, Train, Arena, and Observatory. The developers, Mixed Realms, are still working on three remaining levels including Street, Alley and District, and will release patches for these in a future update.
An upgrade to the game’s Unity game engine, Mixed Realms says in a Steam news post, improves textures and lighting, offers better performance and smoother gameplay, and fixes a number of bugs. You can find the full change log in the link posted above.
Mixed Realms also maintains that Sairento VR is slated to receive a new level at the end of September, and another one at the end of October.
Check out the video below for a look at some of the game’s latest improvements.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
