Played v1.02 on the Rift (no official support but mostly worked).
Summary:
- An OK starter VR experience marred by interaction issues and lack of cues
- A very short (< 1 hr) experience vaguely similar to M.I.A.
Observations:
- Now that games suddenly have freely interacting "bodies" instead of decade+ standard controller expectations, devs need to really consider physicality as if they were making actual objects.
- I suggest every VR dev go read something like Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things"
- Spending longer reviewing the game than playing it...
Pros:
- Decent atmosphere
- Puzzles provide a "reason" for basic VR interactions like pickup/pull, smash/throw, inventory, and bow
- Animal companions having stronger emotional impact in VR than pancake games
-- BUT, add some interactions. A human instinctively reaches out to pet or scratch their animals.
Cons:
- I assume this was intentional but the 2 voice overs are so distorted I could barely make out 10% of what was said.
-- "you'll meet interesting individuals" implies way more than a couple of 2 sentence VOX
- "In this short adventure game" ... "explore a strange world"
-- Another over-promise. 3 small "rooms" is hardly exploring.
- movement is too limited
-- adding at least of fixed 90 degree rotate would really help. Was constantly craning around and jumping back and forth trying to get the right distance and angle for iteration
- I (and from some videos, others), flailed around too much.
[spoiler]
-- picking up and turning screwdriver and picking the lock
--- I somehow opened the chest w/o undoing the chains but couldn't get the treats and had to look online as to how that was supposed to work.
--- Lots of games let you smash or throw a couple items to no real point other than presence. There were a LOT of pots and this felt like that. Had to go online to find that one pot mattered.
--- And again to figure out the turning the screwdriver trick. The picking vs just unlocking was too subtle and needing a cue about the type of interaction.
-- With both audio and visual distraction, didn't see the blue house/etc pieces for several minutes. This was a quite arbitrary interaction with no real mechanical/physical framing for why this puzzle did anything.
[/spoiler]
-- dog doesn't follow which means a long wait when you realize you need him
-- VR adventure games provide far more points for attempted interaction than a traditional point and click, and "cost" the player far more effort. Therefor the interactions need to be much smoother and more natural to compensate. In this type of game, I want to think things through with my mind not play Twister.
- Some minor annoyances on (unsupported) Rift, see discussion entry.
