Earlier this year the Unity Labs team shared an incredible proof-of-concept mixed reality demo that shows the power of blending the real and virtual worlds together. Now the developers behind the project say you’ll be able to get your hands on the experiment on Quest sometime next year.
At Facebook Connect at the end of October, the Unity Labs team revealed Unity Slices: Table, a proof-of-concept social mixed reality app that seamlessly connects people—both local and remote—into a shared experience centered around a game board.
It’s tough to explain so let’s jump right to a video example:
Take a look at the video above. We can see two other users around the table, and then we see the view transitioning seamlessly between the passthrough view of the real world and the virtual world. But do you notice anything else interesting?
Of the two users we see, one is actually there, and the other is not. As the virtual view is wiped away in favor of the real-world view, the local player’s real body becomes visible, but the virtual player’s body remains as an avatar (because they aren’t actually there in the real room).
As Eric Provencher, one of the developers behind the project, explained in a breakdown of the demo, one goal of Unity Slices: Table is to dissolve the barrier between local and remote users by making either kind of player feel equally present in the experience.
This is why the core of the experience is built around a virtual chess board which serves as a central anchor for everyone in the scene, whether they are actually in the same room or on opposite sides of the world. Beyond bringing everyone together around a shared point in space, the chess board rests atop a real surface, which turns it into a sort of virtual touchscreen with real haptics (thanks to the real surface underneath). Everyone (local or remote) collectively ‘touches’ the same board within the same spatial frame of reference, making it too feel like a shared piece of reality.
“It took us awhile to get to a system that worked smoothly, but the moment we first hopped into a networked session with expressive avatars, and could both see and hear the other person tapping our table over the voice chat as if we were in the same room, was truly mind-blowing,” wrote Provencher. “It felt almost magical to bring this tangible part of our reality into a shared experience.”
This week Provencher affirmed that Unity Slices: Table will be released as a demo on Oculus Quest for anyone to try.
“My team is still hard at work polishing up Unity Slices: Table up for release, look for it on App lab in 2022!”
Beyond being an incredible mixed reality demo, hopefully it’ll also be a fully functional multiplayer chess app. We look forward to mixing reality ourselves next year.
One universally acknowledged truth is that if you watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy with a fan of the books, they’re going to tell you about the things in the books that didn’t make it into the movies, even in the Extended Editions. Tom Bombadil will come up, or Glorfindel, or Quickbeam (not Ghân-buri-Ghân, thank goodness). Finally, just as you round the bend on nine-plus hours of films, the book-lover will mention the Scouring of the Shire.
2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies’ 20th anniversary, and we couldn’t imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we’ll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. This is Polygon’s Year of the Ring.
Filling two entire chapters of The Return of the King, the Scouring of the Shire is one of the largest omissions Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh made from J.R.R. Tolkien’s work to their screenplays. And while fans will argue Tom Bombadil should be included because he’s fun, even if he doesn’t really have an impact on the story, the Scouring of the Shire is the opposite.
Nobody likes the Scouring of the Shire. It’s anticlimactic. It’s depressing. It complicates the themes of The Lord of the Rings, interrupting the flow of the happy homecoming we feel our heroes deserve. It’s essentially another adventure into itself, a repetition in micro of the last several hundred pages we spent reading.
And speaking from experience, when you advocate for its inclusion to a movie viewer, you sound like you have fully lost your mind. The Return of the King already has four or five different endings, why on Middle-earth would you want another one? And it’s true that it would take an enormous restructuring of Jackson’s Return of the King — and probably The Two Towers as well — to fit the Scouring into the film trilogy.
The Lord of the Rings movies still work, without the Scouring. They still captivate audiences, spreading Tolkien’s legacy farther than it ever could have gone from the books alone. And without the Scouring, the movies are fundamentally not the same story as The Lord of the Rings novel.
OK, OK, what is the Scouring of the Shire?
In Tolkien’s Return of the King, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin arrive back in the Shire to find their home and its people have been conquered, oppressed, and in some cases literally enslaved by Saruman, his lackey Wormtongue, and a small group of local humans.
The idyllic countryside of the hobbits has been marred by exploitation; the old watermill replaced with a coal-powered one belching smoke, hobbit holes destroyed so that quarries and ugly new houses could be built, fields flattened to park carts in, elder trees wantonly hacked down to their stumps — including, most devastatingly, the “party tree” that featured as the meeting site for Bilbo’s birthday in the series’ opening chapter. Cosy Bag End was taken as Saruman’s headquarters; the garden ransacked, the door marred, the rooms stinking and in disarray.
Saruman, who was stripped of his magic at Isengard but not killed, has arrived home ahead of them and wormed his way into power with political skill, corrupting what hobbits he was able to and imprisoning others. Within a day of the four’s arrival, Merry and Pippin’s new martial experience is all it takes to rouse the Shirefolk against their oppressors, resulting in the Battle of Bywater, in which hobbits kill and die to deliver their home.
