Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) is finally here, launching today on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. And yes, it’s all the wonderful weirdness of the show mixed in with some seriously fun object interaction courtesy of the game’s spiritual predecessor, Job Simulator (2016).
Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality was created by Owlchemy Labs and Adult Swim Games. Voiced by show creator Justin Roiland, the VR game is everything Rick and Morty fans need to calm their nerves before the rest of season 3 comes out later this summer.
*insert ‘blaze 4/20’ joke here*
If you’re looking for an extended look at the game or more information, check out our full review here to find out why we gave it a 9/10.
Making a video game based upon another mediums franchise can be filled with pitfalls. More often than not the final product never lives up to the expectations of fans, either deviating from the core material or just a haphazard job that’s been rushed out to cash in. Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty has built up a strong fan base from its first two seasons and all eyes will be on developer Owlchemy Labs with the launch of Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Has it been worth it, yes it certainly has.
Owlchemy Labs has taken Rick and Morty and combined it with the gameplay style of studio’s popular VR experience Job Simulator, fleshing the idea out with an original storyline and masses of interactivity. Straight from the off there’s stuff to play with before even getting into the main game itself, and once you’re tuned into the simple control mechanics it’s easy to just while away several hours playing with all the random items in Rick’s garage.
Everything revolves around this one location, while it may not look like much there are objects hidden everywhere, and playing through the campaign will help you work out what’s what. Fans of the cartoon series will be instantly at home here, finding all sorts of nods to their favourite episodes. The entire experience does feel like its built purely by fans for the fans, so if you enjoy the franchise then you’ll have a massive grin from start to end. That’s not to say those who’ve never seen the cartoon won’t appreciate the title, but they’ll certainly miss a lot of the in jokes.
Naturally, comedy plays a big part. All the voices are performed by the original cast, and the humour and cutting wit of the cartoon is there, expertly drawing you in so that you are now part of another wacky scheme. As such this isn’t a video game for kids, there’s plenty of swearing throughout.
Such is the polish of Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality that you may not realise how much time you’ve actually spent within the the title. The core story is split into nine sections with a freeplay mode opening up at the end. The first playthough should last a couple of hours or so, but it can feel much shorter due to the level of immersion. As a single-player experience there’s always the worry of replayability, a campaign can only be enjoyed so many times if there’s no variation. Thankfully Owlchemy Labs has thought of this adding plenty of little touches that’ll keep players coming back for more (without spoiling too much, the game within a game Troy is worth going back to).
If you enjoy this style of interactive VR experience then you’ll appreciate Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality even if you’ve not seen the cartoon, there’s even sections catering to first-person shooter (FPS) fans. Really though this is a video game for those that love Rick and Morty, and quite frankly that’s no bad thing. Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality is a madcap, fun filled adventure from start to finish, perfectly suiting VR’s qualities, it should not be missed.
You’re dying for season 3 of Rick and Morty (2013) to come out, and the release of episode 1 on April Fool’s Day isn’t helping. You’ve got a fever that only the drunken ramblings of the genius Rick Sanchez and his level-headed, albeit hopelessly outmatched grandson Morty Smith can cure. The good news: Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) is here to fill the void in your meaningless existence. The less good news: it’s basically Job Simulator (2016)expertly grafted to an episode of Rick and Morty. And you know what? Th-th-th*ugghhb*at’s just fine by me, Jack. Don’t know why I’m calling you Jack all of a sudden. Let’s just get on with the review.
