Virtual Virtual Reality
Year: 2019
Rating: T
Time Played: ~3 hours
The one qualm I have with many VR games is how many of them fail to include any kind of story into their gameplay. It’s mostly, “Here’s this thing you can do in an immersive environment,” and that’s it. The ones that have a story (like Shadow Point or Moss) sometimes don’t lean into the VR nearly as much—mostly being games that could be played in first- or third-person without VR. Virtual Virtual Reality, though, is the best of both worlds, combining VR interactions with a great story.
Placed somewhere between the meta Accounting+ and interactivity of Job Simulator, Virtual Virtual Reality takes the Portal approach to gradual storytelling. There are a lot of parallels that are hard to miss here. At its core, this game’s story revolves around a cheery yet malevolent AI who tries to get the player to perform odd jobs for a variety of requestors. However, when you peel back the curtain to see the horrors behind the scenes, the AI strips the layers of VR away and chastises you for getting out of bounds. Even if you obtain many details via narration, the story is still profound.
Virtual Virtual Reality might be slower to get through than other VR games, but I think that helps with the story’s pacing. You don’t just get snippets of plot between puzzles; you get a motivation to keep going. And the immersive nature of most of these loosely interconnected worlds helped keep me in the story, too. In fact, I had some legitimate jump scares in this game as VR headsets flung themselves onto my face. I also appreciated that I could go back and visit a few of the branching plot levels I missed in my playthrough once I got to the end.
Immersive and meta with a great story, I give Virtual Virtual Reality 4.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
