I've got pretty mixed feelings on this one. When I first started it, I was really impressed with a lot of it. I knew it was a really short game and there's definitely some rough edges apparent immediately in the voice acting, but the gameplay felt really smooth and impressive. Despite having a significantly different tone and setting, at first Propagation felt like the closest I could see us getting to a Resident Evil 1 in VR, something I would be all kinds of down for. Unfortunately, as the game went on, I saw that the flaws in the game were in much more than just the voice acting. I definitely feel like this game is a good start at achieving what they're going for, but there was just too much about it that fell flat as the game went on.

So first, the good. The action in the game felt snappy and intense and even had me tense and on edge despite my general jaded response to horror in games. Despite my likening the game to Resident Evil 1, which was famously pretty sluggish in its PS1 glory, the action in this game is very responsive and immersive. As much as I liked Resident Evil 4 VR for instance, the slower enemies copy/pasted from the original RE4 felt off in the VR environment where you could move so much faster. That's not the case here where the enemies are quite aggressive and fast-moving, too much so, if anything. The aiming is difficult because of this in a way that further feels immersive and like it overlays well with the kind of panic your character must be feeling and how hard it would actually be in real life to shoot something that is coming at you in an intense situation. The resource-scrounging through exploring every room and bouncing between keys and doors while solving puzzles all felt really on-point for that classic Survival Horror gameplay. The VR interface was a bit clunky but was also quite immersive, requiring ejecting magazines and loading chambers for more realistic reloads. The game also looks fairly good graphically, especially for an indie game in VR. My first hour (which is about half of the game), I was pretty pleased with it and eager for more, once the motion sickness wore off.

But then I got to the second half of the game and realized many of the issues that hadn't stood out in that first hour. I was playing on Nightmare, the hardest difficulty, and to that point, it hadn't been overly punishing. However, I started to run into some challenging parts just given the resources I had, which I thought was fine, I'd just try some different strategies and hope for some lucky headshots to conserve a bit more ammo and make it work. After struggling through that part, I got to the next part with a very long sequence that started with crawling very slowly through these vents, only to get to a long gauntlet of difficult encounters, ending with a boss fight, with no save points in between. Retrying that part over and over with different strategies made me realize one of the biggest issues I have with the game: there aren't really a lot of different viable strategies to use.

Good Survival Horror is often all about forcing the player to make tense and difficult decisions, like do I run past the zombie and risk losing some health to conserve a few bullets? There's also opportunity for strategizing over clearing out certain routes to allow for safe passage you can reuse over and over, shutting doors behind you on your way to keep confined the threats you're bypassing. Propagation allows almost none of this. Enemies will follow you basically anywhere but save rooms. While plenty of other such games have enemies that occasionally bust through doors, it's constant here. Unless you can get to one of the like 3 save rooms in the game, the enemies will just follow you around until you kill them. You can't really run past or avoid almost any of the enemies in the game. This means this Survival Horror becomes much more of a shooter where it's more about getting good shots in than really making any kinds of choices or taking risks in hope of a good payoff. This is further exacerbated by just how frustrating the combat can be when the game does decide to just fuck you. If enemies are next to you, they will latch onto you much faster than you can do even a reload, requiring you to punch them off when you'd like to reset the chamber on your handgun. What was at first immersive features of the gameplay just became really frustrating in the later encounters where you're repeatedly cornered. I actually got so fed up with that one long segment (that was one of the last real stretches in the game), that I restarted the game on Normal just to get through it. Most of it was a breeze, partially because I'd gotten used to the bullshit encounters, but ammo was so abundant in this mode I never once had to even think about resources. While still not a good Survival Horror feel, at least that wasn't pissing me off as much as being constantly cornered simply because I didn't get more headshots. Unfortunately, the end boss, while functioning quite differently from the rest of the enemies, even on Normal was a really long and drawn out fight that also included several opportunities for cheap deaths, requiring a restart of the long and frustrating fight. By the time I finally beat it, I was just relieved the game was over.

While I soured pretty hard on the game, I do stand by the fact that they did a lot right with Propagation. I think what's there is an excellent foundation for what could become the quintessential VR Survival Horror experience. And yet it feels like some of the important core mechanics of such a game were just poorly understood when implementing the relentlessly pursuing enemies and the lack of real choice in the game. I was willing to overlook some things like the barebones story and clunky UI, but when the gameplay had me so frustrated, my feelings toward the game plummeted, especially with how the flaws were making the game more difficult in a way that just wasn't fun to me. Given its potential, I'd be up to try another similar game this studio later puts together and that's why I give it 3 stars when it's probably somewhere between 2 and 3. But at this point, I'm mostly just glad this one's done.