Hello Puppets! VR

Frustratingly mediocre by law of averages. It's gonna need going point by point to really get that across. - 2 hour playthrough, a fourth of which spent looking at video walkthrough (the only steam guide available) because the game has a bad habit of poorly explaining what it expects from you. I know games can get grating when every 10 seconds your companion yells what you should do, but hearing a quick one-off you barely register and not having it repeat it just about as bad. I'd complain that two hours also makes it annoyingly short, but... I'm kinda glad. I couldn't bear too much more of it. And that's in big part thanks to... - Scout. Your puppet companion. Above average voice acting across the board for all characters, under average mayhaps slapdash writing. It's one thing to hear a character say an f-bomb when scared, but the frequency just lead to it coming across as a grating and boring potty mouth. It's not helped that the volume feels inconsistent. Several times have I lowered the dialog volume because this game just likes to blow my ears out. The question of Scout being likeable though, in large comes down to... - Interaction. Sometimes Scout asks a question, and you answer with a nod or a shake. Couple of things that are problematic with this. This is a VR game, you tend to look around in VR, and Scout likes to accept answers well before their question is finished. I absolutely wanted to tell Scout that we were a team, but me looking around counted as shaking my head, which then lead to Scout refusing to explain the next minigame. Oh, fun. And it happens multiple times, where I'm walking around, Scout talks, and before I can stop moving, apparently my erratic head shaking counted as an answer. ♥♥♥♥ that. No, seriously, stupid idea. We have a functional remaining hand, I could give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Why's that not good enough? Speaking of not good enough... - Movement! Yay, this game walks slow as hell! It's a spooky game, it's to be expected! But man, it really is just slooooooow. And yeah, the game failed to mention there's a sprint function, but the 4 seconds of sprint you get are VERY fast seconds. About the only fast thing in the game, really, haha. - Cookie cutter thumbstick usage. Frustratingly, just like any other cookie cutter VR game, the only walking you can do is with the thumbstick. Click it to sprint. Both of which are TERRIBLE for wear and tear on the left knuckles. Pro-tip, rebind Left A to Analog Action with X as 0 and Y as 1.0, it'll walk you forward. Then do the same with B but add another action that includes a Joy-stick click. A is walk, B is sprint. There's only the option to move in the direction of the HMD, no movement direction based on the controller, that would require competence it seems. - Sprinting becomes somewhat important at the end of the game during the escape sequence, but the stamina notwithstanding, it still is gratingly slow for a sprint. You're not going to bump into a wall with this one... Oh, speaking of which! - F***ING WALLS. Hey, do you like being flashbanged? Do you want an absolute SEA of white to just blind you while your eyes have adjusted to the dark this game likes to persistently put you in? Well fret no more! Just stuff your head into a wall and EVERYTHING, literally EVERYTHING that has a shape will turn white! The wall? White! The desks and decoration? White! The distant fog? A lighter shade of gray... It is ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS how painful this is on the eyes! Even HL:Alyx had the good sense to let the color instead be yellow. It's still not great to have a boundary system like this, but I'll take Mustard gas over this Flashbang any day of the VR week. - No seated mode. Eventually you enable a function that lets you raise yourself while you're controlling the puppet, making seated play less of an issue, but generally speaking the game is assuming you're standing up and a lot of puzzles may confuse you if you're not holding a standing point-of-view. Dumb. - The writing. As mentioned, while the VA's are acceptable, their writing is not. Scout gets grating to listen to. The antagonists can't settle on whether they want to be scary or funny, ending up at neither. Storywise, it's... It's haunted puppets, that have puppet organs, which is relevant, like... twice. The scares half the time are frustratingly cheap jumpscares, and the deaths... good grief, the deaths are just slapdash bad. First time I did, another puppeteer just walked into me and the screen turned red. Two other times, Roscoe got to me and his head and elongated neck snapped at me while the screen turned red. It didn't look great. Thankfully, the first Roscoe death skipped me past a crank puzzle (even though I could've sworn I'd beaten it). The second time, he literally wasn't nearby, I was just passed it, and was walking past some hanging corpses, and he just... snapped at me. Second later I respawned like nothing'd happened. Death feels like it has no stakes and no importance in this game. This is the sort of game you find on Early Access for 5 bucks, hoping it'll get expanded on. But it won't, it's a full release. Scout dies at the end, whoops spoilers! Loses an arm and bleeds out! Honestly, if that's all it takes to kill a puppet, then that just entirely deflates any threat puppets realistically could have. That just nails home how sloppily written this was. The end is literally just a 'walk into the light' ending. Where's my ending where I go on a talk show with my puppet, huh? Have a post-ending scene with exactly that. It would've been funny. So much so that, with some proper polish for modern usage, it might've flipped this review to a positive recommendation. As it stands though? No, not worth it. Port this to the Quest and leave it there, the standards are much lower on that platform and it doesn't seem like this game requires a lot of graphical power. Bam, prime Youtuber bait.