Recent reviews by 城戸さん

If you aren't playing this in VR, you're wasting your time. Go play the early X-Wing / TIE Fighter games, or the Wing Commander series. They should offer a much better experience in exchange for the lower immersion of a flat screen and older graphics.

At the time of this review I've played the game for more than 11 hours, which is far longer than you actually need to beat the game, so clearly I enjoyed it a lot. But I enjoyed it in spite of one very glaring flaw: this game is ridiculously easy. Now, it's been decades since I last played Star Wars: TIE Fighter, and I was practically a baby at the time, but the one thing I still remember so strongly about it is how hard it was.

Dying Sun's difficulty curve is nonexistent, but for both good and bad reasons. What's good about this game's (lack of) difficulty is that the controls definitely aren't going to get in the way, like they seem to in so many other flight / space combat games. They are smooth and streamlined, while allowing some fun and complex maneuvers using the drift button.

What's not so good is the progression structure of the missions. If you can't beat a mission at the highest difficulty, you can just beat it at a lower difficulty, and still get the exact same reward (plus a slightly lower number of upgrade points), which is usually a fleet upgrade, just as if you had beaten it at the higher difficulty. Then, you can just play that mission again at the higher difficulty using your now beefed-up fleet. Though still depressing, a slightly less absurd progression would be to play the whole game on the lowest difficulty to get all the fleet upgrades, then go back to the beginning and play it again on the highest difficulty using your now wildly overpowered fleet.

Either way, it's grinding, and while you aren't required to play it this way, it suggests that the missions haven't been carefully balanced to offer exactly the right amount of difficulty for progressing in a completely linear fashion on the highest difficulty, which is how games are supposed to be played.

None of the above is really a deal-breaker though; if you have enough discipline you can force yourself to only ever play missions on the highest difficulty, and then it's sort of an okay game, but still ridiculously easy compared to early masterpieces of the genre.

You can artificially increase the difficulty for yourself even more by trying to kill all the traitor flagships. But this deprives you of the fun of trying to escape before the flagship arrives. The best moments in the game come when you have just completed all objectives, and the flagship warps in close by and you're trying to warp out before your ship gets hit by all its incoming missiles. There is a wondrous moment of exhilaration as you warp out, knowing that you were just seconds away from getting blown to smitherines.

If you instead wait around and actually try to kill the flagship, I noticed that both in the music and in my own emotional state, there was a very noticeable deadening of excitement and slowing of the game's pace. So it seems this game is about warping into traitor territory, exterminating the human garbage who were complicit in the murder of our glorious Emperor, and then warping out as quickly as possible. You just need to make sure you play it that way to get the most enjoyment.

It's also drop-dead gorgeous, epic even, in virtual reality. The graphics look stupid and amateurish on flat screens, especially in screenshots; you have to play it VR to feel the full effect of the colorful environments, and for the VR lenses' godrays to accentuate the dramatic white-on-black text announcing the death of the Emperor and your mission to kill all the traitors. But the visuals are not the biggest winner here -- that prize has to go to the game's sound design, which effectively makes it way more immersive and breathtaking than it deserves to be.

This game should really be a 3/5, but when I look at all the other flight/space games that are around nowadays, all I see is rubbish. So I'm giving it...

4/5

I checked out this minigame because I heard it was one of, if not the best, escape-the-room minigames currently available. Yeah... not a chance. It's "fine", just completely unremarkable (really lame ending too). As far as escape the room minigames go, I suggest checking out I Expect You to Die. That one is probably the best this worthless little genre will ever be, and even still I wouldn't really recommend it to gamers since escaping the room should always just be a minigame inside of a larger game.

A "must-buy", they told me...

Just look at the screenshots. It's as ugly and boring as it looks. The price is irrelevant; time is far more valuable, and this minigame is one poor way to waste it.

Sadly this VR minigame wasn't worth my time.

I was excited by the opening level, where you have to jump out of an airplane, with flak guns shooting all around you as you descend to the ground. But it was all downhill from there. The shooting mechanics are awful; you have to hold the sniper rifle more than a foot in front of your face since you can't really see clearly through the scope if you hold it too close, and there's no way to stabilize the gun, apart from putting your physical arm underneath the gun hand, which doesn't look or behave naturally in-game. It would at least be better if the secondary hand could stick to the front of the rifle for some stabilization. It would be even better if the rifle wouldn't ghost through the building/windows, allowing the building itself to stabalize the weapon. (The Omaha beach level had this only because the gun was a permanent fixture.)

For guns that you have to reload, the reloading mechanic is just dump. You squeeze the grips and a new magazine just floats in front of you and you have to line it up with the gun... reloading mechanics can be tricky because of the shape of the controllers, but this is definitely not the way to do it.

