Later I got into some real combat, which involved grabbing my “heart” out of my chest and throwing it at a wave of enemies that continuously ran toward me. As I threw it, I could use my hand to steer it around as if I was using the force to control its path through the air. This let me hit multiple enemies in one toss before the heart returned to my hand, which was the key to keeping them at bay.
Later I would find some hand-to-hand combat against a gas mask-wearing zombie who would very obviously and slowly telegraph his initial attack which I could block by raising my hands and then counter with a flurry of punches before he stepped too far away and readied his next attack. One cool thing about this is that apparently the harder you swing the more damage you do (the developers also told me the combat would get more complex as the game progresses). After a few bouts of this he went further away and slowly lobbed grenades at me which I could catch and throw back. After hitting him with several grenades, he came back in close for more punishment to his face via my fists, then back to more grenade hot-potato. Eventually one of the grenades blew him near me and the game clearly indicated that I should pull the pin on the sling of grenades on his back. This finished him off once and for all.
With enemies dispatched, I teleported forth to another puzzle segment. I entered a room with padded walls (the kind you’d find yourself in if you were wearing a straight-jacket) and as I approached the door to exit the other side, it literally slid along the walls, around the room and eventually ended up on the ceiling (such visions are likely meant imply lots of hallucinating on behalf of your character).
From here a rather unintuitive puzzle ensued which involved changing gravity in the room to allow me to smash two electrical boxes on either wall, and then (for some reason) I was eventually allowed to heave a generator from the ceiling off of its mounts which crashed through the locked door. Why did the electrical boxes needed smashing if I was just going to rip the generator off it its hinges? I still don’t quite know.
It probably would have taken me quite some time to realize what I had to do at the moment, except once again I had a helpful voice in my ear from someone standing nearby (in the real world) who told me what to do.
These hints came with concerning regularity throughout my playtime; without them it feels like I would have been left not only being restricted from what seemed intuitive and obvious, but unsure of what specific thing the game wanted me to do in order to move things forward.
The sense of agency in VR is really important for immersion. If the world doesn’t behave as you expect, it can really kill the sense that you’re there. There were several times where I wanted to grab some object in the game that looked obviously interactive which ended up not being interactive at all—like when I was able to turn on a sink faucet but not grab the bar of soap sitting next to it—and times where I foresaw what the game wanted me to do, but I had to wait for a specific object to become interactive before I could activate it.
Third time’s the charm.
There were also moments where I tired to apply what I had learned earlier from the game (for instance, throwing my heart as a weapon to defeat enemies), which ended up being the wrong choice which lead to my death. I found these moments frustrating, leaving me with the feeling of interacting inside a series of scripts instead of inside a convincing world.
The game so far has not quite pulled me into it. I’m holding out hope that the story and characters I will eventually meet will provide a little immersive glue to the experience—and that starting the game from the beginning will reveal a clearer sense of how I can obey it’s restrictive protocols of interaction—but the slow combat, immersion-damaging locomotion, weak attempts at horror, and lack of agency & intuitivity left the 30 minutes I’ve played so far feeling as dull as the game’s black and white color scheme.
