Cortopia Studios, the Stockholm-based team behind the spellcasting combat game Wands (2016), showed off their next entry into the realm of VR at Gamescom 2019 this week. Called Down the Rabbit Hole, I got a chance to go hands-on with the third-person adventure game, which tasks you with solving a variety of puzzles while leading a lost girl through a miniature world inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865).
Strapping on an Oculus Quest, I find myself looking at a two inch-tall pair of characters, a girl (simply called ‘The Girl) and a little playing card-shaped knight, the so-called 4½ of Spades.
Grabbing onto a large root suspended below the scene, I pull the diorama of the dark forest closer to me, and absentmindedly brush my fingers through a river and play with the leaves of the bonzai-sized trees.
Image courtesy Cortopia Studios
The narrator tells me that the plucky duo is searching for something called the King’s Keep on their quest to follow the White Rabbit, and as luck would have it, a tiny Cheshire Cat is there to help.
Much of my 15-minute demo was played in the third-person; character locomotion is achieved by either moving the pint-sized people via Touch’s thumbstick or drawing a path to the desired destination (the latter is especially useful when you have to backtrack through complex pathways). However at times you’ll also snap into a first-person mode too. Walking close to the Cheshire Cat, I’m presented with a dialogue tree populated with a few options to interrogate the curious kitty.
Image captured by Road to VR
If you know your lore, you’ll remember that Cheshire Cat is pathologically incapable of answering straight forward questions though, so he instead saddles us with the important task of rounding up five pesky butter-flies—literal sticks of butter with wings, which is the overarching task for the demo.
Although I say ‘most’ of the game is in third-person, I can’t really be sure of that from what I’ve played. As with dialogue trees, some of the puzzles I encountered were actually in the first-person too, so it feels like there’s going to be plenty of latitude for interesting and varied interactions between the two.
Ambling my characters separately through a few adjacent rooms to complete some door puzzles—all of it in service of those hidden butter-flies—it becomes clear to me that it’s actually I who is down the rabbit hole. The numerous dioramas eventually create a cylinder around me, and the black void above and below me keeps revealing more and more little rooms stacked on top of each other. Using the same locomotion method as when I leaned in to get a better look, I shift the world around me and climb around by using the many roots as handholds.
Eventually we run into more familiar faces, including the hookah-smoking Caterpillar himself, and a pretty suspicious-looking King, who is really just a low-numbered card with hastily painted on whiteout and a big ‘K’ scribbled on his chest. That’s some low-key Swedish comedy for you.
Image courtesy Cortopia Studios
The demo’s puzzles, both first and third-person, were fairly simple, although were varied enough to keep my attention. A puzzle with a singing bird and musical set of flowers was the most difficult for me personally, although that’s because every musical instrument I’ve ever laid my fingers on turns to dust and flies out the window in a magical tornado conjured by the ghosts of classical musicians past.
In the end, it appears the game isn’t going to offer a single prescribed ending either, as Cortopia say that you’ll be able to make “many choices about the girl’s backstory” and how you want to deal with the various characters, something they say will ultimately determine the ending of the game.
Down the Rabbit Hole is slated to arrive on PSVR, PC VR headsets, and Oculus Quest sometime in December 2019. Check out the gameplay trailer below to get a taste of what’s in store:
Fast Travel Games, the studio behind bowshooting adventure Apex Construct (2018), showed off their upcoming title The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets at Gamescom this year. Getting a chance to pop in for a single level, the admittedly short game offers up casual diorama-based puzzles and a heartwarming story cast in the golden hue of a childhood memories past.
A floating island pops into existence before me. My wizened granddad is recalling our time at his summer house, where my sister and I used to spend the days going on adventures and inevitably fighting amongst ourselves.
Using the Oculus Touch controller, I lean forward to spin the island around, a bright and self-contained miniature world where my dear old gran’s tiny house resides. Grabbing hold of the island and turning it reveals a number of curious items such as a locked chest, multiple tiny doors, and plenty of interactive stuff such as a kettle, teacup, and a burning flame. Practically everything is interactive, making the little island seem alive and oozing with that warm, fuzzy feeling.
The object of each stage is to find all of the pets, which is done by completing some of the light puzzles, like setting the kettle to boil over the flame to make a cup of tea using the leaves brushed from a tree overhead, revealing a tiny submarine in the cup which holds a bulbous little kitty inside. Rummaging around for pets can be as simple as looking in the bush near a dog’s bowl, or going through those slightly more elaborate steps to unlock a chest where a cheeky bunny is hiding, the very same rascal my granddad says ate the carrots in the neighbor’s garden.
A few curious little characters pop around too, animated at a lower, claymation-style frame rate. Although I didn’t need much help solving the puzzles, a curious little guy would pop in and out of doors and draw my attention to an overlooked piece of the puzzle.
It only took me a few minutes to complete the stage (a total of five will come at launch) and also find all five hidden coins, which are highlighted by a small sparkling aura. The only real objective though is to find the pets, as the coins are no doubt put there to get the user to focus more clearly on the game’s super detailed environments.
Talking to the game’s creative lead James Hunt, I was told The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets isn’t explicitly for kids despite it’s clear family-friendly appeal. “It’s an everyone game,” Hunt explains, saying that it was designed especially for new VR users of all ages. And while it’s definitely on the casual end of the puzzle spectrum, the well-built little game promises to offer enough variety to keep you playing for what is shaping up to be a single-sitting playsession that should easily wrap up in under an hour.