Image: New Line Cinema
Frodo tries to spare Saruman’s life and orders him to exile, only for Wormtongue to finally snap under the wizard’s abuse, cut his master’s throat, and be executed by several hobbit arrows before anyone can give an order not to fire. The final ugly confrontation happens as they stand at the very door of Bag End. The Shire recovers, rebuilds, and becomes a happy place again, but it is forever changed. And a few years later, Frodo resolves that it is too painful for him to stay. So he takes a ship west from the Grey Havens.
Readers and scholars have struggled to pin specific meaning to this odd denouement since The Return of the King was published. The Scouring has been called an anti-socialist statement, an anti-fascist statement, and a satire of the bureaucracy of post-World War II England. But Tolkien, as with most attempts to say that The Lord of the Rings is “about” any specific historical moment, loudly resisted such characterizations.
“It has been supposed by some that ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ reflects the situation in England at the time when I was finishing my tale [roughly 1949-1955],” he wrote in his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. “It does not. It is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset [circa 1936], though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story without, need I say, any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever.”
The author’s sole concession to critical interpretation was that, as with the rest of the The Lord of the Rings, aspects of the Scouring were inspired by his own pain at watching urbanization encroach on the English countryside of his boyhood.
But what does the Scouring mean?
With respect to Professor Tolkien, I won’t argue that the Scouring is important because of what it says about history, but rather what it says about his hero-hobbits.
One of the most celebrated passages in The Lord of the Rings is Sam’s speech about how stories don’t end. The Scouring wraps Hobbiton and even Bag End itself up in the long tail of history; Wormtongue was the lackey of Saruman, who was the lackey of Sauron, who was the lackey of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord born at the dawn of time.
Merry and Pippin’s experiences make them the most martially qualified leaders on hand, and they proactively spearhead the armed resistance to Saruman. But the Scouring is also some of the most humanistic war-writing Tolkien produced for The Lord of the Rings — here there are hardly any “fighters” who our heroes don’t know by name. There isn’t a drop of magic involved. The author carefully enumerates the casualties of the first armed conflict in the Shire in 300 years: 30 hobbits wounded and a dozen men captured, 19 hobbits and 70 men dead.
Image: New Line Cinema
Our heroes can’t return home, because even their home has been irreversibly marred by the conflict they prevailed against — more than any other effect on The Lord of the Rings, the Scouring of the Shire absolutely destroys Frodo. Frodo’s story in Tolkien’s The Return of the King is of a character who wants some control over his destiny, and fails to find it over and over.
After struggling for so long with the burden of carrying the Ring, he ultimately fails, claiming its power for his own and forcing Gollum to wrest it from him. On the journey through Mordor, Frodo speaks of how he wishes to never carry a weapon or strike a blow again, gifting his uncle’s sword Sting to Sam. Then, in the ceremony for his honor as the heroic Ringbearer — for something he achieved, in the end, by accident — Gandalf and Sam, of all people, convince him he must wear Sting for “tonight at least.”
From the moment they realize something is very wrong in the Shire, Frodo insists that the hobbits’ liberation be accomplished without bloodshed, on any side, including absolution for Saruman, Wormtongue, their human forces, and all hobbits who colluded with them. It’s a radical mercy that mirrors Frodo’s choice to spare Gollum, one of the only completely free and unadvised (some might say selfish!) decisions he makes in the story, and ultimately the choice that led to the destruction of the Ring when his will failed.
Frodo’s post-Ring pacifism could be interpreted as a simple fatigue of war, but that feels off. Frodo was not present for any of the book’s actual battles, he did not befriend any of its tragically fallen heroes, or see firsthand the suffering in the story’s great sieges. His arc was not about fighting.
What fits more closely is that Frodo is looking for absolution and agency. He’s looking for something that he does to matter, and it never does. He couldn’t destroy the Ring, he couldn’t keep his oath to never wear a weapon, he couldn’t protect the Shire, he can’t free it without bloodshed, and he can’t even successfully show Saruman and Wormtongue the mercy he wishes for himself.
Has Peter Jackson said why they omitted the Scouring of the Shire?
Image: Universal Pictures
The special features of the Extended Edition of Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King devotes a small section just to the Scouring of the Shire. The production did film scenes of hobbits battling orcs and being clapped in chains — but to create an homage to the Scouring in a Fellowship of the Ring scene in which Frodo looks into the Mirror of Galadriel, not to play out the whole sequence.
“The reason to lose the Scouring to me was very straightforward,” Jackson says in a filmed interview for the Extended Edition, “it was one of those no-brainers.
“At the very beginning of this process, we’d identified the spine of our movies — Frodo taking the ring to Mordor — which means that the climax of our movies is Frodo destroying the Ring. We obviously have a denouement; in fact the denouement of The Return of the King is long and extensive, it’s 20 minutes, which is 20 minutes that we wanted to spend covering the damage to Frodo as a result of this journey that he’s had.”
