Above: Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin is a new VR game for PlayStation VR. | Image Credit: Double Fine
Double Fine Productions wants to level up the quality of virtual reality games with its latest release: Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin for the PlayStation VR. The $20 title debuts today on Sony’s VR platform for the PlayStation 4, and it will show that VR is starting to grow up.
Double Fine applied its usual high standards in making Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, which takes place in between the events of Psychonauts and the upcoming Psychonauts 2. Raz, the hero of Psychonauts (which debuted in 2010 and ran on multiple consoles) returns in this game. He is preparing to to a camp with his father when news arrives that his friend Lili’s father, the Grand Head of the Psychonauts (who have psychic powers such as telekinesis), has been kidnapped. The Psychonauts team flies into a mysterious place called the Rhombus of Ruin to rescue him.
I played a couple of levels of the game, which is a point-and-click adventure in VR. You teleport from one place to another and try to solve 3D puzzles using a different point of view. I talked about the design of the game and the studio’s first experience with VR in an interview with Chad Dawson, project lead for the game, and Tim Schafer, CEO of Double Fine, at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.
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Above: Chad Dawson (left) and Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions. | Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
Chad Dawson: We try to mix it up a little bit between areas that are more puzzle-focused, where you’re moving stuff around, and then something like the path with the fish, where it’s more exploration and narrative. A little bit of Raz reflecting on his mission. You’re seeing a bigger space. It changes the pace for the player a bit.
GB: How long have you been working on this now?
Dawson: About a year and a half now. The total experience length is about three hours.
Tim Schafer: It’s not an experience. It’s a game.
Dawson: Yeah.
Schafer: Lot of things out there are called experiences, and they’re more like tech demos. This is a game with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Puzzles, an emotional arc, story arcs for all the characters.
Dawson: Good point.
GB: Is this the first VR thing you’ve done?
Schafer: Right. Our first VR game and our first Psychonauts game in 10 years.
Dawson: We developed some stuff for the Microsoft Kinect and the Leap Motion back in the day. Some of the technology has similarities. But VR is its own thing, as you know. It’s funded by Sony. Psychonauts 2 was crowdfunded with Fig.
GB: How did you want to approach this?
Schafer: We knew we were making Psychonauts 2, and we had this piece of the story we just weren’t going to tell. Then the talk came about making a VR game. What can you do in VR, and what can’t you do? I don’t like moving around in VR because I get sick. If you’re standing still, how do you control the world? Well, psychic powers work for that. Making a Psychonauts game was a great opportunity to tell that little story that we couldn’t tell before, in between Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2. You go on a secret mission to rescue the head of the Psychonauts. It seemed like a great way to approach that story.
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Source: Venture Beat