A Day in the Itch (#Virtual Reality)
The spurt of consumer access to virtual reality and 3D game engines has meant that anyone gifted with a motivated spirit, technical capacity, and (hopefully) creative partnerships can publish a semblance of their vision for the VR community to enjoy/“enjoy”. This means that game sharing platforms are littered with VR experiences from the weird-and-wonderful to the weird-and-f*ing-terrible. In a perfect world, all would be allowed to exist and community support will raise the best of them to notoriety while others are deemed a cute, little side-project. For the interest of perfection, I spent today rifling through the Virtual Reality tag on Itch.io to expose their relative merits, starting with…
Broomsticks VR
The criticism levied against many VR experiences is locomotion that disregards the realities of motion sickness. While the steering and grounding of the broomstick mitigates some of the effects, people sensitive to the effects cannot play Broomsticks. The mechanics of this game do carry the potential for fun and, as I shot fireballs at the broom riders ahead, I had a brief feeling of the Mario-Kart spirit promised in the description. Having grown up with 2D platform games, I often get lost in 3D environments, but the UI and visual cues were good enough in Broomsticks VR to prevent this.
Vive Nights at Freddy’s
All successful game development builds on those that came before. But another approach is to lift a popular flatscreen game entirely, recreating it for the new medium. Vive Nights at Freddy’s is faithful to the source material, mechanically and aesthetically. Like the original version, it carries the high level of tension as demonic/animatronic characters creep ever closer whenever your eyes are turned away. But unlike the original, I couldn’t get my HMD off fast enough after the first attack at the hands of Chicko the Duck, nor could I work up the nerve to try again. Fans of the genre will adore this version as the control room is well suited to VR. Let’s never forget though: VR is immersive and robot animals can be scary.
Having played the demo, one wouldn’t be sure what this game has to do with puppies, but apparently the characters became puppies in later versions. Even so, Puppy Chef Academy does excel in charm, style, and humor. The demo tasks you with preparing breakfast, giving users only one method of performing an objective but it is no less pleasant in a short experience for its simplicity. So, I chopped a bell pepper, cracked some eggs, mixed them in a bowl…ending in a full breakfast, and it was fun. In a full experience, I could see a rich narrative emerging and I would gladly continue playing with more complexity and a developed performative component.
AMS lives up to the promise of its title as players may, as an alien, repeatedly kiss another alien on their many mouths until they’re hot enough to invite you elsewhere. The alien lips light up, giving hints as to where the alien desires to be kissed. Faster kissing results in higher scores, so it contains the potential for competition amongst players. But post high school, kissing games have an uphill battle in gaining mainstream appeal. This game is, as seems to be intended, a cute, oddball experience to be tried once and never again.
This mini-experience has players growing a small variety of plants on their balcony. There isn’t a time limit or point system to speak of, so there’s no real attempt at gamifying the experience. It reminds one of the potential for cultivation-based games, but also that elevated platforms are essential to VR farming since leaning over in VR too much can be strenuous. In the end, Botanic Balcony only has players watering plants and waiting, waiting, waiting for them to grow.
Super Mario Bros VR (Walk of Motion)
Oh, nostalgia. As described by the developers, this experience is only intended to showcase platform style locomotion in VR and, that said, it looks good. But in a courtroom setting, this might be Exhibit A for why platform-style locomotion can’t be done. People often complain about the difficulties of horizontal movement in VR, but smooth vertical movement is incomparably worse. The first time I jumped, my real feet landing on the solid floor several seconds before my Mario avatar, I felt as though I’d been sucked into a vacuum. It felt so nauseatingly bad that I called over a friend to try it, seeing if it felt just as off to him. And yes, it caused him a headache that lasted hours.
This experience has the same problems with verticality as the SMB jumps but, to its credit, there is a disclaimer at the beginning. The Unbreakable Gumball does have very uncomfortable locomotion, but the highly abstract environment does somewhat tamper down the VR sickness one might experience. That said, the aesthetic of the game was pleasing and, if the controls are simplified, it could be fun to play, maybe outside VR. There is a mechanic of sticky lines that propel users in a direction that I would like to try, but couldn’t due to the complexity of the controls.
I’ll forgo any commentary on this one and just relay the facts. In Self-Portrait, you enter the mouth of a frozen corpse, following its protruding tongue into the esophagus. You wander the digestive tract as a seductive, Latin sounding narrator comments on your journey. When you reach the end, the speaker tells you that you’ve made a mistake and a dozen hardened feces beat you with nightsticks until you’re all enveloped in light.
Available in Japanese in English, this experience begins as a 2D graphic novel about a teen manga fan who is returing from a comic book store when the city is suddenly attacked by alien forces. The boy transforms into his favorite ninja superhero and you, the viewer, are thrust into the first person perspective. As the ninja, you rush through the city streets, leaping over walls (yuck!), and slicing alien creatures in half. The speed lines give players a narrowed field of view that make its Sprint-Vector-esque movement tolerable, but the jumping — like all jumping in VR — remains frustrating and uncomfortable. The Beat-Saber-like attacks against alien forces are satisfying, so this might be a good starting point for a good run and slash game using graphic novels.
This two-minute game has players standing on a carpet while they and foreign objects hurtle towards one another down a narrow canal. The players are meant to thrust forward as if fencing, but swiping blows prove to be more effective. Having the players move is also a superfluous movement since, as we know, standing still and swinging your arms in the air can be thoroughly satisfying.
Epilogue
These games are listed in no particular order, but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be Puppy Chef Academy.
Scouring the web for lesser-known VR experiences is a pure delight, no matter the quality of the experience, and I celebrate indie developers with the perseverance and nerve to put their work out there. Nearly every experience has aspects that are worth commending and replicating, or they serve to warn us against VR worst practices (like jumping), so we may not repeat their mistakes.