In the film version, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin arrive home to a Shire so untouched by war that they don’t even bother explaining themselves. The War of the Ring is a secret adventure they share, in knowing looks over their half-pints at the Green Dragon, while everyone else goes wide-eyed at an especially large pumpkin. Sam gets married. Frodo monologues a bit about how hard it’s been to pick up his old life. In the very next scene, he’s in a cart with Bilbo going off to the Grey Havens.
“To get to that point and then to deviate into a completely different event and storyline,” Jackson says in a DVD special features interview, “to me felt — anticlimactic, I guess, is how I would describe it.”
In the movie, Frodo’s victory is simple and obvious: The world was saved and the Shire remains an Eden that has never truly known evil. His newfound isolation is restrictively specific; his inability to reenter hobbit society is internal to his person, and was caused by events external to the Shire. The juxtaposition of the experienced hobbit heroes with the ruddy-faced farm-people cooing over a big gourd makes Frodo’s isolation more of an “ignorance is bliss” problem.
If Hobbiton is an Eden, Frodo has eaten of the tree. His experience has made him too dark, too complex in thought to masquerade as a happy, simple hobbit anymore — and so he throws up his hands and leaves his entire society behind. If you squint, it’s the same decision he makes in the book, in the same way an abstract painting of vertical bars can resemble a photograph of a forest.
The Lord of the Rings is anything but simple
Image: New Line Cinema
We think of fantasy as a genre of basic archetypes and storyforms. The hero is born with a destiny, defeats a great and inhuman evil to restore or improve a status quo (maybe finding love along the way), and is rewarded with power, praise, and societal acceptance. We think of The Lord of the Rings as the foundational text of that genre. And the saga does have such a story: The rise of Aragorn II, High King of the Reunited Kingdom.
But no one would claim that Aragon was Tolkien’s main character. The Lord of the Rings is about a hero with a duty rather than a destiny, who struggles ingloriously to defeat an incorporeal evil that eventually fully overcomes them. A hero who has no more control over their destiny after completing their task than before or during it. In fact, the world is actually saved by a seemingly naive and disconnected choice they made oodles of time before the story’s climax.
They are discomfited by their experience rather than empowered, isolated rather than embraced. They find they can neither reenter society — because they have changed beyond restoration — nor return home — because their home has as well.
The Scouring of the Shire is the element that expands The Lord of the Rings from intricately crafted adventure fiction to timeless literary relatability. It is what separates Tolkien from his imitators, who throw a hero and a wizard and a sword and a journey together and call their Aragorn Story Lord of the Rings-inspired.
More than any other speech, or fight, or character, the Scouring of the Shire makes The Lord of the Rings a war story, in which some come home to fame, fortune, and just reward, others never truly come home at all, and both are still heroes. A story of glorious, necessary battles that, in its final chapter, shows that a thing can be glorious, necessary, celebrated, and still wrong.
With more VR headsets on that market than ever and even more upcoming, 2021 has been a huge year for VR, and an excellent time for first-timers to jump in. In this article we’ve pulled together a concise look at the best VR headsets currently available.
If you’re looking for the very best overall PC VR headset, Valve Index is our pick. It’s pricey compared to the rest, but has an excellent balance of quality, performance, and comfort. That’s why we called it “the enthusiast’s choice” in our full review of the headset.
Pros
Things to love about Index are its excellent tracking performance, wide field of view, quality controllers, great audio, and range of ergonomic adjustments that make it easy to dial in a comfortable and clear fit.
Index is one of the only headsets that offers an eye-relief adjustment. This let’s you bring the lenses as close to your eyes as comfortable, allowing you to maximize your field of view; it also makes the headset easier to adjust for glasses. Index has a physical IPD adjustment which ranges from 58mm to 70mm, making it easy to align the lenses with the width of your eyes for the sharpest visuals.
Cons
But Index isn’t perfect. Compared to other headsets on the market, the external tracking system is more work to set up, typically requiring two tracking beacons mounted on opposite corners of a room, stuck on a tripod, placed up high on a shelf, or screwed into your wall. They also need to be plugged into their own power outlets. And while Index has cameras on the front for a pass-through view, it isn’t as quick or useful as we’ve seen on other headsets. And did we mention the price tag of $1,000? You can get it cheaper though if you already have SteamVR Tracking base stations from an old Vive headset.
Valve Index Specs
Resolution
1,440 x 1,600 (2.3MP) per-eye, LCD (2x)
Refresh Rate
80Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz
Lenses
Double element Fresnel
Field-of-view
~130° diagonal
Optical Adjustments
IPD, eye-relief
IPD Adjustment Range
58–70mm
Connectors
USB 3.0, DisplayPort 1.2, 12V power
Cable Length
5m + 1m breakaway
Tracking
SteamVR Tracking 1.0 or 2.0 (external beacons)
On-board cameras
2x RGB
Input
Valve Index controllers (rechargable battery)
Audio
Off-ear headphones, 3.5mm aux output
Microphone
Dual microphone
Pass-through view
Yes
Content Compatibility
Valve Index is officially compatible with the SteamVR library where the vast majority of VR content is available. If you’re looking to play content that’s exclusive to the Oculus PC library (like Lon Echo II) you can use the free but unofficial Revive mod to play Oculus PC content on Valve Index. It may take some tweaking for performance and controller inputs, but for the most part Oculus content will play reasonably well on Index.