The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets is set to launch in 2019 on a gang of headsets, including Quest, Rift, PSVR, Valve Index, HTC Vive, and Windows VR headsets. Check out the game’s trailer below:
Initially arriving last August as VR’s premiere live-remixing rhythm game, Survios’ Electronauts lets players fiddle with the individual tracks and pieces of popular songs, mixing loose effects and loops together with vocal and instrumental stems at their own leisure [our review]. The free ‘Heatwave’ update nearly doubles the total track count to more than 80 songs.
Aptly titled, this update broadly features summer-flavored tunes by artists such as Tipper, Feed Me, and Kill the Noise. But if you’re not a fan of bass-heavy EDM, you’re still in luck. Also making an appearance is a broad set of styles and tastes ranging from the likes of Kygo, Giraffage, Childish Gambino, and similar contemporary artists. Here’s the full lineup of artists with songs in the update.
Image courtesy Survios
“It’s been really gratifying to see this tool unleash creative expression, both in people who are already super creative and in people who don’t normally tap into their creative side,” said Hunter Kitagawa, Survios’ Director of Marketing, in a statement on Oculus’ blog. “The main thing they’ve been asking for since launch is more songs. With this update, we hope we’re delivering on that.”
That said, creative minds and curious explorers no longer need to wait for new music to play with. The Heatwave update is free for all owners of Electronauts, which is available to purchase and download on the Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, SteamVR, and PSVR platforms today.
Update (August 21st, 2019): The Heatwave update added 39 new tracks to Electronauts, Survios has confirmed. This article previously stated the number was 45, but that was actually the number of artists (Survios said some tracks include more than one artist credit). The article above has been updated with this correction.
I didn’t know what to make of Paper Beasts when I heard about back at its reveal in April. Billed as an exploration game inspired by big data, or the unfathomably large data sets that can reveal unseen trends, the game promises to toss you head first into an abstract living world that has emerged from “the vast memory of a data server.” It sounded wild and mysterious at the time, but after playing the 20-minute demo at this year’s Gamescom, I got a much better grasp on what lays ahead.
I won’t mince words here: when a game’s primary claim to fame is “it’s all about exploration,” alarm bells automatically go off in my head. In some cases, ‘explore’ is really a code word for “there’s not much else to do besides look around.” Although games like this can be a great way to introduce people to the immersive prospects of VR in general, it does very little in the way of keeping butts in chairs.
From my time with the game’s first level, Paper Beast appears to be anything but boring; it seems to take its mission statement of exploration to heart, offering plenty of novel experiences along the one-way trip through the game’s narrative, which is partly driven by the world’s interesting assortment of dynamic and interactive paper-based lifeforms, and to a much larger degree to the constantly shifting environment around you that ushers you forward into new and interesting locales.
Created by Pixel Reef, a studio headed by the creator behind cult classic platformer Another World (1991) Éric Chahi, I was plopped into a PSVR headset and handed a pair of PS Move controllers without explanation.
With no tutorial as such, I find myself in a red tent with a boom box playing a saccharine J-pop tune. The tent waves dynamically in the wind, and the pop song comes to an end. “What do I do now?” I thought to myself. Lifting my controller, I notice I can lock onto hot points connected to objects in front of me. Motioning my hand towards the boom box, I drag it to my feet, which felt a bit like holding a 10 pound weight on the end of a fishing rod. Reaching my hand up to a corner of the fluttering red fabric, I yanked the much lighter fabric away, revealing a vast desert in front of me, and a towering giraffe-like beast standing on spiny legs of tightly crumpled paper.
Image courtesy Pixel Reef
Looking out over the horizon, I see the clouds are really a mishmash of fluffy alphabet soup. With only a few spare moments to take in the dune’s flowing sands, a strange crab-like creature appears over an embankment, rattling his tail suspiciously as he scuttles over to investigate the strange journalist, leaving in its wake a realistic sets of prints in the sand. His entrance is scripted, I’m told, but he’s fully able to amble around and correct himself when flipped over (or violently assaulted, which I didn’t do because I’m a friend to all of paper-God’s paper-creatures under the paper-sun).
Walking closer to me, my towering giraffe buddy bends his long neck to present me with a reddish orb, which snaps to the bulb of my left controller. With that, I’m given the ability to telelport and snap-turn. My spiny beast-pal slowly lumbers off over a dune, drawing my curiosity with him. Popping over the hill, I see a watering hole with a pack of smaller horse-like beasts eating little balls of—you guessed it—paper. Using my floppy laser beam-fishing rod powers, I pick up a ball and feed it to one of the sauntering animals as they slosh around the dynamically moving water.
Image courtesy Pixel Reef
Each of the horses have a number of hot points on them, and picking one of them up from the thorax reveals that they’re just light enough to lift up entirely. The towering beastie sets off again, this time between two rock faces, which open up to reveal a twisting canyon. Around the corner I see the first predator, a multicolored wolf-like thing which is locked in battle with an errant horse. Stealing the helpless prey from the wolf’s grasp and dangling him over his head, he eventually loses interest, and returns to his cave in obvious defeat. Majestic horse-bro now safe, I continue to follow my silent giraffe friend further.
