Forget tech demos; these are the games you'll actually be playing on Vive and Rift.

Virtually ready: Diving into VR’s most promising PC launch titles

Forget tech demos; these are the games you'll actually be playing on Vive and Rift.

by Kyle Orland and Sam Machkovech

For years it feels like we've done the same thing. At tech and gaming trade shows across the country, we journalists have engaged with impressive technical demos that demonstrate the capabilities of this long-promised, soon-to-come wave of new virtual reality hardware. But as the first of those PC-compatible headsets get closer to launch (the HTC Vive is still planned for this year, Oculus Rift in early 2016), such tech demos are quickly giving way to time with actual games that real developers are planning to release alongside the hardware.
Experimenting on near-final hardware, rather than through downloads on a home development kit, has gone a long way to calming fears of nauseating and/or hard-to-use VR headsets in this first generation. And while these titles are genuinely still in development—meaning they're hard to gauge fully in demos that can last only 10 or 15 minutes—they have given us our best idea yet of the actual promises and pitfalls of the first wave of virtual reality games.

Further Reading

At E3, Sony shows what Project Morpheus’ actual VR games will look like

As release gets closer, tech demos start to look more like releasable products.

We looked at a few promising early titles for Sony's Project Morpheus back in June at E3, but, at PAX Prime two weeks ago, the breadth and depth of VR offerings blew that experience away. While this is only a small sampling of the titles in development, and more will be shown at the Oculus Connect conference in Hollywood later this month, what we've seen so far has already gotten us excited about finally playing some real virtual reality games in our homes in the near future. Here's a guided tour of some of the titles that will serve as many early adopters' first impressions of a new world of home PC-based virtual reality.
(Note: While these games were all demonstrated on either the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift, most developers we talked to were open to the idea of porting the title from one platform to the other should time and market demand allow. Exceptions to this include Oculus' VR Sports Challenge and Edge of Nowhere, both of which are currently being developed exclusively for Oculus).

SteamVR: The room-scale VR world that feels like an “IMAX in your house”

Just ask one dev. "Near-field manipulation of physics objects is f***ing amazing."

With its room-scale tracking technology, SteamVR and the HTC Vive have finally achieved the dream of letting players walk around a virtual space as if they were really there. Unfortunately, that dream only lasts as far as the dimensions of your room's walls or the length of wire tethering you to the gaming PC powering the experience. Unless you're playing a game that's confined to a single virtual room space, this is a problem. How do you let a player walk around an entire world in VR without crashing into real walls? The team at Cloudhead Games thinks they've found the perfect solution to this problem for The Gallery, an episodic adventure game that is set to see its first chapter, "Call of the Starseed," launch alongside the HTC Vive later this year. After toying around with that solution during a 15 minute demo of the game recently, we hope it will catch on and become a standard in the space.
Cloudhead calls its VR navigation solution the Blink system. Basically, when you reach the limits of your real world play space (shown as a blue wireframe box in the VR world when you approach), you simply hold down a button on the controller and look at where you want to go. A small green outline appears in the center of your gaze, showing the new bounding area that you'll "blink" to. Let go of the button, and the scene fades to black before quickly fading in on your new position where you can walk around the new surroundings immediately. You can even twist the controller before the "blink" to change the angle of your new virtual playspace before you warp there.
Teleporting around the world like this isn't as "realistic" as simply walking along the entire length of a secluded beach, for instance. Still, it's an incredibly convenient way to get to anywhere you can see in the virtual environment without any of the nausea or disorientation that comes with other methods of virtual locomotion (such as pushing a joystick to move your viewpoint forward). It's also incredibly efficient, saving a lot of ponderous walking time between points of interest.