While Valve’s Index has great all-around performance, HP’s new Reverb G2 is the headset you want if resolution is your most important consideration. Reverb G2 should be on your radar especially if you’re thinking of picking up a VR headset for seated PC VR games like driving and flight simulators—find out why in our full review.
Pros
When it comes right down to it, G2’s defining feature is its class-leading resolution of 2,160 × 2,160, which can look downright amazing with the right content. Thanks to a collaboration between Valve and HP, G2 also borrows the excellent headphones of Valve’s Index headset and brings improved controllers compared to previous WMR headsets. Not to mention the headset has inside-out tracking which makes it easier to use thanks to no external trackers. And who can argue with it being nearly half the price of the full Valve Index kit?
Cons
Although it boasts improved controller ergonomics compared to prior WMR headsets, Reverb G2’s controller tracking still has more latency and less reliability than its peers, along with less detailed (and somewhat noisy) haptics. The controllers will get you through most games just fine, but if you plan to primarily play competitive or fast-paced games, the controllers on other headsets tend to deliver better results. As for field of view, G2 is similar to most of its peers but loses out compared to Index. The pass-through view also isn’t as useful as some other headsets because of its odd ‘flashlight’ implementation.
HP Reverb G2 Specs
Resolution
2,160 x 2,160 (4.7MP) per-eye, LCD (2x)
Refresh Rate
90Hz
Lenses
Single element Fresnel
Field-of-view
114° diagonal
Optical Adjustments
IPD
IPD Adjustment Range
60–68mm
Connectors
USB-C, DisplayPort, Power
Cable Length
6m
Tracking
Inside-out (no external beacons)
On-board cameras
4x IR
Input
Reverb G2 controllers (AA battery 2x), voice
Audio
Off-ear headphones
Microphone
Yes
Pass-through view
Yes
Content Compatibility
HP Reverb G2 works natively with the Windows Mixed Reality store, but very few VR applications are available there. Fortunately a free and official plugin from Microsoft also makes it compatible with SteamVR content. If you’re looking to play content that’s exclusive to the Oculus PC library (like Lone Echo II) you can use the free but unofficial Revive mod to play Oculus PC content on Reverb G2.
Although Quest 2 is a standalone headset (which means games run directly in the headset without plugging into a PC) it also has a feature called Oculus Link which gives you the option to run PC VR games by plugging into a PC. And if you have a modern router (Wi-Fi 5 or Wi-Fi 6), you can even do this wirelessly with the recently introduced Air Link feature.
Pros
Along with the useful passthrough feature, high resolution display, and great controllers, Quest 2 is a pretty great all-around headset. The hard-to-beat price makes it a great value, especially considering the fact that the headset also runs standalone VR games from the Meta Quest store. Meta has also consistently released software updates to improve the headset’s performance and features.
Cons
Unfortunately the cable that comes with Quest 2 isn’t long enough to work well for Oculus Link, and we can’t recommend the official cable because of its crazy $80 price tag. Thankfully you can get 26 feet worth of Oculus Link cable for $34. Or if you have a Wi-Fi 5 or Wi-Fi 6 router you can use Air Link to play PC VR games wirelessly.
Some users have reported strap failure on official Meta products, so it may also be worth looking into the cheaper third-party solutions. You’ll be sacrificing the built-in battery, but a cursory look at options on Amazon show a number of headstrap/battery solutions you may try to save a few bucks.
Without being plugged into a computer, Quest 2 can only play games from the Meta Quest library. If you plug into a computer via Oculus Link, you’ll have access to everything in the Oculus PC and SteamVR libraries as well. That means that Quest 2 is compatible with the vast majority of top VR content out there, as long as you’ve got a powerful PC to plug the headset into.
The Best Standalone VR Headsets in 2021
Standalone VR headsets are fully self-contained and don’t need to plug into anything. They generally offer high ease-of-use thanks to their all-in-one nature and lack of tether. With their low overall cost (thanks to not needing a high-end PC) standalone headsets are a great way to take your first step into VR.
Quest 2 is an upgrade over its predecessor in almost every way, though it’s worth noting that you need a Facebook account to use the headset.
Pros
With an impressive resolution, powerful Snapdragon XR2 processor, useful ‘passthrough’ view feature, and great controllers, there’s a lot to like about Quest 2. What’s more, if you ever decide to upgrade to PC-powered VR, Quest 2 can plug into your computer and be used like a PC VR headset. When it comes to overall value, no other standalone headset is in the same ballpark right now.
Cons
There’s a few things we wish were better though. As we found in our full Quest 2 review, the included soft headstrap just isn’t that comfortable, which is why we recommend the Elite Strap ($50 on Amazon) or Elite Battery Strap (bundled with a case for $130 on Amazon) accessories if you’re a serious VR user.