Image courtesy Pixel Reef
Environmental surprises lay ahead that push me forward at a faster clip. A shallow lake filled with more idle horse creatures suddenly drains into a deep sinkhole, and within the blink of an eye an otherworldly tempest erupts from its basin, carrying with it chunks of earth, all of them in the shape of numbers. Rushing for cover, I zap down an adjacent pathway to find my giraffe standing near the mouth of a cave. In a last act of kindness, he drags a large boulder to seal me in. Demo over.
Besides a few guiding words from Chahi, who was seated beside me on the busy expo floor, the entire demo was non-verbal, both spoken or written. Taking off the headset, he tells me that the game’s narrative will continue to unfold like this, presenting the player with a linear path that’s studded with different creatures ranging from brash predators to springy little mammals made of ribbon. It’s not an open world, although clever art direction might make you think otherwise, as your attention is cleverly tickled to push you forward.
Although I left Pixel Reef’s booth feeling a little less perplexed at what Paper Beast really is, I still have some question that only a full playthrough will answer. Whatever the case, I was clearly charmed by the studio’s ability to not only deliver impressive and varied environments, but also loads of novelty that truly made me feel like I’d been transported into the living dreamworld that emerged from the dust of big data.
Paper Beast is set to arrive exclusively on PSVR sometime in 2019, with the possibility of a flatscreen version coming at some point post-launch.
It’s been a long, long road for Golem, the upcoming PSVR exclusive title that’s been in development since even before Sony’s VR headset launched in 2016. After several major delays, Golem is finally due to launch, albeit a little later than previously planned.
Update (November 14th, 2019): It seems Highwire Games has again shifted the digital launch schedule for Golem; it’s now set to release digitally world-wide tomorrow, November 15th, which comes along with a physical launch in Europe. The physical North American release is still slated for November 22nd.
To kick things off right, the studio released a fresh trailer, which you’ll find linked above and also at the bottom of this article.
Update (November 1st, 2019): Highwire Games announced that Golem will see a slight delay, and won’t be launching on November 8th as previously planned.
Golem is now slated to launch beginning November 15th 2019, starting with a physical European release. The game will then launch digitally worldwide on November 19th and be followed by a North American physical release on November 22nd.
Original Article (August 20th, 2019): Golem started developed way back in 2015 by Highwire Games, a newly formed indie studio consisting of former Bungie veterans Marty O’Donnell and Jaime Griesemer, alongside a handful of other experienced game makers.
The intriguing title promises to let players explore a unique fantasy world at vastly different scales by possessing avatars from mouse-sized dolls all the way to giant stone golems. The game had an initial release date of March 13th, 2018, which was then delayed to March 16th just before the launch. That three day delay eventually spiralled into an indefinite postponement of the title which has drifted on for nearly one and a half years.
After mostly silence from the studio in the preceding months, Highwire Games today announced that Golem will launch this Fall, though a specific release date has not been set.
Image courtesy Highwire GamesImage courtesy Highwire Games
Perp Games will release physical copy of the game in Europe and North America. The physical release will include a downloadable version of the album ‘Echoes of the First Dream’, the musical prequel to the game by Highwire’s Marty O’Donnell, the famed composer of the Halo and Destiny soundtracks.
In today’s release date announcement, the studio offered a brief summary of what players can expect from Golem:
In Golem you take on the role of Twine, an adventurous kid who has been left critically injured by a serious accident. While you can’t leave your bed, you develop an extraordinary ability to create and control large stone golems and see the world through their eyes.
You can use your golems to explore an enormous abandoned city, collecting treasure and artefacts, while unravelling a deeper mystery and discovering the connection between the city and your family. Designed from the ground up for VR, the game also has an innovative free movement control scheme and intense one-to-one melee combat that sees you feint, block, and counter-attack your enemies.
In the release date announcement, Highwire didn’t speak much about the delays beyond saying that the studio has “spent time refining and polishing the experience to the highest possible standard.”
“It’s so gratifying to see our original vision for Golem come together into a full experience. We’ve really had to push ourselves and the technology, but I think the game is beautiful and I can’t wait for everyone to be able to play it,” said Jaime Griesemer, Creative Director at Highwire. “And we’re pretty old school, so it won’t feel ‘finished’ for us until we see it on store shelves.”
Image courtesy Highwire Games
When we spoke with the studio about the delays last August, Highwire said that the game was mostly complete, and that the remaining work was “almost entirely optimization,” though given how the delay has lingered other roadblocks may have arisen.
Characterizing the game’s environment design, a spokesperson at the time told us that Golem is “closest to [something like] Dark Souls in terms of structure. Not wide open terrain or totally free navigation, but a single large interconnected environment to explore.” That structure, the spokesperson said, led to challenges with level streaming—seamlessly loading parts of the game’s large environments without interruption—something ostensibly made more complicated with the high performance requirements of VR.
Beyond the known world is a galaxy of infinite exploration and endless possibility. That is, of course, until you meet your end at the whim of an angry detachment of Sentinels, or breathe in too many atmospheric toxins and collapse on the surface of some backwater planet. With over “18 quintillion” procedurally-generated planets to explore, there’s heaps to see (and flee in terror from) in No Man’s Sky VR. While No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has called the new BEYOND update the ‘2.0’ version of the game, No Man’s Sky’s brand new VR support feels like ‘1.0’ in many key respects, jarringly reminding me that while the sky’s the limit for the studio, their flagship title’s initial entry into virtual reality has some serious turbulence to work through.