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It's a solution that seems perfectly tailored for The Gallery's gameplay as well. The game reimagines the PC point-and-click adventure as more of a virtual reality walk-and-poke adventure. Puzzles seem to rely on everyday object interactions more than overly clever item combinations. At one point, I had to throw a heavy weight at an overhanging shelf in the corner to knock down a chest. At another, I had to aim down the sights of a flare gun to ring a far off bell that was sitting behind a rocky outcropping. The most joyful moments in the short demo, though, were spent just tinkering with the environment rather than actively working toward a goal. You can pick up a roman candle, put it over the fire, and watch as fireworks explode in the air wherever you point. Or pick up a stereo blaring from a table and hold it up to each ear, hearing the music move around your head as you do. Even lying down and looking at the stars as the sounds of the ocean washes through took on a new fascination.
The Gallery is also full of little design touches that update common game design interfaces for a new virtual reality world. To get to items stored in your inventory, for instance, you simply reach behind your back, click a button, and pull a backpack in front of your face. After flicking through the contents and picking out what you need, simply pick the backpack up and load it back behind you. We hope we see more of this kind of intuitive interface design, built off of real-world skills, as VR games come into their own.
While we have only the barest hints of the story and gameplay that will drive The Gallery forward so far, Cloudhead has already created the kind of virtual reality world that had us wanting to just hang out for a lot longer than a short demo would allow.
-Kyle Orland

Job Simulator: A baby in a VR playpen

Demonstrated on: HTC Vive

When we compared Job Simulator to Wii Sports in our feature on SteamVR, we didn’t clarify the ways in which the comparison doesn't actually apply. For example, Wii Sports had competitions, scoring, and a learning curve—real “video game” stuff. Job Simulator, conversely, hasn’t had any of these elements in its pre-release demos. Instead, it’s had wine bottles, knives, eggs, Slurpee cups, tomatoes, magazines, and other everyday objects that you mostly pick up and mess around with. It has also had giant bottles of soda—which, yes, explode when shaken. Players are dropped into humdrum situations—so far, we’ve played as a chef and as a convenience store clerk—and given some job-like tasks to do with their real-life hands, without time limits or other kinds of urgency about how or when we finish them.
Job Simulator’s activities and purpose differ largely from the game that put the Wii on the map, but its sheer, creamy joy—of unlocking a new, simple way to interact with physical objects in a virtual playscape—is a like-for-like match. Some people thought it would be stupid to pantomime tennis in front of a TV before they tried it for themselves; we encourage those people to think twice before judging what it’s like to juggle virtual tomatoes while holding wand controllers and wearing a headset.
As a one-player VR game, Job Simulator’s tack makes more sense than a competitive sports game, anyway. New VR players are babies to the form, and as we all know, babies often prefer playing with the box more than with the structured toy or game inside of it. The developers at Owlchemy Labs have embraced that truth by making Job Simulator’s tasks—and the robot characters who demand them—as silly, sarcastic, and self-aware as possible.

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Upon completing any recipe in the simulated kitchen, or any purchase order in the simulated convenience store, your bossy robot overseers offer stilted-sounding responses, as if their vocal processors were implemented a full decade before the likes of Apple’s Siri. There are also some very odd robot encounters, like a convenience store stick-up from a hovering monitor-with-a-face, for maximum comic relief.
In our time with the game, we were told by Owlchemy founder Alex Schwarz to play with and manipulate everything we could see in his game’s virtual world. So we did—we found the dial to aim the convenience store’s security cameras and then used our hands to wave at the camera while looking up at a monitor showing our own floating hands. We threw stuff at our robotic bosses, to which they weirdly replied, “Thank you, may I have another?” We smashed wine bottle after wine bottle. We used the magical super-size tray to make every single convenience store item unnecessarily huge. We crouched to find all kinds of weird items tucked into ground-level shelves. And we dug through a magazine rack and came across a parody version of the awkward August Time Magazine cover that featured Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.
Aimless? Absolutely. But while Wii Sports had a learning curve to master the unnatural, modified motions players had to make to simulate bowling as effectively as possible, Job Simulator really doesn’t share this issue. Aiming throws, picking up and dropping objects, fulfilling basic objectives: these are all completed by doing exactly what those tasks require in the real world, which is equal parts revelatory and rudimentary. Yeah, picking up a bottle of mustard is easy, so what? Job Simulator shines because it essentially freezes time and lets you become a real-world rascal in tangible, in-your-face ways that even the most evil open-world games have never quite fulfilled.
Go ahead. Make a mess. Be a virtual-reality baby.
—Sam Machkovech

