Influential titles like Dear Esther, Gone Homeand the recent Firewatch have made millions and won awards by replacing standard run-and-gun action with first-person perspective exploration and investigation, often at a snail’s pace. These games set the player loose in evocative locations, with few goals beyond deciphering character insights from Post-it notes, old letters and abandoned campsites, the forgotten flotsam of people’s lives. Walking simulators offer an intentionally languid experience and the gentle pace and strong narratives offer a refreshing counterpoint to the usual blockbuster bombast.
So how does this budding genre translate to the new medium of virtual reality?Bound, from the Polish indie team Plastic, is perhaps the most impressive, and by far the most emotionally impactful. It begins with a pregnant woman strolling along a peaceful beach, flipping through a notebook of crayon drawings, each linked to a traumatic childhood memory. The sketches explode into an abstract polygonal wonderland, enveloping your entire view. A vibrant sea of three-dimensional cubes roils beneath your feet, while neon colored strands of seaweed sway below swarms of darting triangles.
The game’s creative director, Poland-native Michal Staniszewski, cut his teeth in the PC demoscene, an international community of coding and art enthusiasts stretching back to the Seventies. These experimental roots show, because Bounddoesn’t have many contemporary analogues. It seamlessly shifts between layers of reality and memory, delving into the main character’s haunting past through impressionistic freeze frames, turning intense emotions into vivid imagery. This abstractness works in its favor; it’s part of a deliberate strategy Staniszewski uses to flip VR’s limitations into advantages.
“We thought that graphics on PSVR need to be abstract to be convincing” he says. “If something is almost realistic, then you think that it’s fake. When something is abstract and not present in the real world you immediately accept it.”
His theory holds up. Bound could be the most transporting VR game yet. Instead of noticing the tiny seams where the illusion falls apart – something even polished virtual reality games struggle with – you’re more likely to find yourself enraptured by the surreal surroundings. The story, too, is abstract. Rather than explicitly chronicle a family’s disintegration, the game shows you small, impressionistic slices of time: a nervous child peeking around a corner, a torn necklace, anguished cries. It’s handled with such deftness that I didn’t realize I’d mapped my own preconceptions onto the story’s events until I discussed it with the game’s director afterwards.
“The game is designed in such way that it is randomized and it does not blame any person,” says Staniszewski. The concept was sparked by his own experiences and reflections as a new father. “Families are very fragile at the moment when kids are born,” he says, “In many cases there are no responsible family members for the family break. It just happens…”
In his company’s internal play tests he found that despite presenting a neutral story, “players who had similar situations in their lives were blaming the actual person that hurt them in the real world.” It’s a surprising demonstration of how the intimacy of virtual reality can mess with our emotions in the real world.
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Source: Rolling Stone