Developer: Hello Games Available On: Steam (Vive, Index, Rift), PlayStation Store (PSVR) Reviewed On: Rift (CV1) Release Date: August 14, 2019 Price: $60
Note: While No Man’s Sky Beyond is the title’s seventh major update in over three years, we’re focusing solely on how the VR portion of the update plays in its current state. Understanding that save progress and multiplayer gameplay are seamlessly shared with the game’s flatscreen mode and flatscreen players, this review does not reflect the experience that a player may have if/when they choose to play No Man’s Sky Beyond outside of a headset.
Gameplay
The only laws in a procedurally-generated universe are the ones you choose to follow. No Man’s Sky VR begins its descent into lawlessness by letting you choose between loading up an existing save or starting an entirely new one. You’re given four save slots, corresponding with the four modes available to choose from as a new player: ‘Normal’, ‘Survival’, ‘Permadeath’, and ‘Creative. If your PSN or Steam friends are online, you can even jump directly into a session with them from the main menu.
While ‘Normal’ is ostensibly the most popular—at least, it constitutes the definitive No Man’s Sky VR experience—there’s an entirely different experience hidden in each mode. ‘Survival’, for instance, keeps most of the core gameplay intact but challenges you with modifiers that make every action less rewarding and every potential threat more dangerous. ‘Permadeath’, which is something I’d never want to experience in a game that can rack up tens, hundreds, or thousands of hours of play, is aimed squarely at those who crave a vastly heightened feeling of urgency in the game’s exploration and combat encounters. Meanwhile, ‘Creative’ is far more permissive towards those who just want to chill out and build bases, offering invulnerability and limitless crafting supplies.
Note: The remainder of this review is based on my time in the ‘Normal’ difficulty mode, which encompasses the baseline No Man’s Sky VR experience.
Image courtesy Hello Games
Opening a new save file from scratch one, the immediacy of survival becomes clear. You are no more than a tiny speck upon the surface of a dusty planet in an unfamiliar system. Finding yourself alone without a spaceship or a weapon, surrounded by hostile atmosphere and aggressive wildlife, you quickly realize that your protective exosuit is failing and that you are going to die in short order if you don’t do something about it.
But there is hope. On the lower right corner of your helmet display, a tutorial canvas informs that you’ll survive—if you repair your scanner and fetch up a source of sodium, the naturally-occurring element that allows you to recharge your suit’s ‘Hazard Protection Unit’. Following these directions, in addition to keeping you alive, begins a series of small tasks that you’re compelled (not required) to complete as you gain familiarity with your environment, your equipment, the interface, and very shortly, your first ship.
Captured by Road to VR
No Man’s Sky VR doesn’t intently hold your hand, but it does give you pellets to follow in the form of primary missions. For the first several hours, each of the game’s systems are taught on a task-by-task basis. Unfortunately, many of these first missions aren’t telling you much more than “go here, do this” without a stronger narrative context. And since the game is so open-ended, they constitute no more than a subtle nudge for a player who wants to get out into the universe and explore sooner rather than later.
It’s an awkward juxtaposition, because there definitely is a narrative, but you won’t even come in contact with it until after completing the tutorial period, several hours into the game. In fact, the real meat of No Man’s Sky VR—the journey to the galactic core which features freighters, higher-tier solar systems, the Artemis story path, exocrafts, advanced base blueprints, and the ‘Space Anomaly’ multiplayer hub—is hidden behind the hyperdrive, which is awarded at the end of these lightly enforced, very helpful, but seemingly monotonous tutorial quests. The game certainly does teach you everything you need to know, but only if you’re patient, attentive, and willing to learn at the pace dictated by Hello Games.
Image courtesy Hello Games
As soon as you gain access to the wider universe, however, the real fun begins. Holistically, No Man’s Sky VR is hard to encapsulate because it can be so many things for so many people. There are such a great deal of systems running simultaneously that it’s difficult to keep track of what to do and where to go at any given time.
Are you interested in trading goods and lining your pockets? Each solar system has its own economy which responds to supply and demand; you can learn the best trade routes and even crash entire economies for your own benefit. Would you rather live out your juiciest intergalactic geoarchaeological fantasies? The galaxy is brimming with unmapped planets to find and scan, alien ruins to defile, and valuable treasures to dig out with the Terrain Manipulator.
And if you’re thinking about becoming a pirate, you don’t have to wait another moment. You can hunt civilian ships and loot their precious cargo, then warp away into the next system as you escape the justice of responding Sentinel authority interceptors.
As you accumulate Nanites, the game’s secondary currency that operates as a stand-in for experience points, you can buy upgrades for your Multi-Tool that let you earn more currency each time you scan a new oddity. Or you can spend those same Nanites on exosuit upgrades that keep you protected from extreme weather patterns, allowing you to explore longer without seeking shelter. If vehicle customization or bigger, better weapons are more your style, you can invest in those as well.