Lucky's Tale: Crash Bandicoot for a new generation

Demonstrated on: Oculus Rift

Famed strategy gaming studio Ensemble Studios has split in a number of directions since the Age of Empires days, forming teams that have created the likes of Orcs Must Die, Words With Friends, and Halo Wars. Now a few more former Ensemblers at another studio, Playful Games, have set their sights on yet another genre, one that’s equal parts old-hat and unproven: the virtual-reality platform game.
At first glance, a game like Lucky’s Tale seems far from essential for a VR platform. You’re yet another cute mascot-looking critter—in this case, a fox named Lucky that Playful Games swears wasn’t named after Oculus founder Palmer Luckey—and your character has the usual arsenal of basic platforming tricks (double-jumps, butt-stomps) that it uses to run around worlds rendered in shimmering, primary colors.
But after only a few minutes with Lucky’s Tale, we came away impressed—not necessarily by its opening demo gameplay, which felt unremarkable at best, but by how smoothly the VR perspective fit into the game and how easily we could look around the world by moving our heads around. We’d feared motion sickness issues due to a floating camera that moved automatically along with our furry hero, but instead, we found our view enhanced, if ever so slightly, by choosing a near-retail Oculus headset over a typical TV screen.
“We cut our teeth on games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie,” game director Dan Hurd said to Ars during a recent demo. “In those years, we thought, whoa, the Mushroom Kingdom is actually a world now, right? But those games introduced the abstraction of moving a camera around with C buttons. Players who’ve grown up with those games have gotten used to that, to camera sticks, but for a lot of other players, that’s still been a harder language to get their heads around.”

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Lucky’s Tale levels have almost all been built as forward-ramping challenges, similar to Crash Bandicoot, as opposed to the arena-style designs of the best N64 platformers. Players can peer left and right to see what shortcuts and hidden paths might be ahead of them, but they’ll never need to backtrack, either, thanks to obvious left-right pathing or thanks to an abundance of “foxholes” that warp players backward to the original path when needed. “It’s uncomfortable to run towards your face,” Hurd admitted, and Lucky’s Tale has been designed to remove that whenever possible.
The camera isn’t truly fixed, by the way, but it automatically hovers, lifts, and veers at various points, anticipating where a player might look. However, the game worlds have been built so that the view always looks like players are looking down at a set of toys, as opposed to more cinematic or scenery-favoring angles. As a result, the already-cute Lucky really does feel like a toy come to life, and the game recognizes if you’re looking directly at him while he’s paused—because he’ll look back at you. It’s a silly gimmick, but striking all the same.
Plus, there’s no underselling how this comfortable stereoscopic camera, and the ability to tilt your head to find your own sweet spot at any given moment, adds the right amount of perspective to gauge jumps and dodges as you hop along the game’s jumping and platforming challenges. Hurd insists there will be other headset-specific twists in the final game that we didn't see in the demo, including a cavern level where players aim a flashlight with their vision and a catapult level where players aim shots simply by looking.
Ultimately, the coolest bits in Lucky’s Tale are matched by some concessions, particularly in removing back-tracking from level design. We’re not about to pronounce the televised 3D platformer dead, by any measure. But Playful, at the very least, has made us believe that there is merit to using VR headsets in platforming games—that the genre can work in VR and actually add comfort to the proceedings. For the easily queasy VR testers at Ars Technica, that is saying a lot.
-Sam Machkovech

Eve Valkyrie: Fly the unfriendly skies

Demonstrated on: Oculus Rift

Our own Lee Hutchinson found the experience of playing Elite: Dangerous on an Oculus development kit to be indescribably amazing last year. Given that, I shudder to think how he's going to react to playing Eve: Valkyrie on a retail Oculus Rift unit. The increased resolution, frame rate, and image persistence allowed by that final hardware make developer-kit Elite look like a muddy, smeary mess in comparison.
Valkyrie is a little more of an action-oriented space dogfighting experience than the more deliberate simulation of Elite, with bright, colorful ships leaving whizzing contrails and fantastic explosions all around you. The gain in perspective control afforded by VR is especially useful in this kind of high-octane environment; being able to easily track an enemy with your head as he banks above you through an overhead loop is an intense experience.
It's also one that left us with a surprising lack of nausea. That's likely thanks to strong visual cues that lock your position to an unmoving cockpit, like translucent glass and the ability to see your body shift under you as you move your head. If this is the direction CPC wants to take the Eve franchise in VR, count us in.
-Kyle Orland

