SVRVIVE – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

April 17, 2018

It’s Corrugated Hell in Kartong – Death by Cardboard

Scary horror videogames are great in virtual reality (VR), almost as if the technology was designed around immersing players in virtual worlds to scare them half to death. Some developers like to go full bore, jump scares galore that’ll have you hiding in the corner in no time. Or there are those that like to go more psychological, teasing something grim and nasty that’ll chew your face off in the next room yet holding back, letting players own imaginations run riot. Then of course you have the twisted minds of SVRVIVE Studios with its last offering Kartong – Death by Cardboard!, it’s just weird, scary weirdness.

Kartong Screenshot 1

You can take the title of the videogame almost literally as there will be death, just not from a measly paper cut. You’re in some nightmarish land that’s a cross between any Tim Burton movie and Alice in Wonderland, wandering around a world made of cardboard.

Each level is its own little individual maze, randomly generated and you have to make it out preferably without encountering some of the twisted inhabitants that lurk within its walls. The image above is a good little introduction to what you’ll find, teddy bears crossed with macabre mechanical parts, or how about little, almost cute looking, gnome creatures that want to hack away your ankles.

Luckily your not defenseless as you can pickup all manner of objects to defend yourself with. Hairpin crossbows, nailguns, rocket launchers, hell you can even spark a match if you think it’ll help. As you progress there a re of course more prizes instore, just as you become better equipped so do the enemies.

Kartong – Death By Cardboard! 01

As VRFocus usually does, we’ve created a little gameplay video to showcase just what Kartong – Death by Cardboard! is all about. Giving you a brief taster of a couple of levels and some of the inhabitants you’re going to come across – and run away from – as you look for a way out. Kartong – Death by Cardboard! is available now through Steam for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality headsets. Oculus Rift users will also find the title on Oculus Store.

October 18, 2017

FPS Stealth Game Kartong – Death by Cardboard! Gets an Early Access Release Date

SVRVIVE Studios, the team behind 2016 puzzle title SVRVIVE: The Deus Helix announced back in April that its next project would be slightly different, revealing a stealthy first-person shooter (FPS) called Kartong – Death by Cardboard! The team are preparing to launch their second videogame on Steam Early Access next week, 25th October.

Featuring procedurally generated levels and 15 difficulty settings, Kartong – Death by Cardboard! puts you up against evil experiments inside a miniature cardboard city. Combining the cuteness of scary toys with the charm of paper cuts, the early access build will also include six weapon options and four enemy types to begin with, teleportation and stick style movement systems, eight traps and gadgets and cross platform saves between Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

Kartong Screenshot 5

SVRVIVE Studios expects to be in early access for a couple of months, during which time it’ll continue adding content such as more weapons, traps and gadgets, enemies, improved controls, new map elements and much more.

Revealing how the project came about, Daniel Kihlgren Kallander, Lead Game Designer and Programmer at SVRVIVE Studios, said: “Kartong – Death by Cardboard! is actually the result of a game jam gone wrong, but the gameplay quickly caught on with the team and we decided to keep working on it. The game puts you inside a miniature city with procedurally generated levels, which means the city’s map will change every time you play. We’ve also added a seed system, allowing you to share your discovered city maps with friends and challenge each other.”

Kartong – Death by Cardboard! will be released via Steam Early Access for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on 25th October. For any further updates, keep reading VRFocus.

November 25, 2016

‘SVRVIVE: The Deus Helix’ Review – Can You Survive This Slog?

If I’d played SVRVIVE seven months ago with my HTC Vive fresh out of its box, me being eager to play just about anything in a roomscale environment, it might have been enough. The simple thrill of walking around in VR and being able to pick up objects with the Vive wands may well have pulled me in for the few hours this experience lasts and enthralled me, even with the often frustrating puzzle solving.

But we’re not in April anymore.