Image courtesy Hello Games
And those are only mere examples of what this game offers in terms of content and replayability. There’s also base-building, creature taming, undersea diving, exocraft racing, 32-person multiplayer, faction missions, bounty hunting, farming, crafting and smelting, artifact scavenging, black hole charting, frigate collecting, cave digging, punching mineral nodes to dust with your bare hands, and an entire 30 hours of story content. There’s even more to do than what I’ve listed, but the big question is how do any of these aspects feel while inside of a headset?
Immersion
I figure it’s worth examining what really ties this whole experience together: the spaceships. On the one hand, there’s a lot to be said about piloting a spaceship with a throttle and a joystick while staring out into space from the interior of your cockpit. That part is, for lack of a better term, extremely cool. And that first moment of blasting off from a planet’s surface and out into space may very possibly be memorialized as one of my favorite VR moments of all time.
As I broke atmosphere and launched into orbit, I took a moment to shut off the throttle and gaze into space. I drank in the panorama of planets casting shadows on one another, the flecks of cosmic dust hitting my ship’s exterior hull as it bumped around in the solar wind, the game’s idyllic retro-electronic synth pads harmonizing underneath it all. That was the moment that the gravitas of No Man’s Sky VR became clear to me. If I could see it in my headset, I could go to it. And nobody was going to stop me.
Other great moments followed shortly behind. My first dogfight in space was adrenaline-pulsing; slingshotting between asteroids to get the drop on an enemy ship while an ocean of stars swirled around in my peripheral vision. It was something out of a movie, though I could see how, even with consistent frame rates, dogfighting in VR may make other players sick.
My third favorite moment occurred after I’d dug a shelter out of a cave in the middle of an ice storm with the Terrain Manipulator, proudly stood in the middle of my room, watching the snowdrift blow into the cavern’s opening as light shone off the walls, in awe of what I’d created with my hands.
But No Man’s Sky’s greatest VR moments, for all they’re worth, are also why I ultimately am left so disappointed with much of how the rest of the game is presented. For every fantastic tidbit of VR immersion this title conjures up, there’s another poorly-translated relic from its flatscreen roots that mucks the entire experience. It pains me to say that the issues that have plagued No Man’s Sky since its launch: unintuitive interfaces, by-the-numbers NPC interactions, and immersion-breaking bugs—while far cleaner in the newest desktop version, they still crumble under the microscope of VR.
Too much of my time playing the VR update was spent drifting between large text boxes, busy menus, and digital cardboard NPC dialogues for me to truly absorb the grandiosity of the universe that Hello Games had laid out before me. Granted, while on foot, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was remotely controlling a player character—a human portal to a set of stats and records—rather than embodying that same character in a world that responded to me as a living being that actually existed. Which was, of course, to be expected from a port, but disappointing nonetheless.
Captured by Road to VR
Scanning different lifeforms and minerals on each planet with the Analysis Visor and the Multi-Tool is one of the core elements of gameplay in No Man’s Sky VR, but even that piece involves standing in one place, pointing at something, and holding the trigger for a few seconds. It’s an overly rudimentary form of progression even in the desktop mode, and in stark contrast to the high-impact ship commandeering experience, it’s plain unfun in VR.
It doesn’t help that your Multi-Tool, the single thing you’ll invariably rely upon the most throughout your time in No Man’s Sky (aside from your ship), is hardly more than a floating mesh in VR. It offers no recoil or additional interactivity beyond a wrist-mounted menu, from which you can point and click on an icon to toggle between mining and weapon modules, or reload if you have a weapon module equipped. It’s just about the least immersive way to introduce a ‘gun’ mechanic in a VR game, and it explicitly casts the Multi-Tool as a weightless toy. This, in turn, makes many on-foot interactions feel disconnected—reminding you once more that you’re simply touring the world rather than existing inside of it.
The HUD is locked forward, meaning that it doesn’t follow your actual view around. Thus, I found that I needed to shift or even reset the HUD location using artificial locomotion each time I swiveled my head or turned my body while on foot. I understand that this is meant to accommodate for players who prefer to keep facing forward at all times, but the lack of an option to toggle off the HUD lock is a burden if, like me, you enjoy moving around your entire physical space.
Furthermore, it’s downright annoying when you forget that the HUD is entirely behind you but the game still thinks you’re facing in its static direction. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if it didn’t have implications on gameplay, but it does. The ‘Rocket Boots’ module, an upgrade for the jetpack which is supposed to make navigating on foot much more convenient, automatically moves in the direction that your HUD is pointed. It’s activated by a quick tap of the same button that would otherwise activate the jetpack, which means that it’s easy to leap in the entirely wrong direction when you forget to reset your position or adjust to the direction of your HUD. It’s the sort of thing that jars you out of your experience if you aren’t paying attention, but even then, avoiding it altogether means remaining conscious of boring interface elements that are removed from the virtual world.
Image courtesy Hello Games
After receiving three years of new content, it’s easy to call No Man’s Sky a dense game, meaning that there’s a metric ton to do and see. Unfortunately, it’s still hard to call it a particularly deep game in any of its individual aspects. Many of its features still feel janky if not entirely thought through, despite seeing tangible improvement over the years. And it’s all the more visible in VR, where you’re literally standing inside of the world rather than watching an avatar stand in for you.
Alien encounters already felt nondescript and forgettable because each random encounter was still, ultimately, just a transaction attached to some random number generation. To this day, each random NPC interaction ultimately leads to another alien word learned or another item gained, all represented on canvas slate in the HUD or in a menu. And in VR, you’re contending with all of that in addition to having to parse through a massive text box and a blank-faced NPC character that seems to look right through you.