The hidden built-in speakers are convenient but we wish they were more powerful for better immersion (luckily there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack if you want to use your own headphones). And while Quest 2 has a pretty strong game library, since it’s a standalone headset you won’t be able to play any of the big PC VR games like Half-Life: Alyx or Asgard’s Wrath unless you have a powerful PC to plug into.
It’s worth noting that some users have reported strap failure on official Meta products, so it may also be worth looking into the cheaper third-party solutions too. You’ll be foregoing Meta’s trusty warranty by going with a rando-strap, however a cursory look at options on Amazon show a number of headstrap/battery solutions you may try to save a few bucks.
Meta Quest 2 is compatible with all content in the Meta Quest library. If you have a gaming PC (or get one in the future), you can plug it into your PC to play content in the Oculus PC library and the SteamVR library.
Yup, our value pick for standalone headset is the same as our ‘Best’ pick: Quest 2! But if you’re brand new to VR and are just looking for a taste, you can probably hold off on the Elite Strap accessory and save yourself $50 in the meantime. If you find yourself using the headset often you can always add the strap later.
See the section above for thoughts and details on Quest 2.
The Best Console VR Headsets in 2021
If you know anything about VR, you’ll already know what we’re going to say! PlayStation is the only console maker that currently supports a VR headset (sorry Xbox fans), and PlayStation VR is the only console VR headset you can use. That makes PSVR ‘the best’ console VR headset by default, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we recommend it.
Image courtesy Sony
Our Take
PSVR launched in late 2016 and was a great headset for its era, including a handful of excellent exclusive VR games that you won’t find anywhere else. However, the headset is officially past its prime in 2021 and feels ‘last generation’ in resolution, tracking, and controllers compared to what’s available elsewhere in the VR landscape.
It’s hard to recommend buying the four year old PSVR today. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find new units at reasonable prices. Bundles are typically priced at $350, but good luck finding those in-store or online anymore. Ebay has a number of pre-owned options alongside unreasonably expensive new in-the-box units, so choose wisely.
PlayStation VR is only compatible with VR content in the PlayStation store which includes a handful of excellent exclusives not available on PC like Astro Bot Rescue Mission and Blood & Truth. You can also use the headset to play non-VR PS4 content in a ‘theater mode’ through the headset, but with relatively low resolution it’s not something you’re likely to do often. The vast majority of PSVR titles are also backwards compatible with PS5.
‘Advent calendar’ of rewards unlocks through Dec. 30, with make-up days after
An “in-game Halo advent calendar” of peppermint-colored gear will be available from Tuesday until the morning of Jan. 4, during Halo Infinite multiplayer’s “Winter Contingency” event. 343 Industries has built in several make-up days to the calendar, so that folks who may be traveling and away from their consoles for the holidays may still have a chance to collect everything.
All you need to do to pick up the day’s reward is to pop into Halo Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer and complete one match of Arena or Big Team Battle. One reward will unlock per day until Dec. 30. After that, players have six more days to keep playing and catch up on any items they may have missed.
343 Industries calls their frosty armor set and weapon skin the “Peppermint Laughter” set. They’ll be supplemented with new shoulder pieces, emblems, and more. Here’s a detailed look at everything on offer:
Whether you’re off dodging lasers and defusing bombs, shooting back hordes of zombies with your friends, or just sitting down for a quiet night alone with a photogrammetric jigsaw puzzle, there’s plenty of options out there on how you to teleport yourself to another universe through the magic of virtual reality.
And as we look back at this year in VR gaming, we’re hoping to highlight those truly great games that captured our senses and fooled those squishy bits between our ears into believing we’d done something delightfully improbable.
Approaching our fifth annual Game of the Year Awards wasn’t an easy task either. It seems every year is more difficult than the last when it comes to stacking up the competition. Even in the face of worldwide disaster, the medium has continued to flourish.
This year has been all about getting back to business though, so in that spirit we present our 2021 Game of the Year Awards without further delay:
Originally slated to launch in 2020, After the Fall fell victim to the global shutdown that disrupted nearly every industry. Things looked uncertain for the four-player co-op shooter, as delays pushed launch more than two years after its E3 2019 reveal. Vertigo Games is one of the most veteran VR studios out there though, and has thankfully managed to make After the Fall totally worth the wait.
Taking plenty of cues from Valve’s Left 4 Dead (2008),After the Fall offers up intense zombie-shooting action across a good handful of bespoke levels, each of them providing ample opportunities for exploration and surprise attacks. As a four-player co-op, social play is a big part of After the Fall too. Unless you’re playing with bots—which is actually a pretty great experience on its own—you need to keep communication clear so you can heal fellow players, report where baddies are, and learn the ins and outs of each map. All of this maximizes your ability to collect points and make permanent upgrades to weapons, a big reason for coming back for more.
