Déraciné comes from FromSoftware, the studio best known in the West for its work on the Dark Souls franchise, though it’s also behind a lengtiether list of works including the Armored Core series. Déraciné is the studio’s VR debut, and it shows. While the game is technically sound, that’s just about the only thing it has going for it.

Déraciné Review Details:

Official Site

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Developer: SIE JAPAN Studio, FromSoftware
Available On: PlayStation VR (PS4, PS4 Pro) [Exclusive]
Reviewed On: PS4 Pro
Release Date: November 6th, 2018

Gameplay

Déraciné is effectively a point and click simulator that walks you through a completely scripted fantasy tale of some children who live in a boarding school. In the story, the player is a Faerie, which is an unseen ghost-like entity which exists in a realm where time stands still. What that means in practice is that the game world is generally frozen, and you’ll wander around the same boarding school most of the game but at different moments in time, occasionally finding characters frozen mid-action, clicking on them to hear their thoughts.

Déraciné is one of the finest examples yet of someone setting out to create a VR game before actually finding out what’s fun or interesting to do when you have a headset on your head and motion tracked controllers in your hands (Move controllers are required). It feels a lot like someone wrote a story and then handed it to some developers and said “make this into a VR game.”

The game’s interactions (which are effectively all of the gameplay) are woefully boring. As time is always standing still, there’s zero gameplay conflict. You will wander around each chapter looking for the frozen characters, walk up to them, find something on their person to touch (generally whatever is in their hand), and then you’ll either see a little yellow orb pop out of them (which you can touch to hear a few lines of dialogue) or occasionally the character will play a lazy animation to accompany the dialogue.

Image courtesy Sony

Alongside that, you’ll occasionally take an item from one of the characters and go place it somewhere else (a key, a lamp, a bracelet, etc) in order to progress along the entirely scripted sequence of events. In order to succeed you’ll need to make regular use of the immersion-breaking pop-up dialog boxes, as essential information about items that’s otherwise unknown to you will be hidden therein. A watch that you hold also allows you to pop up an objectives/hints list, which you will need to reference on a constant basis because the game tells you what to do even when most of the time you have no idea why you’re doing it.

Let me give you just one example of just how arbitrary the interactions and gameplay of Déraciné can be:

At one point in the game I’m wandering around the halls and come across one of the children who is carrying some boxes. I click one box and hear some dialogue. I click another box and out pops a little twisted piece of paper no larger than a Q-tip. I grab the piece of paper (because game says I can, not because any normal person would expect it to be important), and it automatically goes into my inventory. I pull it back out of my inventory and use the ‘inspect’ button to see what it is and a dialogue box pops up: ‘A twist of paper used to clean instruments… or sometimes to tickle noses.’

“Um… ok,” I think to myself.

So I go about my way wandering around the halls looking for other characters and things I can click on. After not making any progress for a while, I check my objective list which says “Why not tickle the boy’s nose with a twist of paper?”

“Um… ok,” I think to myself.

So I walk back to the boy holding the instruments, get out the nose tickler, and try to tickle his nose. Nothing seems to be happening, so I try a few different ways. Eventually the boy makes a very subtle motion like he’s about to sneeze, but doesn’t. So I think maybe I’m just doing it wrong. I keep trying. At some point I hear a noise as I’m flicking this tiny piece of paper back and forth, and I feel some rumbling, so I think maybe the game is giving me a clue that I’ve almost got it.

After maybe five whole minutes of watching this boy look like he’s about to sneeze as I tickle his nose, I think maybe the game is bugged and not triggering the action correctly. I quit and reload the scene… walk back through to the point where I get the piece of paper and continue to hone my apparently inadequate nose tickling skills. I still get the almost-sneezing animation, but no technique seems to achieve a real sneeze.

I give up in frustration and leave to see what else I can do. I find another one of the children out on the grounds playing with a dog, and above her there’s two others on the roof leaning dangerously over the edge and around a corner trying to unlock a window that’s out of reach. In order to get to them I have to go back inside another building, and then happen to stumble across an open window that was never open before. I go out the window and walk along the roof over to the two boys trying to unlock the window. I click on them to hear their dialogue, which includes a seemingly random line “Oh god, what’s wrong with my nose?”

So I grab the piece of paper from my inventory and see a small highlighted version of it placed near the one boy’s nose. I place it there and let go (I’m not even asked to do a mock tickling motion). An animation plays out where the boy sneezes and almost drops his friend off the roof.