Airmech VR: The miniature wargame of the future

Demonstrated on: Oculus Rift

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Of all the existing gaming genres that can be ported to virtual reality, real-time strategy might be the easiest to switch wholesale. On a monitor, the genre practically requires quick hopping around a mini-map to keep track of far-flung action. In stereoscopic virtual reality, you can simply look out over a vast field of miniatures, panning and zooming the view with a quick tilt or lean of your head.
Airmech VR shows just how well this transition can be managed, with a tutorial on a small table quickly opening up to a map the apparent size of a small conference room, surrounding you with a world of tiny marching robots with guns and rockets. The tower-defense-esque gameplay is aided ably by having direct control over a lead unit, which can transform into a plane to airlift companions to their most useful spots.
That lead unit is also a great tool for focusing attention in a VR space that can be overwhelming in the best way, as skirmishes erupt on all sides and the very structure of the walls around you start to fall apart with the explosions. With more VR games like this, solid, real-world wargaming miniatures might get a run for their money.

Final Approach: Mobile time-waster gets new life in VR

Demonstrated on: HTC Vive

By and large, the past few years’ virtual reality games and demos often failed because they shoehorned first-person cameras directly onto your face—with stomach-churning results. Hey, shoehorning happens on new platforms, and it taught VR game makers a lot of what not to do. But upcoming HTC Vive game Final Approach has us thinking that a whole other segment of existing games could stand to benefit from such blatant prior-game copying: smartphone titles. What happens when full hand and arm motions replace mere touch gestures? The answer used to be a disaster, especially proven by the laggy, tiring play of Fruit Ninja Kinect, but Final Approach gives us a little more hope. The game asks players to map flight paths at an island airport—just like in iOS and Android game Flight Control—only instead of doing so from a bird’s-eye perspective, they stand over the island like a giant, mapping the full 3D flight trajectory of planes and helicopters. Reach out and touch a plane with an HTC Vive wand, then hold the trigger button and draw a dotted-line flight path, up, down, and all around, to guide its safe landing.
Truth be told, we didn’t find Final Approach’s brief demo all that mind-blowing; the game didn’t present interesting spatial challenges beyond juggling a lot of planes’ flight paths. We don’t know if that will change ahead of the game’s planned launch alongside the HTC Vive, but we very quickly felt proficient at creating and altering a bunch of paths on the fly. What’s more, the demo made us think seriously about other touchscreen franchises, from Angry Birds to Cut The Rope, that might actually play better as full-room VR translations.
-Sam Machkovech

Damaged Core: Sit-and-spin-and-shoot

Demonstrated on: Oculus Rift

The dream of a virtual reality first-person shooter is alive and well, but it seems set to remain a dream if the demo for Damaged Core is any indication. Though it was billed as a first-person shooter when it was announced at Oculus' pre-E3 press event, the short snippet we played was more like a long distance shooting gallery than, say, Quake. The entire demo was spent sitting in place, using a central targeting reticle in the middle of our vision to aim at a series of walking and/or hovering robots moving lazily about. Button presses on a handheld controller were used to fire and to zoom in for long-range sniper fire.
There's a lot of futuristic window dressing in the game's presentation, including a floating AI robot that ponderously tells you how to scan the area with radar-like pings and how to focus on far-off "nodes" to teleport to those locations. Overall, the production values are as polished and high-quality as you'd expect from an experienced developer like High Voltage Software. That's not enough to distract from turn-your-head-and-shoot gameplay that was already starting to feel stale by the end of a quick 10-minute show floor demo, though. We hope that there's more to discover when this game sees a final release.
-Kyle Orland

Edge of Nowhere: Atmospheric, straightforward adventuring

Demonstrated on: Oculus Rift

When people think of virtual reality, they usually picture taking control of an avatar from their own first-person perspective. Edge of Nowhere, much like Lucky's Tale, is one of a few big-name early VR titles seeing if that headset can't be better used for a third-person perspective, with your head acting as an easy-to-control camera pivot.
The move to VR comes with some pros and some cons as you do the standard Uncharted-style run-and-leap exploration on offer here. On the plus side, being in VR really helps create a sense of atmosphere. In one memorable section of the Edge of Nowhere demo, while rappelling down an icy cavern, the torch I was holding briefly illuminated dozens of skittering spiders in huge clumps on the walls. No matter where I looked, the spiders seemed to be surrounding me, imparting a claustrophobic feeling that's hard to capture in most third-person games.
On the downside, having a third-person viewpoint attached to your head is a bit more limiting than having a free-floating camera in a standard game on a flat screen. Something as simple as looping the camera around 180 degrees to turn around (or just see behind you) seems functionally impossible in this set up. Perhaps as a result, the short demo felt a little bit more linear than most games of the genre. Action generally moved forward in a single direction with only slight deviations from side to side. That's going to be a hard problem to design around, but if anyone is up for it, Insomniac probably is.
-Kyle Orland

