As it turns out, Journey for Elysium is a game of two parts . . . and thus a follow on to yesterday's post, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat Gently Down the Styx" is absolutely needed today.
After my play session a couple days ago, I happily took off my headset thinking . . . "Oh, what a quirky little VR boat game." Yes, it has its problems:
- No haptics on the bow weapon
- Sometimes the bow just disappears out of my hands
- Speaking on hands, they don't even grab on to the bow correctly
- What a horrible decision it was to make a 360 game interrupted by a UI telling you to face forward the other direction
- Pffft, what motion sickness . . . we're just gonna ignore all that and make a spinning tower as a part of the end boss encounter!
OH, what's that I said right there? End boss encounter?!
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The last half of the game has little to no rowing of a boat and instead has a ton of puzzles and, you heard me, an end boss encounter!
Inside Apollo's temple you end up navigating several puzzle rooms where if you make the wrong step, it'll spike ya dead with a trap. There's also several climbing challenges involving the Lyre instrument where you play a tune on your Lyre and hand rail bricks pop out of the wall for a limited time and then you have to hurry and VR Climb them before they disappear.
At the very end of the game, your unfortunate past is now made crystal clear as you get caught up in a battle between Melinoë (bad) and Vanth (good). Apparently Melinoë was jealous of your wife because as it turns out you are a half-god and she's a bit of a stalker. What's strange here is that I don't think Vanth really is a Greek mythology character, so they're bending the rules a bit, which is fine by me. I'm not playing this game for a Greek Mythology lesson or anything.
Your final boss fight goes a bit like this . . . after plunking a few scary tentacles with a bow, Vanth surrounds a now water-insect-demon-like-Melinoë in a sphere of energy as you solve two climbing puzzles, return to the middle, and then fire your Vanth-empowered god killing bow straight into water-insect-demon-like-Melinoë's big ugly alien eye.
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Just when you think you're out of troubled waters and on your way to heaven aka Elysium, Hades stops you, breaks your key, tells you I both love and hate you now (thanks for killing my troublesome daughter, but also what the heck man, you killed my daughter), and makes you his ferryman. If you can earn him enough gold from the poor souls trying to get to Elysium, you'll be able to buy your freedom back from him and mend the key.
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Story wise and creative wise, I actually really liked the concept of this game. I liked slowly rowing the boat. The puzzles were interesting, but not too challenging. The hardest part of the game was climbing that right tower at the end. Holding on to a spinning tower in VR was not something I was expecting to do yesterday. Here's the full video if you'd like to check it out.
At the end of the day, I'm glad I bought this game on the cheap as a part of a VR bundle. $10 is chump change for a VR game, but hey . . . paying $3-5 is always better. Speaking of which, if you're looking for some great deals, go on and head over to the Fanatical website and check out their Build Your Own Bundle going on for VR games right now. I picked up five more games today for a fraction of their regular cost. Now to just find the time to play them.
Happy Dueling!
2 comments:
What I'm getting from all this is that VR devs all become immune to motion sickness and begin to disregard it entirely as something people will "get used to".
Both my partner and my daughter get motion sickness in cars if they aren't driving and the car is going around any sort of curves. Me, I can even read in cars as a passenger -- no problem -- and I get motion sickness after fifteen minutes or so in VR.
I honestly think AR has a better chance of bringing in a wide audience than VR, not only for this, but for staying connected to the real world, which is actually super important for those people whose lives don't usually encourage sitting isolated by yourself for an extended period of time (for me: never, always something happening in the house).
Mmmm . . . I think Vection sickness is still high priority for devs. Case in point, there wouldn't have even been an option for teleportation movement if they simply didn't care. I do think some devs care more than others. Another case in point, the way Google earth adds a vignette when you're moving over land. That's a really thoughtful implementation. On Journey to Elysium, I think the dev was a bit haphazard with a few things.
Would be fun to see AR take off. :)
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