Image courtesy Hello Games
Even so, the droll dialogues offered by random NPCs in No Man’s Sky VR are almost always detached from your adventure, near-constantly failing to leave anything resembling a meaningful or emotional impact. But that flavor of tone deafness is to be expected when exploring a universe that flaunts itself on being ‘procedurally-generated’. Of course, the main ‘Atlas Rises’ campaign (which stars Artemis, one of the few handwritten NPCs you’ll spend some actual time getting familiar with) and the world-colliding multidimensional Space Anomaly do both offer characterization and context that is more dynamic and engaging than 99% of the other habitations you’ll experience across the galaxy. But it takes some time completing those aforementioned tutorial missions to get to them, and a new player may become bored and veer off before they reach either.
Comfort
No Man’s Sky VR does offer a few comfort options, though those are still quite limited in comparison to the broader scope and selection of comfort options available in many other modern VR games. You can choose between snap-turning or smooth-turning, teleportation or hand-tracked smooth locomotion, and you can switch comfort blinders on and off. Additionally, you don’t actually have to play with motion controllers if you prefer to play with a mouse and keyboard arrangement or a gamepad. I chose to play through 40 hours of the update with Oculus Touch controllers, all smooth locomotion, and with comfort blinders switched off. Since I don’t generally deal with any motion sickness in VR at all whatsoever, I enjoyed the experience just fine.
Unfortunately, I have thorough reason to believe that most people won’t be able to endure No Man’s Sky VR the same way that I have.
Simply put, the VR mode is, in its current rendition, far too buggy to have a consistent experience inside of. Understanding that there was a lot of game here for Hello Games to weave into virtual reality, I ran afoul of more crashes, frame-sinking performance issues (on my GTX 1070), and outright broken user interface components than I’ve ever seen while playing No Man’s Sky in desktop mode since I first began playing the game during its ‘Atlas Rises’ update in 2017.
Captured by Road to VR
Shockingly, I found game breaking bugs present inside of common user interface interactions. Attempting to open my Multi-Tool and switch to the ‘Create’ function of the Terrain Manipulator inside of a space station or inside of my freighter locked me out of further gameplay interactions until I reverted to an autosave. Meanwhile, I found myself stuck in an interaction where trying to take a new base screenshot at a planetary ‘Base Computer’ turned my camera sideways and stopped my Touch controllers from inputting anything for a full 10 seconds. Yes, my entire view in VR was inexplicably turned sideways for several seconds.
To my dismay, there were serious bugs abound throughout the rest of the game as well. Wandering into the storage container units inside of my freighter dropped me underneath the capital ship’s cargo hold to my death. There’s no longer a way to upload all scanned systems, planets, flora, fauna, or minerals all at once, adding more time spent tediously floundering about inside of menu screens. Attempting to rename anything forced me to get out of my headset and use my actual physical keyboard in the real world to so much as back out of the interaction.
My list keeps going, but I’ve made my point. There are too many technical issues to list here and delineate in a timely manner, and that alone is the massive problem that I’m driving towards. It’s not even the individual bugs that I’m bothered by. It’s that much of the time there’s a feeling of needing to wrestle with the game in order to make it ‘work’. Furthermore, contending with so many bugs in No Man’s Sky VR means spending even more time staring at text in canvas menus, restarting saves, falling through the world, completely losing track of what my avatar is doing, losing track of the camera, and otherwise having an uncomfortable experience.
Captured by Road to VR
Can these issues be fixed through subsequent updates and patches? Totally. Do I expect them to be? Knowing Hello Games’ recent history, I have faith. Even outside of VR, I appreciate many of the ‘2.0’ bits of the Beyond update. But it’s safe to say that No Man’s SkyVR, while novel and exciting in many ways, is plagued with bugs, poor optimization, and seemingly obvious design oversights that create friction and, at worst, infrequently deplete the joy of playing in a headset.
Sony, MWM Immersive, and Tequila Works today announced that their upcoming VR adventure Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son is set to launch next month, which includes support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PSVR.
The game is being billed as a VR narrative adventure which is set in the world of the 1990s classic film Groundhog Day (1993). The VR adventure is slated to launch globally on September 17th for $30.
In Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son, players dip back into the world of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania as the son of Phil Connors, the aptly named Phil Connors Junior. The game, which traps you in a time loop à la the original film, is said to include puzzles and much of the iconic (and now cartoonish) environments from the game’s namesake.
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Image courtesy Sony, MWM Immersive, Tequila Works
Image courtesy Sony, MWM Immersive, Tequila Works
Image courtesy Sony, MWM Immersive, Tequila Works
Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son will be available for pre-order on PlayStation Store, Oculus Store, Viveport, and Steam starting tomorrow, August 20th. PlayStation Plus members will be able to pre-order the game at a discounted price of $27.
For a limited time, US and Canada-based pre-orders will also include a code to download a digital copy of Groundhog Day the film.
Groundhog Day VR will be available for demo at Gamescom this week. We have feet on the ground in Cologne, Germany, so strap in for the latest in AR/VR news to come from the world’s largest gaming event.
