I think it was Yoshi who once said that VR is like "cheating" and although he's kinda right, I believe this means these walking sims are just taking their first babysteps because these are the most likely to get VR treatments. With VR however the immersion is far more easy to realize which in turn gives devs the chance to introduce certain elements more sparsely so they can really work it out properly.
#LAYERS OF FEAR SAFE CODE FULL#
This game presents another scare, another trick, another twist or turn almost every minute like you said, but I think that is necessary to maintain full immersion the moment you look up, down or hear a car drive by you feel detached from fhe experience. I do wonder if it could be too scary with a game like this for example, but there's not one "walking simulator" that wouldn't benefit immensly from being VR compatible. Mon 15th Feb think all the nay-sayers just need VR to be totally drawn in.It's an unusual but powerful effect, and something that we've never seen in a first-person game before. One nice touch here is that the protagonist walks with a kind of lop-sided gait – the result of some form of leg injury or medical issue – and this is both reflected in the cadence of his footsteps and the unorthodox way in which the camera bobs. The sound, similarly, is worthy of mention, with creaky floorboards, squeaky doors, and all of the other sound effects that you'd expect. There are some aliasing issues, too, but other visual ailments – like the overuse of chromatic aberration – appear to be down to stylistic choice. Running on the Unity engine means that it suffers from many of the same framerate issues that we mentioned in our Firewatch review, though trading the Wyoming wilderness for tight little corridors means that the performance problems aren't quite as pronounced. The restricted scope means that a painful amount of care and attention has been poured into each and every asset – it looks sublime.Īgain, it's not without its problems, though. But the title takes this budgetary concession and leverages it to its advantage, allowing you to familiarise yourself with the layout of rooms, before flipping them on their head – sometimes quite literally. That's not to say that you'll be visiting different locations: all of the events take place within the confines of a Victorian house. Some scares are understandably more impactful than others, and a handful are downright cheap, but the release rarely recycles its concepts, opting to introduce new ones with dizzying regularity. You never truly feel safe, which is the hardest thing to achieve in a horror game – and it's particularly well executed here, seeing as you can't actually die.Ĭonsidering the game has a bit more girth to it than the bite-sized P.T., we were waiting for the developer to run out of ideas, but while it does repurpose practically every cliché from the horror playbook, it subverts them just enough to feel fresh. The release may be rudimentary when it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay, but it uses the medium impressively: room layouts contort as you move the camera around, environmental details deliver key narrative accoutrements, and the title does a brilliant job of toying with your expectations to create tension.
It's a title in which you do very little – walking from room-to-room, opening drawers and cupboard doors is the extent of the interactivity here – but it's incredibly inventive, finding new ways to trick you and teach you a little more about the protagonist's schizophrenic state of mind. The game's strength, though, is pulling all of these stimuli together and sewing them into a barmy, breathless five hour short which makes no sense and total sense all at the same time.
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