The Riese Project

One of the most promising VR projects, with huge potential - pushing Unreal's graphics to the maximum, and tackling super interesting topic of the Project Riese (german for Giant) - set of German WW2 secret underground complexes in Polish Lower Silesia, which to this day are surrounded with secrets & mysteries. Mixed with the visuals which are probably still the best, among games developed for VR, it's a perfect combination. Originally launched Kickstarter in 2023, and even tho it didn't get funded there, it got an investor, and even released the Prologue, which was then a year later even made free, and the game got quite far in development, before the investor backed out in 2015, The Real Invented Studio got disbanded and only the one main developer remained, and faced with the choice to abandon the project, or to continue as solo developer, whilst looking for funding, he chose not to abandon his passion project, and went with the Early Access, so that gives me faith the project will get finished. I also cannot resist to say, in it's current state, that it's pretty much Art imitating life, like the actual Project Riese is quite giant set of underground complexes, yet as with visible part of iceberg above water, the discovered and known to public parts of the Project Riese are likely just a small part of what was actually built, and it is the same way with The Riese Project, the Prologue seems to be just a small part of what's already been developed... It's based on some real locations, like the Hostel Szyprówka or the pumping station, which are quite faithfully recreated, there's also some more creative liberties taken with some other locations, but it adds to gameplay. It's worth noting that content-wise, this Early Access version is pretty much same as the free Prologue, and so far contains just the Prologue, and ferry from the upcoming first chapter, but it's still worth to not miss it out, since the price will rise as more content gets added. Also I think it's just a VR project worth supporting. And it's also worth addressing my playtime, since the Prologue is something like 1-3 hours or even just like 20 minutes if you rush through it - I've been testing the game, and reporting its issues, and since the launch of the Early Access lot of them already got fixed. Few issues still remain, but I'm sure those will get fixed as well. And I cannot wait for the first chapter. Recently it got updated to latest version of Unreal, and so it finally gets really smooth performance, thanks to all the optimizations.