That’s what I was supposed to do the whole time—I was supposed to know that I should take a menial item like a piece of twisted paper from one character to a completely different part of the game to try to make these kids almost fall off the roof by way of sneezing.

These are the defining and memorable moments of Déraciné. The ones where you throw your hands up and say, “REALLY?!” The ones where you wonder, “why was that the answer?” Few things are worse, especially in VR, than inhabiting a character and not understanding why they (you) are doing what you’re doing, or sometimes, even what you’re supposed to do.

But this is the essence of Déraciné, born of an inane script where the player has zero agency, and often no understanding even of the intentions or reasoning employed by the character they inhabit.

Screenshot by Road to VR

To top off Déraciné’s, ‘gameplay’, there is never a pressing moment and no risk of failing or making a wrong choice. You could take your headset off at any point throughout the game without pausing it, and nothing even could go wrong.

On paper, that isn’t a bad thing by default; after all, there’s some pretty compelling VR works out there which are designed to be more story than game. But Déraciné is trying hard to be in the game end of the spectrum, and failing spectacularly.

It’s ultimate conceit is that even if they took out the inane interactions and just had you passively watch the events unfold without being part of it, the dull story still wouldn’t be compelling on its own.

You know how they say ‘time flies when you’re having fun?’ The opposite must also be true, because Déraciné’s roughly four hours of playtime felt like double that because of how little it engages you.

Immersion & Comfort

Image courtesy Sony

The only compliment that Déraciné deserves is for its looks. The environments are fairly detailed, well lit, and consistently art directed. The characters in the game aren’t quite as well rendered, but are passable when still. The occasional animations aren’t terribly well done but at least don’t feel uncanney.

Screenshot by Road to VR

It’s when the characters start talking where things really start to grate on one’s patience. The voice acting is actually good, but the script and direction is terrible. From hearing their thoughts and dialogue, the children are entirely unbelievable as people (either as a child or an adult); it’s not clear why they want to do many of the things they do, or why they’re profoundly excited by the most menial tasks. That’s all made worse by the bumbling pace of delivery.

As you can imagine, not being able to understand the characters’ motivations, or even their perception of the world around them, makes it difficult to care about them—a surefire way to make a story and character driven game fall flat.

In the world of Déraciné, Faeries apparently move using node-based teleportation (see the videos in the Gameplay section above for a look at how it works), occasionally seeing larger nodes around points of interest which means there’s something to interact with (be it a character or an item on a table). While the environment can often be quite richly detailed—a library full of books, a classroom full of plants and drawings, a kitchen with pots and pans—it’s all for naught as you rely entirely on the game to point you to the few select items that you’re allowed to interact with; the rest is pure set dressing.

Screenshot by Road to VR

The node-based movement and snap turning is comfortable at least, and generally node’s are placed frequently enough that it doesn’t feel terribly restrictive, but it’s not very fun or immersive to rapidly node-hop from one side of the boarding school to the other to get to some objective. Nothing short of rethinking the game’s fundamental design would fix this though (even smooth locomotion wouldn’t make the chore of running around more fun). Furthermore, when you do enter into ‘interaction mode’ your snap turning changes from rotating you in place to rotating you around a circular interaction area which is clunky at best and immersion breaking at worst.

When you move from one of the game’s scenes to the next, you’ll be greeted not only with a loading screen, but also a plain old game menu asking if you want to quit or continue to the next chapter. This even happens right between the story’s few key moments and ensures, along with the essential pop-up dialogue-boxes, that the world never feels very solid or constant around you.

REVIEW OVERVIEW
Overall
3
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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • gothicvillas

    So much time and money wasted by a good developer. It seems devs didnt have a clue what makes VR a great platform.

    • Raphael

      Yes, a lot of wasted time and money.

    • Hans Wurst

      Luckily others seem to disagree because most clearly like it. UploadVR gave it an 8.

  • Raphael

    Bigger name VR developers are the most resistant to change and keeping up with VR gaming trends. Dark Souls could be brought to VR without any reductions apart from the necessity to offer anti-vomit mode teleport for those with poor spacial awareness. But instead the developers sought to create an original game that’s rather boring and mundane.

  • impurekind

    The nose tickling puzzle is kinda like the ones you’d find in old point and click adventure games, where they are often difficult to figure out using any kind of normal logic or common sense, so you usually end up just trying random various items and actions until one finally works. It’s not great puzzle design, but I guess that’s how it’s been for a long time in games like this.

