7/24/2023 0 Comments After life vr gameIn the first hour, you’ll encounter a hanged man that cries out for his father and a woman that looks like she’s made of shattered glass who cries and stumbles around like the girl from the ring. The earliest encounters had a lot of promise. The bulk of the gameplay consists of running fetch quests around the mansion while avoiding the specters that haunt it. It’s a short (around five hours) narrative-driven game, yet the narrative elements feel like an afterthought. This will only help you understand the main storyline, and if you want to dig into the characters and specters more to really understand what’s going on in Wraith, you’ll need to scour the mansion for notebooks and newspapers to read. It would be one thing if you were transported to a “living” version of the mansion for these scenes like the “Crack in the Slab” level from Dishonored 2 (ironically, another story about a seance in a mansion) but these scenes are particularly enjoyable or engaging. These brief moments of exposition occur 20 times or so throughout the game and they never stop feeling like low-budget solutions for plot development. Without warning, gray, featureless characters will occasionally appear in front of you and re-enact scenes from the night of the seance. The story is told entirely through lore notes and short scenes that spontaneously play out in front of you as you explore the mansion. Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife is an old-fashioned hide-and-seek horror game elevated by the intimacy of VR, but among its VR peers, there’s hardly anything exceptional about it. This narrative-driven, exploration-focused VR horror game has a ton of potential and fresh ideas, but it never actually does much with the tools it has to create interesting gameplay, nor does it ever make much use of what VR has to offer. Wraith is a terrifying game, so much so that I wasn’t able to play it for more than an hour at a time without needing to take breaks to calm my nerves.at least for the first half of the game. I don’t think Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife is the most generic horror game, but the medium is definitely doing a lot of the heavy lifting in delivering scares. The most cliche monster or overplayed horror scene can still have a big impact on a player in VR because the experience is just so visceral and in (or on) your face. You can look away from something scary, but you can never look away from the game itself. In VR, there is nothing to separate your visual field from the world of the game. When you look at a screen, it’s a lot easier to separate fantasy and reality. It doesn’t take much to make a VR game scary.
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