Row, Row, Row Your Boat Gently Down the Styx

I picked up Journey for Elysium as a part of a VR-centric humble bundle a few months ago. It's one of those games I've been wanting to try "when the time is right." The time was right yesterday since I was looking for something new I could play and write about for Blaugust.  

Journey for Elysium is a cruel game that immediately walks you to a cliff where you witness a beautiful sunset, and then immediately kills you as you plummet to your death. Weee! 

Time to die!

It's funny because just yesterday I was talking to someone that joked he gets the fear of heights feeling when he gets close to an edge in VR . . . even though he knows it's not real. As cruel as I am, I should offer this game to him to play.

Not to worry, it is the last time you'll be dropping from a cliff like that because now that you're dead, you've forgotten who you are and it's time to make your way to the river Styx where you'll be rowing a boat, traveling down it, solving puzzles, and unraveling your story.

Not ominous at all!

The first time I strapped on my headset and started to play, I was offered the choice of teleport to move or moving with a joystick. I chose teleport to move because I thought it would be the right choice. It was the wrong choice. 

Immersive for the win

At the time, I didn't know the the right joystick on my controllers would reposition me in 45 degree increments, and I kept ending up facing backwards looking at two lines telling me to not to do that and it really broke the experience. 

It's kind of strange that a 360 VR game was so bent on telling me which direction I should face. the reason it appears was to always orient me onward and in the direction of the story. After progressing in the story a couple beats, it was time to jump into the rowboat on the river styx and row, row, row my boat . . . and immediately got vection sickness, so I took off my headset and got busy doing real-life stuff.

Later that night, knowing that a Blaugust post was looming, I decided to give Journey for Elysium another shot.  This time I chose the immersive movement. I was nervous that immersive movement alone would give me vection sickness, but to my surprise, it didn't and now the weird warning lines were gone. In fact, I think the weird warning lines were actually causing me vection sickness because when I hopped in the boat this time, all was well.

Pausing the journey to listen to tales of how cool I am as an orphan hero

This game is all about immersion and has an interesting feeling about it as you slowly row the river Styx. Slowly.  Remember that.  Don't over do it on the rowing. I found that a slow row caused almost no vection issues and made the whole experience much better. While traversing the river, you run into memory bubbles that tell you a bit of your story as a "bastard" child that became a hero. By the way, if I had a 3% discount on the game for every time they used the word "bastard" I would have gotten the game for free.

In between the story bits there were simple VR puzzles for you to solve. They weren't hard, but they were entertaining. The whole time I was playing I kept puzzling out in my mind . . . am I supposed to be a famous Greek Myth hero?  If I am, which one? I think I'm just a random unknown hero? 

Anyway, at the end of my play session I had arrived at a temple of Apollo, played a lyre to open the gates and arrived at a larger puzzle.  From everything I've read, there's really only 2-3 hours of gameplay in this VR title, and really for a VR title, that seems to be all that's expected.

If you don't have a lot of room to move around in VR, this game had me sitting in one spot and not moving my body much. If you're into that and a slow-paced story and easy puzzle experience, this is a good, short title that has a lot of gloomy atmosphere.  Honestly I kind of wish my floating orb guide had less of an upbeat chipper tone about her and instead was more ghostly and spooky to really put me in the mood of traveling through the underworld.

I kinda liked the two-handed rowing stuff!

Once I got used to the rowing, I kind of loved the boat ride aspect to this game, it made me want to experience all the slow moving parts of Pirates of the Caribbean in VR. I wonder if that exists somewhere?  If it does, that sounds like yet another Blaugust post in the making! 

Happy Dueling!