Brow Beat

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes May Turn VR’s Biggest Disadvantage Into a Strength

Sony is releasing its PlayStation VR device on October 13, and virtual reality experiences will no longer be the sole domain of users with fat wallets and slick PCs. (Not counting television/monitor costs, this guide from Polygon suggests you’d need to spend about  $1,000 on a gaming computer, plus $600 minimum for the cheapest headset; a PS4 and a VR bundle clocks in at about $1,000 less.) But none of the VR manufacturers have tackled the elephant in the virtual room: people playing VR look goofy. No matter how immersive a virtual reality experience may be for the player, the reality reality experience for everyone else in the house involves a family member sitting on the couch wearing a giant plastic blindfold and headphones, craning their head around obliviously. America’s living rooms might not be prepared.

But Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, from Steel Crate Games (which has been available since 2015 for other VR platforms) seems like it performs a smart bit of jujitsu on the goof factor. The game, which has to be played by more than one person, simulates defusing bombs, and half the fun is having a VR player, blind to the outside world, looking silly on the couch next to you. The other players attempt to walk the VR player through the bomb defusal process, following an incredibly complicated manual (sample instruction: “If the button is blue and the button says ‘Abort,’ hold the button and refer to ‘Releasing a held button’). The player in the VR headset can’t see the manual, the other people in the room can’t see the bomb, and the timer’s counting down.

The trailer shows how this works—frantic yelling, mostly—and, with its cuts between super-low-budget “cinematic” shots and the reality of three people sitting on a suburban couch, inadvertently shows that half the fun is the vast gulf between the VR player’s experience and the experience of everyone else in the room. Visiting strange new worlds—while cutting yourself off from your surroundings completely—will be cool, no doubt. But trying to communicate complicated instructions to someone in a silly-looking VR helmet while they pretend to defuse a bomb you can’t see? That’s gonna be hilarious.