Time Machine VR: Swim with the dinosaurs

Demonstrated on: Oculus Rift

You’re going to see a lot of virtual reality games that stick players into cockpits—mostly because these games tend to find that sweet spot between user comfort and maximum control on sit-down platforms like the retail Oculus Rift. As a result, we anticipate seeing a lot of active, action-packed flying games in Oculus’ future. As such, we were relieved to see a slower, more contemplative take on cockpit VR—and one that’s quite beautiful—already in the works for the burgeoning platform. Time Machine VR, which Oculus dev kit owners can already purchase and play via Steam Early Access, comes courtesy of the team at Minority Media, which gamers may already know from PS3 indie darling Papo Y Yo. Like the title suggests, players hop into a time machine—one designed to swim and fly up to prehistoric beasts whose DNA, characteristics, and other data you’ve been tasked to catalog. Our 10-minute demo of the game sent us into an ocean to float past turtles and eventually pilot ourselves up to a much larger dino-fishie’s mouth to extract data from its sweet, sweet tongue meat.
Sadly, we didn’t have much to do in the demo, other than look around and enjoy the view, and we only got a tiny tease of the game’s apparently weird story—which we were hoping apes Papo Y Yo's themes of weird monsters and alcoholism. Still, the sense of scale from swimming up to giant dinosaurs in VR was already quite attractive. As a bonus, the game gets points for already being available for early download well ahead of the final VR hardware due to ship early next year.
-Sam Machkovech

VR Sports Challenge: Wii Sports without the motion controls

Demonstrated on: Oculus Rift

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Back in the distant past of 2006, the Wii proved its worth to millions with a little pack-in called Wii Sports. Oculus seems to be hoping for the same killer-app-through-accessible-sports-metaphors with VR Sports Challenge, a collection of mini-games designed to get people used to the new world of playing in virtual reality.
The only mini-game we've tried so far is a simple hockey goalie simulation. As a team of convincingly rendered hockey players dribbles and passes the puck in front of you and your fellow defensive players, you have to follow the movement with your eyes (and head and neck). That task is simple but not always easy, with plenty of defending players getting in the way of some quick, fancy passes. When a shot comes in, you simply look straight at the puck and tap the appropriate bumper on the Xbox One controller to block it on the left or right side.
It's a fun little reflex test and a good way to train people to track objects in virtual reality stereoscopic 3D. Still, we can't help but feel this kind of game would be much more interesting if it used the Oculus Touch controllers to let you actually try to grab the pucks out of the air. Just tapping shoulder buttons on an Xbox One pad to automatically fend off pucks feels a bit like touching the future through the bars of a cage.
-Kyle Orland

Fantastic Contraption: Rube Goldberg for a new generation

Demonstrated on: Oculus Rift

Another existing game getting ported more or less straight to virtual reality, Fantastic Contraption is a 3D update to old Rube Goldberg builder games like The Incredible Machine. The idea is to use a limited number of interlocking pieces to engineer a contraption that will satisfy the level's goal. In the demo, this meant attaching wheels and crossbar supports together to build a ball-holder that would roll the item safely around hazards and to a highlighted zone.
Taking things like balance, structural integrity, and friction into account may seem a bit complex for a puzzle game, but doing so in virtual reality makes things a little more intuitive. There's something about being able to walk around an apparently life-sized contraption, actually stretching support poles in your hands and bending down to connect them to wheels on the ground, that adds a necessary directness and tangibility to the process.
We can't wait to wander through complex contraptions that fill the virtual rooms around us, tinkering and refining to get every piece positioned just right. Building a machine in virtual reality might be the clearest example of the impending computing-device divide. Or, put more simply, it’s way easier to build stuff with your hands in 3D space than with a mouse. Who needs a garage workshop to tinker in when you have virtual reality?
-Kyle Orland