I’ve flown starships. I’ve fired grenade launchers. I’ve won NBA championships. And I’ve played more than my fair share of Solitaire. But as video games make their way into virtual reality, and imaginary worlds are more immersive than ever before, there’s still one thing I’ve never done in a video game: I’ve never actually talked.
Thirty years of video game playing later, and I’m still the perpetual silent protagonist, body rendered with every imaginable muscle save for a tongue. Numinous Games—the same studio that developed the heartbreaking, autobiographical “game” That Dragon, Cancer—is challenging this with a new title developed for Google’s Daydream VR platform, Untethered. Its first episode is $5,available now.
Featured recently on Creative Applications, Untetheredplaces you inside the DJ booth of a small-town radio station. As you swivel in your chair, you can point the Daydream’s motion remote to play records, queue up commercials, and listen to messages left on the answering machine. The voice of an offscreen friend, the radio producer Rick, shoots the shit with you, while ensuring that you’re staying on task.
Like any VR experience, it’s a highly visual game. Glance around the room, and you’ll appreciate fine details of the mise en scene, like the pencils some bored DJ before you had javelined into the ceiling. But it’s the audio experience that will get you hooked over a slowly unfolding storyline. Modeled after radio shows like Prairie Home Companion, a mix of music, sketches, and personal confessions plays over a series of speakers piping into the audio booth.
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Source: Fastcodesign