    • Jozo Bazin

      It’s not like those puzzles in old adventure games. I actually wonder how reviewer could get that far in the game without understanding basic principles. The items are never used generally in the world, if you take any object to the hand and it is usable in current context, it shows up as a small highlight so it’s just not possible you actually try to use it in non-intended areas (let alone for “maybe five whole minutes”). This review is terrible and this is just one example of the reason why. Btw, the sneezing part is a joke and is optional, you are not forced to do this whith that paper, you just can.

  • jj

    Thank you for this honest review!

    • Hans Wurst

      Thankfully there are other honest reviews which rate the game quite well.

  • Graham

    Interesting – so you guys give it 3/10 but upload vr gives it 8/10. So either one of you have got it totally wrong or it’s just one of those games you either love or hate…

    • Hans Wurst

      It seems they clearly picked the wrong reviewer for this game.

      • Sky Castle

        You clearly hate honest reviews.

        • Hans Wurst

          It’s not honest, it’s unprofessional.

    • Sky Castle

      UploadVR is the sight that gave a mediocre game Damaged Core a “Near Masterpiece” score.
      That says it all..

      • MasterElwood

        Damaged Core IS a near Masterpiece! All it lacks is touch support..

        • Sky Castle

          And lacks everything else as well.

  • namekuseijin

    I think this was Miyazaki’s answer to boring gory action game addicts wanting a new From title. now you’re a fairy, take that, losers

    well, I always loved adventure games. This game is a good one, sorry

  • Lucidfeuer

    I’m sorry but this is a terrible review. In fact this is a non-review, you do not seem to know your subject (which is FPE/Narrative design)…

  • KLEEBAN KLIBAN

    Part of me wants to fight the review because it is harsh, but the rest of me knows this is exactly how I’d feel playing the game haha. The review is honestly fine. It accurately represents how a great number of people will feel when playing the game.

    It’s really up to the reader to look at how a reviewer perceives game elements and determine if the reviewer’s interests are in line with their own. This is how you find which reviewers are best for you to follow. We can’t expect people who don’t like our games not to express their opinions and provide helpful reviews to people that share their view. We need reviewers telling people why they would think this game sucks, same as we need reviewers telling other people why they would love it. If we don’t have both, something is wrong. A genre definitely shouldn’t only be reviewed by people who enjoy those types of games, because then people who won’t love a game will be misled by complete bias.

    From’s games never please everyone. People either love or hate their games. Either way I think this game is a success because, no matter my personal preference, From Software is getting experience with VR. They weren’t going to immediately know how to make a mind blowing game without ever having used the hardware. Many great developers are starting with these smaller games. I just want more developers to do exactly what From has done and make one small game just to get a taste of VR so they can then start thinking of new ideas over time, then share with Sony what they would like to see improved next gen.

  • bagwag82

    Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture would be great in VR

  • benz145

    I wasn’t looking for a puzzle game. I’ve played many purely scripted story-based games with no player agency, several of which were quite good and worth recommending. But the same genre isn’t necessarily destined to work well in VR, at least executed in the same way as its flatscreen counterparts.

    “Not fun” doesn’t mean “I didn’t get to blow stuff up or make any choices that influenced the plot;” if moving through the game world, solving small puzzles, and unravelling a plot are the core elements of the game, and all executed poorly, it adds up to “not fun.”

  • Jozo Bazin

    Sorry, but you should not review games you clearly don’t understand. If you expect shooting, running and “doing cool things in VR”, please don’t play magical (and wonderful) story-driven narrative games. And if you play them, do not review them or at least do not post your marks on metacritic. It’s perfectly ok that the game is not for you but this review is like someone reviewing soccer game and saying “no guns, strange costumes, hardly-to-get rules, overall complete nonsence, why they don’t take the ball to their hands if the task is to deliver it to the opposite side??”. That’s exactly how you sound. Stupid. Sorry.

  • KuroPansa

    Just because you can’t read/hear/see the clues that the game sends to you doesn’t mean it has bad puzzles. Even by reading your description, I understood that you decided from the start to dislike this game. I mean… the sneezing thing was quite obvious. How bad are you at video games in order to miss such subtle details leading you to the solution ?

  • Hans Wurst

    Absolutely dumbfounded by this terrible review of a really nice VR game. Pathetic review, really.