Last week was E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, in which developers and hardware manufacturers unveil their upcoming products with great fanfare. As is usually the case, the vast majority of the money and creative talent seemed to be spent on the least-imaginative games, like Mafia III, which meticulously recreates New Orleans in 1968 for the purpose of allowing the player to stage mass shootings there. But there were bright spots amidst the violent masses, developers small and large who are pushing the medium forward instead of duplicating Grand Theft Auto III with higher and higher levels of realism. Here are four of the most innovative games I played at E3, none of which had “shooting people in the head” or “disemboweling corpses” as a primary game mechanic—at least not in the parts I saw.
Here They Lie
Here They Lie is a “surreal horror experience” which, more than anything else I tried at E3, shows the potential of virtual reality. The section of the game being shown to journalists had very little in the way of narrative—I’m told the complete game will be more story-driven—but there’s something about the way VR engages the limbic system that new studioTangentlemen is using very effectively. In the part I saw, the player walked through a deserted subway station, rendered in black and white. Art director Rich Smith mentioned Kubrick as an influence, but he must have meant content (animal masks, bloody floors, etc.) rather than style, because it’s impossible to create anything like Kubrick’s precise compositions in an environment where the player can move his or her head around at will.
Which doesn’t mean it’s impossible to create memorable images, because VR talks to the nervous system in a way films don’t. This means that a game like Resident Evil 7: Biohazard—store-brand Tobe Hooper instead of Kubrick—can get pretty far on jump scares alone. But what Here They Lie’s demo was going for was much more interesting: less horror movie, more actual nightmare, unease instead of terror. This begins with strange half-obeyed laws of physics: shadows on a wall that behave normally—shine the flashlight on them and they disappear—but clearly weren’t being cast by anything. This set off a sense of the uncanny that I’ve never felt in a traditional video game. And with VR, the sensation that something is happening behind you is a real one—you can actually look over your shoulder to check—so something as simple as a tunnel changing when you aren’t looking sets off a visceral shiver absent from non-VR games. And the game designers understand that the most frightening nightmares aren’t the ones that move quickly, they’re slow and inexorable. One moment in the demo—a place where the tunnel opens into a vast underground cavern, with hammerhead sharks swimming through the air far above me—made me a believer in VR’s future. The sense of space opening up above me was a real one, and that image was the most memorable thing I saw all week.
Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin
The origina Psychonauts, from 2005, has a well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest games of all time. Players took the role of Raz, a kid at a summer camp that trained psychic warriors. Raz could enter other characters’ minds, and each level had an art style that reflected their mental state, from the warped suburban landscape of a paranoid milkman to a black velvet city filled with bullfighters and luchadores. Psychonauts 2 is finally on the way thanks to crowdfunding, but Double Fine Games is also releasing Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, a VR adventure that is set in the time between the two games.
The game’s use of VR is limited; in the section I played, Raz was strapped into his seat in a private plane and didn’t leave it. I was able to look freely around at my surroundings, but one of the game’s main mechanics was using clairvoyance to see through the eyes of other characters, allowing me to look around the plane from different angles. The gameplay itself, using psychic powers to move things around, set them on fire, and so on, was pretty straightforward, but being immersed in a world of cartoonish art and even more cartoonish logic was really fun. Most promising of all, however, is that the demo showed the same sense of humor that made Psychonauts work. There’s no sense rendering a 3-D virtual roll of cartoon toilet paper if you can’t set it on fire.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew
The trailer for Star Trek: Bridge Crew, in which Star Trek alums rave over the experience of flying a VR Starfleet starship, was already very promising. But having gotten a chance to try Ubisoft’s upcoming game, it’s even more fun than it looks and was easily the most immersive game I played all week. It’s a game that would absolutely not work without virtual reality. The gameplay is, essentially, “sit in a chair pressing buttons on a touchscreen”—there’s a reason Starfleet crew used VR to escape their jobs, not reenact them—but this was the most realistic virtual environment I’ve seen. Looking down and seeing computer-animated versions of your own arms and hands moving around as you move is surprisingly natural—it just looks like you’re wearing a Starfleet uniform for some reason. (Moving your real legs and watching your virtual legs not move was disorienting.)
The key to this game is multiplayer—I played as the helmsman on the ship and was responsible for plotting courses between star systems and performing local maneuvers during battle. In practice, that simply meant moving a virtual throttle and joystick on the flight controls, keeping an eye on the viewscreen at the front of the bridge and local scanner data in front of me. (And, of course, pushing the throttle forward to warp speed.) The trick was coordinating my actions with the rest of the crew so that we could successfully complete our mission. The other players were visible on the bridge with me; we could wave at each other, as were several virtual crewmembers—one of whom died in a bridge-shaking attack from a Klingon vessel. The game involves a lot of frantic yelling and trying to follow orders as things inevitably go off the rails (at least, when I’m one of the crew). It was a spectacular amount of fun; this is the game I most look forward to playing when it’s released.
GNOG
If Star Trek: Bridge Crew is a game that only works in VR, GNOG, from KO_OP, is a game where it’s difficult to see why there’s a VR component at all. The game presents the player with a series of robot heads to repair, each of which is a point-and-click–style puzzle box. It’s a little like The Room but a million times more charming. VR allows the player to see these puzzles in 3-D but doesn’t provide much additional benefit—and indeed, the game is being released in non-VR versions for PS4 and iOS. But it doesn’t much matter that the VR is unnecessary when the game is so absorbing: The candy-colored animation and gorgeous score are absolutely marvelous.
In the level I played, I gave a boom-box–looking robot back his groove by rewiring his head. Each time I got a new section of the head to come back to life, the music added another layer of instrumentation, which added immensely to the dopamine rush of solving a puzzle. If there were a semi-legal substance that caused people to fixate on fiddling with things while really getting into music, GNOG would probably be the game those people would want to play while they used it. The interaction between the music and the puzzle boxes gives the whole experience an addictive sense of flow that games rarely achieve.