The studio has done well to focus on Quest 2 and PSVR, offering seamless cross-play across all supported platforms, which in turn means plenty of online user activity. Many developers targeting Quest however don’t always take the same level of care when it comes to launching on PC VR headsets, often opting to pair down the PC version as a result of shifting focus to the admittedly more profitable Quest platform. But the PC version of After the Fall feels like it’s had an uncommon level of love and devotion poured into it, making it the best gameplay experience by a long shot. That’s taking everything into account: from enemy design/animation/physics to the spatters of blood and gore that litter the impressively detailed world. It’s a visual treat.
Although we were hoping to see more enemy and map variations, nearly everything you’d want for a multi-day binge is there and then some. Still, Vertigo Games has an excellent track record of releasing DLC, with its early hit Arizona Sunshine (2016) receiving updates well into 2021, so we’re looking forward to plenty more reasons to play more in 2022 and beyond.
Translating the sort of survival games we know and love to VR is difficult. The immensity of those iconic worlds is a big bonus, but then the crafting aspect usually falls flat on its face due to the overreliance on abstracted menus. Standard 2D menus are simply unintuitive when you have two hands and you expect to use them… well… like hands. Song in the Smoke is a ground-up effort from 17-BIT that makes both the crafting experience—and the danger that lurks in the shadows—feel real.
You’ll scrape around for twine to physically wrap around a branch and stone to make an ax, or shape an arrowhead out of a small rock and affix it to an arrow shaft, replete with fletching you made earlier. You’ll keep the demons away at night by building a big fire—all of them a constant challenge you need to balance as you simultaneously tackle hunger, sleep, and health. This inward pressure of maintaining your daily tasks combined with outward conflict of fighting off prehistoric beasts makes it difficult to rest on your laurels as you push yet deeper into the game’s large-scale levels.
All of the game’s well-studied crafting depth is underpinned by an expressive art style that offers excellent visual contrast between the massive number of items and enemies you’ll encounter, something that’s extremely important when played on PSVR’s aging 960 × 1,080 per-eye display. Headset resolution woes fade into the background though, as Song in the Smoke deftly serves up a stylized visual panache and immersive two-handed crafting system via PS Move that feels reliable and impressively real.
In few words, Song in the Smoke is breathtaking, and definitely worth the tens of hours it will coax out of you.
I Expect You to Die (2016) didn’t win our Game of the Year when it released in late 2016 for one reason: we started the whole GOTY thing in 2017. If we had though, the first in the series would have been the game to beat thanks to its inventive escape room puzzles that have given it rare staying power that few VR games of the era can boast.
The good news: I Expect You to Die 2: The Spy and the Liar has more of everything, and its patented brand of spy-themed gameplay is still going strong. The sequel offers up a great depth in puzzles, impressive visual flair, and a resounding continuation of the game’s Bond-style spy intrigue.
Oftentimes it feels like there’s more ways to solve each deadly dalliance, which requires you to really fire up your critical thinking skills in short order to avoid lasers, defuse bombs, and generally foil the evil plans of Zoraxis—arguably more so than the first. And just like the first, what I Expect You to Die 2 lacks in immersive object interaction it makes up for with its varied levels packed with truly intriguing puzzles and plenty of windy plot twists that will have you questioning just who you’re working for.
With I Expect You to Die 2, Schell Games has again delivered a surprising amount of detail and depth onto more humble chipsets like Quest and PSVR, and doing it to such a level that it puts even some PC VR-only titles to shame.
Like its predecessor, Lone Echo II delivered an impressively immersive experience, and one that had an even bigger scope than the original. But how did developer Ready at Dawn manage to capture that lighting not once, but twice?
Immersion is baked into the core of Lone Echo II in two foundational ways. First is the novel zero-G locomotion where players can grab-onto and push off-of any surface in the game to propel themselves through space. After just a few minutes this becomes surprisingly natural and it’s also highly dynamic; you can give yourself just a little push to gently float from one place to another, or a hard lunge if you’re in a hurry. You can even grab onto fast moving objects in the game—like the little powered drones—to hitch a ride long distances. And if you fling yourself far out into space with nothing to grab onto, you really feel helpless out there… save for the little hand boosters which you can use to slowly get back to safety.
The other foundation is the game’s consistently high-quality hands-on interactions. Much of the game’s underlying gameplay is about grabbing things, pressing buttons, pulling levers, and plugging things into other things. All of this happens by directly manipulating things with your hands which keeps much of the game’s moment-to-moment gameplay in your ‘near-field’. This consistently engages your sense of proprioception, which in a way almost forces you to feel present in the virtual world.
Backing up these highly immersive mechanics, Lone Echo II also drops players inside and outside of a seemingly massive space station that’s there to seamlessly explore all the way from one end to another with no loading screens.
Taken all together, Lone Echo II delivers one of the most highly immersive VR experiences to date.
It’s been almost five years since the first consumer VR headsets hit the scene, but innovation into something as ostensibly simple as ‘moving around’ is still going strong. Really basic stuff like stick movement, room-scale movement, and teleporting has been more or less codified as standard methods, but developers still have the latitude to create something different if they think outside the box.
