Zambezi is a first person virtual reality title based around the concept of players travelling from the source to the foot of the Zambezi River in ancient times.
Players being at the source of the river in canoes and follow the river in a linear story driven experience as they travel down the river on an expedition, taking a look at the varied culture and threats of the rivers length while using the VR systems to create a deep connection with the games events. Players will need to manage their resources as they travel and puzzles will be presented in a variety of interactions during game play such as conversation or riddles, finding ways to move through a rapid pieces of river or sneak through a pod of angry hippos.
Zambezi is primarily designed to provide deep immersion while allowing players to see a popular destination through an intense fictional storyline.
●Virtual Reality
●Strong Story
●Beautiful Artwork
Little Big is a story about a young girl and her adventures with a giant for Virtual reality. Players on take on the role of a giant (Mr. Big) and must carefully move the "Little" a young girl through the environment without directly touching her or letting her fall into the harmful traps and dangers in the areas she adventures in
Little Big takes advantage of the development of VR systems to let players take first person of Mr.Big the giant. Big must shift the map around and use his body to safely ensure she gets from the start of the level to the end without being hurt from the large number of traps and dangerous things throughout the level. Players will do things like using their limbs as makeshift bridges or shifting boulders from the path of the little girl.
Little big is a basic escort puzzler with a twist, adding in the unique roll of Mr. Big who is essentially a scene director? Players must safely get Little from one side to another using their body as a tool to achieve this goal
●Unique Giant mechanic
●Interesting use of VR
Viracy is a first person virtual reality game based on the Steam VR. Players take on the role of a Virus who awaken in the D:/ Universal Service Bus. Players take over the D:/ drive and set out to find the meaning of their life while expanding their influence
Viracy uses the Steam VR to handle interactions and combat. The hand based controllers in the VR feed information for the games combat system with arm motions being fed into the game through the hand held controllers to allow for sword or gunplay. A system called combat synchronisation is used to help the feeling of combat where players can move around the room slightly to allow for a more satisfying combat experience in terms of movement but leaving the combat sync zone slows the game to allow players to re-centre themselves. Outside of this limited movement players will use thumb sticks to move, this is to allow for expansive environments without losing the fine-tuned components of combat the VR system can bring. The game has two states. Ship and Combat. Ship is a controlled state where players interact with their "crew" who are other viruses they join forces with or capture. The player is mute and answers yes or no with a nod of shake of their head detected via the VR headset. They can build and customise the ship to their liking and equip and prepare their crew before combat. When going into combat on the ship the players use a war table which they manipulate using their hands. Players define three squads of five, two of which they set AI tactics for while the third they lead into combat. Once this is done players enter combat, they will receive information through diegetic UI elements and a commentary from their shipboard tactical advisor.
Viracy is all about deep immersion it uses the VR system and careful design to deliver this. Considerations such as being mute are important because it would be difficult to retain immersion if the wrong voice is coming out of your face. The game has no HUD instead opting for a specific art style which has stark contrasts. Enemies and blue and white with humanoid round features to look friendly (anti-virus) while allies are black and red with sharp edges (viruses). The environments are largely white with sharp edges, similar to what you might find in a hospital. Because of the simplicity of the art style it is very easy to feed the player diegetic information throughout gameplay.
While doing this Viracy aims to explore the grey space available to it. Players can embrace the fact they are a virus and destroy everything, they can travel looking for the reason for their creation or they can try and find a place where they can be safe
●Deep immersive gameplay
●Virtual Reality
●Intense combat
Summary
Forget Me Not is a first person virtual reality game for the Steam VR. Players take on the role of Tweak, a memory hacker. Memory hacking is the act of altering the memories of another human, either by wiping them or adjusting them. Memory hacking is explicitly outlawed in the Geneva Convention however like all things illegal you can find someone if you dig deep enough. In the beginning of the game Tweak adjusts some fairly horrific memories for a man who stumbles in, discovering he was involved with the Yakuza. While she succeeds in wiping his memory the Yakuza are less than pleased that someone outside of their organisation knows so much however rather than killing her they kidnap her taking her to an unknown location where they have her wipe and adjust memories to their liking. Players must wipe memories while collecting information and building relationships in an attempt to either further their status in the Yakuza or try and escape them.
Gameplay
Forget Me Not takes advantage of the Steam VRs spatial tracking. The Yakuza have locked Tweak in a lab they built for her containing everything she needs. Her bed is hidden behind a room divider and a small bathroom is through one door. There are no windows and the only way in or out is a large set of locked cast iron doors. This is where all of the game will take place.
Players will interact with the various Yakuza that visit them and perform operations on patients, either wipes or memory alteration. Memory wipes are simple, players simply enter the patient's memory and start altering things to cause chaos in the memory, and once the memory becomes corrupt the player can use their DataHammer to smash the memory to pieces. Memory alteration is slightly harder, players can fast forward or rewind the memory as it plays around them to get a feel for it before pausing in certain places to alter the course of the memory, and memories are altered during the pause state by shifting things in the memory, from objects to people. The more aggressively players seek to change memories the more dangerous things become as the patients mind turns against them. Players can combat these malicious figments by duelling them using their DataHammer, a great hammer used to corrupt information.
Mindset
Forget Me Not aims to put players in a consistent world and take advantage of the Steam VR system by using small room environment's which a high level of interactability to immerse players. Using this immersion the game asks a lot of morality questions about what is right and wrong and allows players to roleplay the situation. Players may become one of their captors or rebel against them entirely. Each patient offers unique outcomes, you could leave someone entirely broken or spare them pain by blotting out specifics. Through this Forget Me Not aims to put players in an unfamiliar morality dilemma and have them constantly question their decisions as they try to find their place in the twisted world. Players should feel satisfaction at solving a memory change to the best of their ability while also trying to manipulate the Yakuza to get their desired outcome.
Highlights
● Complete immersion using the Steam VR
● Unique morality dilemma
● Variety of meaningful story choices
● Consistent world created through use of space and steam VR spatial recognition