Survios, the VR studio behind Raw Data (2017) and Creed: Rise to Glory (2018), today announced that their upcoming pirate ship battler finally has a release date; it’s slated to arrive on September 10th for most major VR headsets.
When the studio initially announced the closed beta, it wasn’t certain exactly which platforms the game would officially support. Now, the studio reveals, the game is slated to launch on September 10th for PSVR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive.
A version for Quest is also in the making, although its release date has yet to be revealed.
If you haven’t had a chance to jump into any of the game’s closed betas, check out our latest hands-on from E3 to get a taste of what the nautical battler has in store.
If you’re looking for the TL;DR though, here’s the skinny: Battlewake tosses you into a either a single player or co-op campaign filled with boss battles (massive Krakens anyone?). It also boasts multiplayer deathmatches as well, although when it comes to either co-op or multiplayer matches you’ll be piloting your own ship and controlling all manner of weapons and navigation yourself (i.e. everyone gets their own boat).
There’s plenty of opportunities to upgrade weapons, ultimates, and ship-specific stuff like defense points, health points, etc. The last bit: will it make you sick? The answer: probably not. Survios typically puts user comfort at the forefront of their games, with Battlewake being no exception. Again, for the full explanation, head over to our full hands-on piece.
Buckle up and put on your PSVR headsets, because PlayStation Plus members will be getting WipEout Omega Collection for free in August.
The game combines WipEout 2048, WipEout HD and the ‘HD Fury’ expansion, and is fully playable on PSVR. You can select any game mode, be it ‘Racebox’ or ‘Campaign’, and play the full game in VR from start to finish.
Typically retailing for $20, the intense racing game includes dozens of ships to unlock over the course of 26 tracks. As a multiplayer game, you’ll be able to race against eight players—with both online and offline capabilities.
And if you’re worried about comfort, you really shouldn’t be. When we first went hands-on with the Omega Collection in March of last year, it was clear the developers took their time to offer a number of VR-specific adjustments to keep players comfortable even while racing at breakneck speeds, taking jumps, and doing barrel rolls.
If you want to know more, and see a race in action, check out our hands-on article to find out why WipEout Omega Collection shouldn’t be missed.
Both WipEout Omega Collection and the non-VR title Sniper Elite 4 will be available to download at the PlayStation Store from August 6th until September 2nd.
As a storied franchise, Wolfenstein games serve as undeniable vehicles for kicking Nazi butt, the most recent of which have taken on alternate history narratives that place resistance fighters in the heart of a prolonged Nazi occupation. And while Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot does this with gusto, it’s hard to think that this is the Wolfenstein game VR deserves.
Developer: Arkane Studios, Machine Games Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Available On: Steam (Vive, Index, Windows VR), PlayStation Store (PSVR) Reviewed On: Vive (Rift compatibility confirmed) Release Date: July 25th, 2019 Price: $20
Note: Although not listed as a supported headset, users with Oculus Rift should have no issue playing. All controls are mapped correctly, although the in-game schematic that explains the controls shows it as a Windows VR controller.
Gameplay
You awaken to find that you’re a member of the French resistance, and you’ve infiltrated a strangely empty Nazi control point where you’re given access to some interesting and deadly tech to help liberate the streets of 1980s Nazi-occupied Paris.
If you’ve played any of the recent Wolfenstein games, you’ll recognize all three mech-machines available to the player. There’s the Panzerhund, a big dog-like tank that can lunge forward to do more damage than its face-mounted flamethrower can on its lonesome. There’s a stealth drone for hacking into computer terminals and electrocuting Nazis to dust (active camouflage helps you evade guards). And there’s the Zitadelle, a hulking bipedal affair with a machine gun, rockets and a temporary force field for when thing get hairy. Each has their special ‘panic’ move, unlimited ammo and unlimited capability to heal themselves.
Image courtesy Bethesda
Instead of scrounging for dropped supplies, lurking for rare and powerful weapons, or doting over you dwindling health, Cyberpilot is conversely a pretty low stakes game. If you die, you simply reappear at your last checkpoint without any penalty, making it feel less like a game and more like an extended cinematic experience with a few more moving parts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I tend to think that if a studio decides to go that route, it necessarily puts more pressure on the narrative to deliver where the action can’t. Cyberpilot however goes the well-trodden route of a single NPC who is pipped into your head via radio, giving you continual mission instructions and a few bits of story to go along with it.
Although voiced by a talented actress, you never get a chance to create a bond with anyone or anything, as you’re either strapped to a chair back at base or out on the streets piloting vehicles.
Image courtesy Bethesda
The game’s vehicles are impressive bits of kit, and while shooting with the Zitadelle uses one of my least favorite tropes—floating crosshairs—these sorts of abstractions are forgivable considering you’re actually piloting the mechanical beasts remotely from the safety of your pod back at base.
Much less impressive though is Cyberpilot’s insistence on presenting the player with a paint-by-numbers pathway through the game. Your hand is held at every conceivable turn: you’re instructed on how to repair each machine, do a short tutorial, go through a single mission in each vehicle (a simple game of navigating through a metaphorical one way street), and you move on to the next until you reach the end. More on that below.
The machine repair, something that precedes each mission, is more of a simple task than a puzzle per se, and requires little more thought than is necessary to open the little battery door on the back of your TV remote. On the flipside, the repair sequence gives you a good opportunity to inspect your vehicle, something you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.