I could forgive all of the above though if the levels were even remotely difficult or interesting. The AI is worthless and uninteresting; you just shoot them for a few minutes and the level is over. That's the whole (mini)game -- at least until you get to the last level, which was added recently. The Eagle's Nest level seems to be an attempt at a more traditional FPS game adapted for VR, where you actually have to move around to infiltrate a building to kill Nazis in the mountains. Sadly it uses an extremely clunky teleportation mechanic to do this, and for the early part of it you just teleport right behind each Nazi, who is always conveniently facing away from you, and shoot them point blank. Once you get inside the building it gets... "better", but not good, and it's over very quickly.

VR is still in its infancy but there are already much better shooters you can play.

I'm excited for whatever the developers end up producing from this pretty little demo/preview, but the loading screen as well as the part where the world shakes are both wretched even for people who have their VR legs. That kind of nausea-inducing nonsense should be illegal. Even though it's free I have to urge new virtual reality gamers not to try it, as it might cause physiological harm, or at least make them hate VR...

This is the second game I've completed in virtual reality, after The Gallery episode 1, that feels even close to being like a 'real game' with an actual campaign storyline. Both have been a revelation, yet containing so many flaws (Greenwater especially) that I struggle to give either of them a strong recommendation. Nevertheless, here I am recommending this game, and not just to reward the developers for taking a big risk in a new artistic medium.

This game's strongest and weakest points demonstrate what can be most challenging and most rewarding in virtual reality game design. First, room-scale VR can do horror like nothing else. Most horror movies and videogames bore me or even put me to sleep. But Greenwater puts you in small, claustrophobic rooms roughly the same size as your physical play space. Unlike in The Gallery, there are no blurry far away objects or textures and no need for potentially immersion-breaking locomotion systems. Everything is right in front of you and within physical walking distance.

This also means that whatever is going to scare you, and you just know something is coming, it's going to be very close, and running is impossible both in the real and the virtual world. There were some parts of the game where I had to just stop and come back to it later because the suspense was driving me as mad and paranoid as the character you play. I found out after this happened a few times that this only makes the game more suspenseful; it's better to just keep pushing forward.

There are times when you need to move to a different room, and as long as the door is unlocked, you just press your trigger on the doorknob, and your virtual body fades out of one room and into the next. It's so simple, and works beautifully. Future VR game designers should take note of the techniques used here; mere level design could solve many of the locomotion questions that are still being asked about VR games.

Second, fear seems to make it easier to achieve presence, but wonky unrealistic physics destroys it, at least in games that aren't set in fantasy/scifi worlds. And this game's physics system is deeply awful. Even just picking things up, like the titular chair in a room, feels wrong and awkward the way it swings in your hand. When you pick up pills and put them in a mug, they sometimes fall through the mug. Drawers hardly ever shut perfectly, which is excruciating to me. It feels even wonkier than the buggy physics in Surgeon Simulator games.

This game is basically an elaborate escape-the-room, so having such broken physics occasionally feels like a deal-breaker when your progress depends on manipulation of objects. Perhaps this is good for some people, as it will add some comic relief to a game that would otherwise be so frighteningly suspenseful it would simply be unbearable. But I would rather not be shifting in and out of presence all the time.

The actual story and horror elements in the game are really rather shallow, depending almost entirely on the creepy setting, music (that always seems to be judging you), lighting, and occasional psychotic visions than on interesting characters. But it all works really, really well in this game, because you are playing a psychotic character. You feel it from the moment the game starts, that your mind is unstable and your perception of the world is unreliable, and that you are always being watched and scrutinized by the mental instutition you're trapped in. In spite of the disastrous physics system, this has been one of the most immersive gaming experiences of my life.

4/5

I'm glad this exists, but the higher difficulty levels of the saber training droid are way too hard compared to the ludicrously easy humanoid opponent. It really should be the other way around.

I am still not desensitized to VR horror. For a while, I could never get through the first section of the game because the idea of being alone in a small cabin with big windows in the woods at night was creepy enough. (Especially after watching the movie Hush...) But once I forced my way through that opening part of this minigame (or mostly non-interactive VR short), it really lost its horror edge and became just a bunch of weird colors and shapes and unnecessary changes in perspective. A pointless gimmick and waste of time.

Unfortunately I cannot recommend this VR short. It uses techniques, such as camera panning and fast cuts, that are your bread and butter in flat filmmaking, but are ineffective for VR. Apart from that, the environment is ugly and boring, nothing of interest happens, and there are no sympathetic characters; even kids might struggle to enjoy it.

Note: I exceed the minimum requirements but the performance was still bad. However, I disregarded that that for the purpose of this review.

The character animations were often jittery, but this is a fine VR short showcasing the current state of the art in staging and "cinematography" (for lack of a better word) for non-interactive VR.