Beat Saber review: a Tron-esque boulevard of pulsating neon

Some VR enthusiasts have argued that 360 videos, with their non-navigable environments and limited degrees of freedom, do not qualify as “real” virtual reality. I won’t get into that debate right now, though it’s interesting to note that the closest thing the present era of VR has had to a “killer app”—the hugely popular rhythm game Beat Saber—involves less changes to the player’s visual perspective than most of these supposedly not-up-to-snuff experiences. Always our gaze is dead ahead: staring down a Tron-esque boulevard of pulsating neon lights and sci-fi looking thingamajigs. The only directions we move are left and right.

Small boxes fly through the air imprinted with arrows indicating the correct direction to slice them. Beat Saber uses a simple visual configuration whereby objects rapidly come towards us without requiring any movement or navigation. It’s an effect a little like when you stand in shallow water at the beach and look down at the water as the tide rolls out; it looks like you’re moving but actually it’s water shifting around you. Beat Saber requires much slicing, dicing, ducking and dodging, performed to a range of pick-me-up tracks that ordinarily I would struggle to tolerate, if not downright despise, without the aid of recreational drugs. 

In this world, however, uplifting party tracks are par for the course—and we wouldn’t want it any other way. One of the unintentionally interesting aspects of Beat Saber is the way the game reveals the harsh discrepancy between our perceptions of bodily movement from inside the virtual realm, versus how that movement looks from the outside world. When we hit our stride, carving up those boxes with pinpoint precision, we feel uber cool: like space ninjas dominating the cosmos. In the actual physical world we look spasmodically stupid, arms everywhere, limbs akimbo. 

What one strives for in Beat Saber is a zen-like feeling: the achievement of a euphoric state through which human and computer are synthesized—our sensory system in a feedback loop with the machine. The concept of flow theory or “flow state” was introduced by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s, explaining a state of mind in which one feels completely immersed in a particular activity (sometimes also referred to as being “in the zone”). In Csikszentmihalyi’s view, according to an interview with Wired, a flow state is achieved when: “The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

The jazz metaphor is nice, but “your whole being” are the words that leap out at me—implying a fusion of body and mind. This is a fascinating space for VR, due to its combination of inner and outer worlds: i’s not just our body and mind synced to the experience, but the fabric of the virtual reality around us, optimized to facilitate the process. 

One expects a review of Beat Saber to discuss how we play the game, but the more I think about it, the clearer it gets that the game plays us, operating our body as if it were a gigantic joystick. Each of the airborne boxes are like lines of code, scripting exact commands—slice this way, duck, move over there—and if we don’t oblige, the system shuts down. Game over. Being a dutiful servant is more than fulfilling, however; small amounts of endorphins must surely be released after every correct response. It feels good—even if, in the outside world, we don’t look like a space ninja…we look like a damn fool.