Eye of the Temple puts forth a massive temple complex filled with room-scale puzzles, which sounds a bit like par for the course when it comes to VR games. The entire locomotion scheme is based on moving platforms though that require you to physically hop aboard to move through the world—or rather let the world move around you.
The game’s platforming is baked into everything, taking you around multi-level rooms which include normal linear platforms, but also ingenuous log-rolling devices that are used tactically throughout the game to surreptitiously move you back to the center of your physical playspace. Due to the tight integration with its locomotion style, the amount of intention that went into designing the entire game is actually pretty mindboggling—especially because Rune Skovbo Johansen isn’t just a cool name for a VR studio; it’s the name of the dude who made it.
And it would all be for naught if Eye of the Temple weren’t absolutely chocked full of interesting puzzles and traps, the results of which make you feel like Indiana Jones, including bull whip, fedora, and trusty torch.
You can’t just throw VR support into a game and expect it to be a hit. Thankfully, studios seem to be waking up to this, and are starting to revive some of our favorite games from years past with a more studied eye for the whole shebang: visual appeal, attention to object interaction, and smart choices when it comes to packaging the game into a comfortable experience for VR players.
And thanks to bringing all of the above to fruition, Armature Studios has made Resident Evil 4 arguably even cooler when played from inside a VR headset than on flatscreen. You get to go hands-on with the game’s iconic weapons in a natural way as you engage in battle with probably the biggest bosses we’ve ever seen in VR. Granted, cutscenes are all presented in 2D windows, but there’s not much you can expect since the game was so heavily reliant on cinematics to drive the story.
In addition to being reworked from the ground-up to make sure textures don’t look blocky and terrible, it also includes the new first-person POV that the original game lacked when unmodded in addition to multiple locomotion styles and holstering options. All of this makes for what we’d consider an essential way to relive the glory days of Resident Evil 4.
A Rogue Escape expertly fuses the concept of an escape room with a videogame by putting you into a giant mech with convoluted controls and no manual.
The only way to figure out how everything works is by experimenting with the dizzying array of buttons, knobs, levers, and gauges around you to try to figure out what’s going on. And here’s the kicker… this mech doesn’t even have a window so you can see where you’re headed or what challenges stand in your way. You’re effectively blind inside this hulking machine and have only one objective: figure out how to use it to escape.
In time you come to learn some of the mech’s basic functionality—like how to take your first few steps forward, how to turn, how to refuel and, critically, how to understand what’s happening in the world outside of this hulking metal shell.
This is A Rogue Escape’s most genius conceit… the entire mech—all of its buttons, levers, and confusing displays—is the interface to the world outside, both how to interact with it and how you perceive it. Once you understand how everything in the cockpit works, your imagination renders the world outside of the mech… so the developer doesn’t have to!
It was a risky idea to make a room full of buttons, levers, and gauges essentially a giant, immersive interface to the broader game, but in pulling it off, A Rogue Escape delivered one of the most unique games we’ve played in VR yet.
Developer Realities.io has been working for years to bring its expert photogrammetry to VR audiences. In 2016, the studio released a series of beautiful photogrammetry scenes that wowed plenty of early VR users. But despite their beauty, simple photogrammetry tours didn’t exactly catch on.
The studio bided its time and patiently continued to explore the intersection of photogrammetry and VR. Eventually it struck upon an interesting idea. What if, instead of simply walking around photogrammetry scenes virtually, the scenes were shrunk down and sliced up like 3D puzzles?
Puzzling Places just fits brilliantly in VR and works as the perfect showcase for the great photogrammetry talent of Realities.io. Not only does the app give users puzzles that are uniquely fun to piece together in VR—each puzzle is a detailed photogrammetry scene that has been shrunk down into an adorable diorama.
And it isn’t just the unique 3D puzzling that makes Puzzling Places especially well suited to VR. The studio went above and beyond by crafting lovely ambient audio that accompanies each puzzle. As you’re building a puzzle of, say, a snowy church, occasionally you’ll hear the faint sounds of church bells ringing or snow gently falling on the ground. The serene backdrop and delicate sound design work together to transport you into a world designed for that perfect puzzling mood of zen and focus.
Note: Games eligible for Road to VR‘s Game of the Year Award must be available to the public on or before December 13th, 2021 to allow for ample deliberation. Games must also natively support the target platform as to ensure full operability.
Why it matters that the pair’s meeting is different from the books
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for The Witcher Netflix series and the novel The Blood of Elves]
The Witcher season 1 spent a great deal of time talking about the power of destiny, with Geralt and Ciri finding each other against all odds in the woods near Sodden where neither was supposed to be. Whether you’ve read the books or not, it seemed apparent that the series’ other main character, Yennefer, was also fated to meet Ciri — and in the second season they finally do, at the Temple of Melitele. Geralt has taken Ciri there to supposedly receive an education from Mother Nenneke in how to control the dangerous power she possesses. But that’s where the similarities between the adaptation and author Andrzej Sapkowski’s source material end.