Developer: Owlchemy Labs Publisher:Adult Swim Games Available On: Steam (HTC Vive, Oculus Touch), Home (Oculus Touch) Reviewed On: HTC Vive, Oculus Touch Release Date: April 20, 2017
Gameplay
In Owlchemy Lab’s new Rick and Morty VR game, you’re lower than the low. Not only are you a Morty, but you’re a Morty-clone who has less purpose (and respect) in life than a butter-fetching robot. The only thing that might be construed as a lower being on the totem pole of galactic intelligence in the game is a Mr. Meeseeks, cleverly renamed Mr. You-seeks for the purpose of the game, of which you have in infinite supply. But all he does is mirror your movements, letting you pick up objects that go out of your teleportation range, making you basically the lowest life form in the entire multiverse.
image courtesy Adult Swim Games
It all starts one day when Rick, in his infinite wisdom, conjures you up to do the simple task of cleaning his clothes. Open the washer, pop in the suds and dirty clothes, hit a button, and you’re done. Game over. But not quite. From there you take on grander tasks, like retrieving “important parts” (for his spaceship), fixing the toilet, drinking gasoline—you know, menial Morty-tasks that need doing while the real Morty goes with Rick on actual adventures.
I genuinely started to feel jealous of my namesake as he flies away on Rick’s space ship, or hops through portals while I’m stuck in the Smith’s garage charging micro-verse batteries, ordering parts online to fix more “important things”, or feeding an alien laxatives. If you can get over the fact that you’ll never truly have that free-wheeling Rick and Morty adventure so tantalizingly close to your grasp, and that you will invariably be the butt of every joke, you’ll begin to see the game for what it is: a true glimpse into the Rick and Morty universe, one that’s masterfully stitched into Job Simulator’s object interaction.
image courtesy Adult Swim Games
Even though your tasks are essentially meaningless—and believe me, there’s plenty of plumbus-bopping and bottle-smashing—the patently absurd story arch playing out before you really makes you feel like you’re in an episode of the show, albeit a subplot to a grander adventure waiting behind Rick’s portal. In unmistakable Rick-like fashion though, eventually the old man’s machinations are revealed, giving the inane object bashing that much more importance and authenticity.
Easter eggs are also everywhere, with 13 collectible mix tapes featuring silly songs and ramblings from the show’s characters. The fictional VR game Roy: A Life Well Lived, made famous in the episode Mortynight Run (2015) in Season 2, also makes an appearance in the guise of a knockoff called TROY complete with cardboard cut-outs to give it that cheap-o feel.
image courtesy Adult Swim Games
Rick’s sci-fi ‘combining machine’ alone will keep you mixing and matching in efforts to create the weirdest object combination (think growth hormone + plumbus). I played through with minimal faffing and completed the main story in a little over 2 hours, but if you’re hunting for every last one of the game’s Easter eggs, it could take you much longer.
Immersion
The brilliance of the Rick and Morty TV show is how it reaches through your television and grabs you by the ears, sometimes directly by breaking the 4th wall, but often times by disarming you with absurdity while delivering powerful messages on mortality, loss—you know, the human condition. The VR game is all of this and more. You only need a few minutes in Purgatory after your first death, listening to the devil’s secretary tell you about why you shouldn’t reanimate back into the game to see what I mean.
From Rick’s lovingly recreated garage-lab, to all of the interactive items ripped straight from the show (including low poly 3D versions of Rick, Morty and Summer), there’s a feeling of familiarity that fans will definitely click with. But there’s something more insidious lurking in Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality though.
image courtesy Adult Swim Games
The show’s characters get in your head in VR in a way the TV show just can’t. Because you’re physically in front of the almighty Rick (voiced by show creator Justin Roiland) you can’t help but seek his approval, if only so he doesn’t dismiss you as just another stupid Morty-clone. You begin to wear Morty’s persona, the sycophant grandchild who just wants to please his ultimately powerful grandfather. If you do a job right the first time, you might get a backhanded compliment like “Hey, it looks like this Morty-clone isn’t a complete pile of flaming garbage afterall.”
And that’s when I started understanding something about the game: you just aren’t good enough to go on a real adventure with Rick. Hell, the real Morty barely is. Sure, there are action sequences with the promise of multiple deaths around the corner, but these are remarkably few in number, and stink of Rick’s characteristic manipulation. It isn’t a real adventure at all. And yet somehow, all of this is okay given the absurdity of both Job Simulator and the show itself.
getting instructions from Rick via wristwatch, image captured by Road to VR
All of this is done in a beautifully rendered environment that easily mashes up with the show’s hand-drawn feel. It’s like living in your favorite cartoon (if Rick and Morty is your favorite cartoon, that is).