Lots of developers have done amazing things with the hardware. We’ve played online military shooters, built fantastic contraptions, met with Gnomes and Goblins, and more. The simple thrill of using the Vive headset and its controllers isn’t enough anymore, and that makes this escape room puzzler decidedly dated and shallow.

SVRVIVE starts out with promise. In its opening minutes, put simply, you die. But it’s not game over; you’re granted a second chance at life, so long as you can assemble different parts of the Deus Helix. That involves travelling to different worlds and solving a series of challenges. You’ll venture to alien worlds, thick jungles and run-down apartments, exploring every inch of every environment for clues about exactly how you’re meant to proceed.

The range of locations makes SVRVIVE a tonally strange game. In the first level, where I stepped on creaky floorboards and searched in the dark, I was convinced that this was a survival horror experience. When no scares came and in the next level I found myself in an elaborate neon city, I thought it was sci-fi. On one hand, the random locations made it fascinatingly unpredictable, as I was always guessing where I was going to go next.

But there’s also a certain drabness to the environments that make them utterly uninteresting to explore. Everything looks like it was taken from the Unity asset store, for one thing. Textures are plain and hurt what could have been some interesting art direction in some of the more imaginative environments. Despite the variety in design, it’s all lackluster and uninspired.

Sadly, those are two terms that fit the gameplay pretty well too. SVRVIVE essentially consists of walking around environments, picking up objects, and finding some use for them. It’s trial and error gameplay at its most tedious. In the first level for example, you’ll find an axe but won’t be able to cut open the vent holding the item you need, just the door to the screw driver that will unlock it. In the second you’ll find a series of strange objects that slot into holes in a wall. There’s no difference between them, it’s just a case of trying each item with each hole until they slot in place.

Making matters worse is the fact that many environments are just simply too dark. I often felt like I was just stumbling around squinting for hints, and I found progress-halting bugs that I could replicate by doing things out of the order they were meant to be completed in.

At one point, I stood for what must have been half an hour trying to replicate a musical pattern. It sounded simple but I just didn’t have any success no matter how much attention I paid to the tune. I just wasn’t having any fun.

SVRVIVE doesn’t have any ingenuity to its puzzles, it just has a lot of random obstacles that you’ll spend a long time time to solve before you progress. Perhaps there’s an audience for that type of product, but I’m willing to bet most that try their hand at SVRVIVE will leave as frustrated and bewildered as I was.

Final Score: 4/10 – Forgettable

Escape room games are relatively popular in VR, but SVRVIVE is one of the most frustrating and inessential I’ve played. With puzzles that frustrate in their obscurity, environments that are murky and joyless to explore, I can’t find a good reason that anyone would want to play this disappointing game unless the escape room concept is too appealing to ignore for your personal tastes.

Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.

Tagged with: escape room, review, svrvive, Vive

November 3, 2016

Become an I-DBUG as SVRVIVE: The Deus Helix Approaches Launch

Stockholm based virtual reality (VR) development studio SVRVIVE has begun an interesting teaser campaign for the forthcoming launch of their highly anticipated mystery puzzle videogame, SVRVIVE. HTC Vive owners are invited to apply for the position of an I-DBUG; undercover agents working in the field of genetic search.

SVRVIVE screenshot

Currently in development for the HTC Vive, a demo release in August of this year earned SVRVIVE a great deal of attention. Now, the official title of the first chapter from the final videogame has been revealed, SVRVIVE: The Deus Helix, with a release expected in the coming weeks.

SVRVIVE: The Deus Helix begins with the player being recruited by an alien agent workforce called I-DBUGS. Players will explore different dimensions of the universe and undergo challenging puzzle solving tasks in order to locate the missing pieces of the Deus Helix. The pre-launch campaign includes a job advertisement for Junior Search Agents at I-DBUGS, with the promise of more information to follow soon.

No further information, including an exact release date, is available at present. However, VRFocus will of course keep you updated with all the latest details on SVRVIVE: The Deus Helix and this interesting teaser campaign as launch approaches.