The Netflix show immediately puts them at odds, with Yennefer appearing there by coincidence but secretly intending to take Ciri as a sacrifice to Voleth Meir in hopes of regaining her lost magic. It’s a big departure (both the lost magic subplot and Voleth Meir were created exclusively for the show) and it sacrifices a maternal relationship for an antagonistic one.
The Blood of Elves, the third Witcher book (and the first novel, following the two short story collections, The Last Wish and The Sword of Destiny) is largely about Geralt’s struggles in parenting. After finding Ciri in the short story, “Something More” from The Sword of Destiny, he takes her to Kaer Morhen and trains her as a Witcher. It’s not part of a grand logistical plan — that’s all he knows to do with a child. As it becomes clear that she needs more than swordsmanship, he invites the sorceress Triss Merigold to help with her magical abilities, but she too finds herself not entirely capable of tutoring Ciri. Then it’s off to the Temple of Melitele and Mother Nenneke, a priestess and herbalist. Throughout the story, Geralt realizes Ciri cannot simply slot into the role he was given as a child, and starts turning to every woman he can think of in the hopes one of them can figure out what she should be doing.
Photo: Susan Allnutt/Netflix
In the show, most of these events still happen, but with a twist: Geralt’s motivations are altered, painting him as a more highly capable father figure where the books portray him a little ignorant and bumbling, something he has to grow beyond.
Ultimately, that failure on Geralt’s part is what makes Yennefer’s first meeting with Ciri so meaningful in Blood of Elves. While the Netflix show has Yennefer hunting down Ciri, in Blood of Elves she’s invited to the Temple by Triss and Geralt. And after so many failed attempts to lead Ciri down one well trodden path after another, it’s Yennefer — a powerful and independent trailblazer in her own right — who finally connects with Ciri and helps her control her power. The book doesn’t climax with an epic battle, but rather with a child being seen and understood by an adult. Yen doesn’t talk down to Ciri and, at last, Ciri is able to see there’s a way for her to take control over who she is.
But in season 2, the moment they meet barely belongs to them. Instead it’s more about Geralt and Yennefer’s reunion, with the two exes stumbling through their first reunion in years. While this season gave Geralt and Ciri their moment of connection, Yennefer must share hers. When their defining moments aren’t shared with Geralt then they’re tied to the machinations of unseen villains or the influence of magic and destiny.
Framing the long-awaited Ciri-Yennefer meeting around action scenes, rather than two women quietly bonding over their shared difficulty in conforming to society, is frustrating. Despite the best efforts of actresses Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan to imbue the set pieces they’re inexplicably thrown into with some depth, they’re given so little to work with that it’s difficult to believe in their bond. Scenes like the one where Ciri must use her power to get them across a river, feel forced and ultimately show no bond between them. While Yennefer offers guidance it’s only when Ciri refuses to stop despite Yennefer’s protests that they are transported to the other side. In terms of the plot, Yen gets to see Ciri’s power, but it does little for their characters who have exchanged next to nothing. The emphasis is on the problem of crossing a river and Ciri’s powers, not on what these two women might find reflected in each other.
Image: Netflix
And so the changes leave both of them a little wayward: Already living with the trauma of one would-be kidnapper, barely able to sleep thanks to nightmares of being taken from Cintra by the Nilfgaardian general Cahir, how can Ciri so easily learn to trust Yennefer when she’s reopened that wound? It’s not something Ciri (or the audience) really gets to consider for long; they’re pulled along by plot and motives change as easily as Geralt suddenly appears to chop something’s head off.
While there’s always room for a new take on a character like Yen, it makes a powerful, independent woman desperate and pleading for forgiveness, exuding none of the control or confidence we got from her in the books. As she explains to Geralt how Ciri made her turn over a new leaf and see there’s more to life than accumulating power, it’s trite. Nothing we’ve seen communicates much of that feeling; they’ve barely had more than an episode together, and having the episode saying it aloud doesn’t simply make it so.
These changes feel like a misunderstanding of what the books let Yennefer be. The first season gave us a tragic backstory of sorts that, while hinted at in the books, was wisely left to implication. But I never needed to see Yennefer suffer to justify the way she carries herself. Yennefer of the books was an unapologetic bitch. She carved out her independence in a world of men who wanted to use her or ignore her. She refused to fall in line with the girlboss sorceresses, who only wished to take the place of men in their society. So when Ciri, having been lead down the paths set by those people, meets Yennefer who stands apart from them, it feels like a chance for the sorceress to give Ciri the guidance she wished she’d been given when she was a child.
While in the first season Yen’s characterization seems somewhat tempered by these impulses, in the second they’re pretty much gone — and without it, her connection to Ciri is reduced to a slightly patronizing motherly impulse. This Yennefer doesn’t feel like a role model for the Lion Cub of Cintra, offering no encouragement to live according to her own identity, which sets the foundation for who Ciri will become in The Witcher universe.
In season 3 perhaps the show will breathe more life into this drastic change, but with only two episodes and a plot desperate to move rapidly onwards, this alteration falls flat. If only it had given them as many scenes to bond as Geralt got with his horse.
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