Anamorphine (2018)

Upper: Walking on the ceiling.

Downer: The most tedious bike ride.

I believe this game encapsulates some big themes in gaming (and other type of entertainment/art).

First, playing with no VR is a complete waste of time. There's nothing to provide a sense of immersion. No interactivity, no exploration, the the environments do not respond to your presence and you don't respond to the environment (there's even non-clipping rocks and trees). Instead, the game relies on the actual immersion you get with VR googles.

Second, it seems to think that impactful and deliberate is the same as boring and slow. Scenes are drawn out with nothing new after the first seconds and because the story (as far as I got) is so terribly predictable, every attempt at suspense or character development falls flat.

Third, it's broken technically to the point that I could not finish it. I got stuck once in a bicycle scene but the game just warp me to an unstuck position after some time (a tell that the developer knew about the problem but could not be bother to fix it). But then I got stuck again in a second bicycle scene and this time the game warpped me to yet another stuck position. After failing to recover, I decided to quit and restart, but then it seems that the main menu glitched and the game started from the beginning. That was the last straw, but there are so many other problems mostly with open passages like open doors or spaces between objects that are sometimes invisibly blocked.

Those three general aspects --VR being a crutch for sub-par game design, slowness as a proxy for emotional heft, and published games being technically broken-- are all illustrated here impeccably.

All of this is a shame, because there are some interesting imagery that was powerful even in a laptop screen and I imagine more so in VR.