Fire Escape

[h1]Experienced on the Oculus Rift. Spoiler Free Review.[/h1] You can watch my review here: https://youtu.be/iZr5nyI8fxA This is a 1 hour long, mostly cinematic experience running on the Unity Engine. You're basically a voyeur on the fire escape of the adjacent building where you observe the drama unfold in front of you. You can zoom in with your smart phone to pay close attention to the action in a particular apartment window open for viewing. The interactions are of the point and click variety. You select which apartment you want to snoop on and then at times you can also select which reaction you want to convey to the question being asked of you through the use of emojis. There's a whole cast of suspicious characters, but you can't snoop on everybody at the same time. So there is replayability to see which important scenes you missed play out to get a more thorough view of the story. You can easily go back to the menu to play out the scenes again for the particular time frame or you can just continue to the next time frame. You can also pause or unpause the action. I did not like how the game automatically pauses several times in a row within a short time period for you at times. I hope that gets patched and is my biggest complaint about the game. The episodes are set out in 3 chapters. The voice acting is pretty good and I was surprised to find out that ASMR Sweetie is actually ASMR Darling and she did a great job of playing herself. She was the highlight of the cast of characters and the sound mix was done well. However, the graphics are a bit outdated and it was annoying to see clipping from some of the characters as they moved around. The lighting was also poor. I enjoyed the game. It's a good mystery and I'm still not sure who the culprit was. The writing was excellent overall and there's just this guilty pleasure of watching & listening in on private conversations. I actually got 10% off the price because I owned 1979 Revolution: Black Friday (which I also enjoyed). I think I got my money's worth. it's better than most of the VR games of this type. [b]Rate 7.5/10. I'm not sure if you can get different endings. I will have to make some different choices to see if they impact the story at all. [/b] [i]p.s. Game does NOT work on Windows Mixed Reality[/i]

Real ASMR AND a Murder Mystery story??! ...Hell Ya!! The game 'seems' short here. But the point IS to have us replay it a few times over and again! Contrary to a Netflix or TV series, where what you saw is what you saw and then have to rely on your friends to maybe learn about a different angle or new perspective to the intrigue. Here you control the camera. And exactly because you can't see all the action all at once, you have to re-watch it from a different angle each time to fully get all that's going-on out there (and gain Achievements in the process)! In my opinion, this is brilliant and makes it a much more immersive experience than just watching TV! Therefore, if in doubts due to the many mixed reviews, don't run for the closest 'Fire Escape'. And instead, choose to enjoy all the action of this dramatic night, from your vantage point of view at the top of a building filled with weirdos. What could go wrong? ....Right?!! ;)

Interesting idea for game play- you view into different apartment windows to try and decipher a who done it murder mystery. But the execution was way to passive. You play no role in the story other than as an observer, and the reveal isnt based on any action from your side. This felt like a demo for a game play function more than a true stand alone game.

A good whos done it murder mystery game in VR or Non-VR. I played in VR using my Htc Vive, the game is played through 3 chapters which are time stamped so if you miss any thing you can go back to, i did 1 play through of all the chapters i enjoyed it very much the graphics, in which i mean the charater models are nothing to shout about but not to bad, the story line is good, the voice actors are amazing, so all in all i would recommend this game, there is a bug which paused the game not a lot but its annoying, so i hope they patch that but its not game breaking as you can just unpause, i do wish you could rewind the action, maybe that could be added, so my score is 7/10 if the bug is fixed 8/10.

Really on the fence about this one. On the one hand, its an interesting take on story telling. On the other, there's really not much to do in this 'game'. The game's major gimmick is that you can choose who's apartment's to focus on, and thus you're not going to get all of the story at once. You can go back at checkpoints to get the other apartments stories. At the very start of the game, and through many later parts, you are forced to list to the 'whisper girl'. It is extremely annoying, and I almost closed the game and refunded about 10 minutes in. It really has no point, and seems to be there for 'weird for the sake of weird'. The story itself is ok. Kind of a cliche setup for the murder that you can tell what's going to happen in the first few minutes. The graphics are ok but not great. The voice acting is great. As I said, on the fence. As far as thumbs up or down, the whisper girl is going to be the straw that turns my thumb down.

Fire Escape is basically divided into 3 "episodes" that are further segmented into parts of a couple of minutes each. As such, the whole thing takes about an hour to play out, give or take. There is no actual gameplay element to this, and you just watch and listen as the events unfold. I was expeting to take part in solving an interactive mystery, but this is not that. Add to that a slew of unlikable characters [i](If I had to sit through one more forced, unskippable "conversation" with that annoying, whispering sh**bird....)[/i] and yeah, it's not even enjoyable to watch. The voice acting is mostly good ([i]except for the aformentioned whispering "asmr"-idiot[/i]) and the "game" runs well enough. My hardware specs are in my profile for reference, but Fire Escape is so undemanding that it's hardly even relevant.

Unfortunately have to leave a negative review. The game just refuses to respond to my controllers, despite multiple reboots, restarts, tweaks, and other things, and the dev has not responded to me about the issue. It loads up OK but no controls so can't play it at all, which is a shame because I think I would enjoy it a lot. Note I also tried to use KB+M but it wouldn't respond to those either, at least not in VR (which sort of makes sense). I have no interest in playing it without the VR headset though, nor having to unplug it to launch the game in not-VR.

Perhaps get this game on sale if you really must. It's not a well written story. The gimmick of the game is being a voyeur, who is watching people as they live in their apartments across his alley. How he is hearing these people, I have no idea. Unfortunately, this isn't much more thrilling than an old ViewMaster. All you do is watch, with very little action being taken by you. A few phone calls. The game presents elements and then abandons them to the ether, to push forward a story that is rushing towards a non-ending. You are presented with possible supernatural elements that end up being... I cannot remember what that ended up being. You are presented with ASMR Sweetie (ASMR Darling of YouTube) having some bizarre "Into it" aspect of your character's voyeurism, but not elaboration. You even have a murder mystery that basically amounts to nothing. That is this game's greatest flaw. Everything you see amounts to nothing. You're either going to see the very obvious "twist" that the game is going for, or you'll pay attention to the wrong conversations, and end up not piecing anything together. It would be very easy for someone to miss vital story information every single time during this, by switching to another window at just the wrong moment. Unfortunately, either way, this twist leads to a very passively observed ending that feels like the end of a first chapter of a longer game. Even if given a sequel, it wouldn't be worth paying the money for only one other 60 minute completely passive experience. My advice is to just get Bigscreen and watch a proper movie in VR. You'll get nearly the same experience but a (likely) better story.

Immersive storytelling experience. Played in VR (Index) and enjoyed the narrative, great voice acting too.

(Vive) Я не могу с чистой совестью рекомендовать эту криминальную историю. Там нет субтитров. Понятно, что при такой насыщенности они бы заняли полэкрана. Но текстовую версию диалогов выложить просто необходимо. С языками у меня хорошо. Я понимаю, о чем примерно мотивирущая кассета на испанском, это важно и бросает тень на персонажа. Но когда в английских диалогах встречаются фразы типа "тупые 311 жалобы", то для поиска я должна хотя бы понимать, что речь о NYC. Или должна знать жаргон и с лету понять, что человек привлекался - но давно, в юности. Заниматься этой и подобными расшифровками на такой скорости - мало удовольствия. Пригодится разве что в качестве учебника. Но без ответов :)