Image courtesy Bethesda
In the missions themselves, there’s a good range of baddies to be found, although since you’re on a one-way trip through the level, there’s very few surprises outside of the occasional blast door that opens to reveal an enemy, or a reinforcement pod that drops out of the sky to reveal a small cadre of weakling ground troops. On normal mode, I only died once, and that was during a drone mission where a single shot can kill you. Even on the hardest game mode, you’re given ample opportunity to heal yourself between areas. Bigger baddies, such as rival Zitadellen and Panzerhunde (that’s German pluralization for you) are the hardest things you encounter here. No bosses, no one-off enemies of any kind. There are three difficulty tiers; normal, hard, and challenge.
It’s not all shooting and lighting Nazis on fire through the streets though. The stealth drone mission was by far my favorite, as your perspective is shrunken down to fit the Power Wheels-size flying vehicle. Since the stakes are slightly higher (a single shot will take you down), you have to tactically use your ten-second active camouflage to get around Nazi officers and other drones, as you’ll be quickly dispatched if you’re going around corners too recklessly. Your other motion controller acts as an input so you can hack computers. Unlike the lock-picking mechanic in Skyrim and the computer hacking mechanic in the later Fallout games, you simply need to hold one of your motion controllers in the right physical orientation to get through three locks before the computer is considered open.
Image courtesy Bethesda
Although I have my gripes, I didn’t entirely dislike my time with Cyberpilot. The game works flawlessly, and I was never left scratching my head on how to accomplish any given task. I didn’t encounter any game-breaking bugs, and when I dialed in my settings (more on that below), the game looked actually pretty darn good. If anything, you might accuse Cyberpilot of being too simple, too low stakes, and too thin in the narrative department to leave a lasting impression even an hour after you’ve finished the game. It also wasn’t Wolfenstein-enough, although I understand why they went with the cockpit motif instead of the franchise’s standard first-person shooter gameplay style. I’ll talk more about that in the Comfort section below.
My personal playsession lasted one and a half hours. While that’s on the extremely short side, even for a $20 game, what frustrated me the most wasn’t the dollar to playtime ratio calculation we all do in our heads, but that there’s genuinely a real game sitting under all of this. Stealth missions could be teased out into something more complex, more rewarding. Hacking terminals could be—again—something more complex and rewarding. Shooting could have been more of an exercise in smart tool selection, and less about jamming on the triggers until everything goes ‘bang’. Almost all of the game’s basic elements are serviceable as jumping-off points that should ideally lead to something more in-depth and meaningful—something I just didn’t find here.
Without spoiling it, the end is extremely anticlimactic, which I think might actually leave a possibility open for another Cyberpilot down the road, although there’s an equal chance that it was just an abrupt and unsatisfying ending. There’s really no telling.
Some of the best bits about Cyberpilot is the attention to detail, both visual and in some unexpected places too. I’d guess much of this was the result of clever repurposing from the franchise’s bigger budgeted sibling Youngblood. Although I refuse to believe that Nazis in an alternate timeline would be listening to a weirdly patriotic version of German New Wave, the effort to create an atmosphere that really exists outside of the dystopian bunkers and locked-down city of Nazi-occupied Paris is something you can’t help but appreciate. Although the mechs themselves don’t feel weighty, the visual aspect of their design can’t be denied.
Image courtesy Bethesda
Object interaction was par for the course, although it’s important to keep this in context; Bethesda’s VR ports like Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR present the player with gads of items you can’t pick up with your hands. Here you’re given the agency to pick up and inspect every item presented to the player in the bunker.
Performance isn’t as solid as I would have liked. Strangely enough, my rig features the exact recommended specs for the game, and even still I found there was some slight judder when settings were put on medium. In fact, all of my settings were put at low automatically to begin with, so I had to play with the various toggles (particle effects, texture quality, etc) to get some better visual clarity of it. One way of accomplishing this is by dialing forward the game’s fixed foveated rendering setting to allow my entire field of view to be rendered at max quality; the edges of where the scene is rendered at its highest quality is painfully noticeable otherwise. I would say Cyberpilot is still in need of some optimization so that more modest systems below the recommended spec can get an acceptable graphical experience without having to toggle everything to low, which is pretty blurry and unattractive.
Comfort
By default, the user is presented with hand-controlled smooth locomotion (not based on stick movement), which for many users can cause discomfort. There is a variable snap-turn available though, making it a very comfortable experience overall if you can’t handle smooth turning. I’m not a big fan of smooth locomotion, however the game’s cockpit helps you stay grounded in your near-field, something that makes racing sims and mech games one of the most comfortable genres despite fast and constant movement.
There are moments of intense forward acceleration (Panzerhund’s bum rush), but these seem to be handled well enough to be an entirely comfortable experience.
My last, and most minor gripe: as an entirely seated experience, I would have liked to see variable desk heights for the surfaces back at base, like how Owlchemy Lab treats any table in Vacation Simulator (2019)—simply readjust the table to your desired height. I live in a small apartment, and I play seated VR games at my desk. When the virtual desk is slightly lower than the physical counterpart, you can end up losing tracking as you need to put your motion controller under your actual desk to grab items. Most people won’t encounter this issue, but if you’re in a small area you may need to consider backing up and giving your office chair plenty of room.