Comfort
Getting to the nitty-gritty, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality offers many of the same features of Job Simulator, including its ‘smaller person’ mode that lets you scale down the size of your environment to let you access things easier. Despite this, the game is very much a standing experience that requires at least 2m x 1.5m (about 6.5 feet x 5 feet). Object interaction is the exactly the same as Job Simulator; bottles have poppable corks, and jars have screwable tops, i.e. almost everything is interactive and articulated enough to seem plausibly real.
There are three nodes you can teleport to, all of them inside the garage. This makes it an ultimately very comfortable experience, one that requires little explaining to master (even a 6-year old can do it).
Strangely enough, the Oculus Rift version doesn’t offer any form of ‘comfort-mode’ snap-turn for people with only a two-sensor set-up, which considering the 360 nature of the game may initially sound like a no-go for anyone without at least 3 sensors. Despite this, I found most interactions to be forward-facing, so I didn’t have to deal with Touch tracking issues all that often. The HTC Vive’s standard Lighthouse tracking predictably handles all room-scale interactions with ease.
Check out the first 10 minutes of gameplay to get a better idea of just what Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality has to offer.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
Rick and Morty are finally making their way to VR in Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Coming to HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets on Steam and Oculus Home, you can take part in the dimension-hopping adventure starting Thursday, April 20th for for $29.99.
Created by Adult Swim Games and Owlchemy Labs, makers of the tongue-in-cheek VR game Job Simulator (2016), Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality is said to be a “fast-paced, chaotic VR adventure.” So expect plenty of puzzles and multi-dimensional missions as you, a clone of Morty, navigate and rummage through Rick’s garage and the Smith house for interactive items abound.
Road to VR‘s Michael Glombicki got a hands-on with an early version of the game, saying it’s “full of the same absurdist sci-fi humor that fans of the acclaimed Rick and Morty show know and love.”
In the game, you take control of a Morty clone, ostensibly created for the sole purpose of doing chores for Rick. The first task Rick gives you is to wash his dirty laundry by placing it in the washing machine and turning it on. It’s a very simple task, but everything about it, from placing the dirty underwear in the machine to turning the knobs, felt like a activity in Job Simulator. The reason for the similarity is that Owlchemy built the game using version 2 of their VR interaction system and so they were able reuse a lot of the same technology that powered Job Simulator.
image courtesy Adult Swim Games
Show creator and principal voice actor Justin Roiland has already published a VR experience through his newly created studio Squanchtendo that’s delivered a mix of his signature brand of bizarre and absurdity called Accounting.
Roiland has however had his eye on VR since at least late summer 2015 as he and Owlchemy Labs’ studio head Alex Schwartz (via the official Owlchemy Labs twitter) exchanged a few choice tweets discussing the possibility of collaboration.
Been up all night working on design documents for several VR video games I plan to bring to market for #HTCVive@steam_games I'm so pumped
Owlchemy Labs has developed and published over 20 games spanning desktop and mobile, including Aaaaaculus! (2011), one of the first games with Oculus DK1 support on Steam. As a launch title on HTC Vive, PSVR and Oculus Touch, the motion control-focused Job Simulator has not only garnered critical acclaim since release, but has reportedly surpassed over $3million in sales earlier this year and making it one of the most financially successful VR games to date.
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image courtesy Adult Swim Games
image courtesy Adult Swim Games
image courtesy Adult Swim Games
image courtesy Adult Swim Games
“We really believe fans are going to lose their minds at what we’ve developed,” says Owlchemy Labs CEO Alex Schwartz. “It’s been an incredible experience to develop for one of our favorite shows and see the joy on players’ faces when they get to explore Rick’s garage in VR, physically step through portals, and interact naturally with their hands in the world they’re already so familiar with. Players are interacting with the world of Rick and Morty in a way only possible in virtual reality, and they love it!”
Check back for a full hands-on with the Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality game on April 20th.
