Baba Yaga review: a ho-hum fairytale neither watched nor played

Baba Yaga is a narrative-driven, 20 minute-ish family experience that attempts to resolve—or at least neutralise—major issues that’d been bubbling away in the VR community for some time. Mostly relating to presence and agency, and playing versus watching. How do you tell a precisely sculpted cinematic story with a carefully defined narrative and visual structure, while providing a sense that we’re not merely onlookers in this world, but characters whose actions and decisions matter?

These questions are more easily addressed in first-person experiences that are fundamentally played. Where we navigate worlds and make choices, however basic—like walk, shoot, dodge, climb, run. These actions make us feel like our presence matters and impacts the imaginative universe. But sculpted productions like Baba Yaga are fundamentally watched. They don’t open up navigable worlds and embrace narratives that are fundamentally told. But nor are they prepared to relegate us to the role of a passive observer; they want us to have agency and input.

In one early scene, having embodied a young villager named Sacha, we’re positioned by the bedside of our sick and dying mother (voiced by Glenn Close). Sacha’s younger sister Magda (voiced by Daisy Ridley) is also there, and she’s beside herself: “no, no, this can’t be happening!” she exclaims. Coughing and struggling to speak, poor mum says: “Magda, Sacha, come here,” before imploring us to care for our younger sister. That simple line (“come here”) is a bad call from the writers and in the context of the moment doesn’t make sense. We’re already there. Without the ability to walk around in this world, we couldn’t move away even if we wanted to. 

A subsequent scene, around halfway through, provides a narrative justification for being frozen in place. Having journeyed into a forest in search of a magical plant that can heal poor ol’ mum, a wicked witch has captured both sisters and locked us in separate cages. We see Magda to the left of us, picking the lock of her cage and freeing herself. She tries to do the same for us but is interrupted when the witch arrives, swiftly recapturing Magda and hanging her upside down above a boiling cauldron. 

Here the developers return to the idea that we ought to have some agency and throw us a bone. Or more to the point, a wand-like magical staff, which flies out of the witch’s hands and lands at our feet. It’s obvious that we’re supposed to pick it up; when we do so, and point the wand at the witch, it unloads a big red blast that takes her down.

The superior narrative-driven production Wolves in the Walls, released one year before Baba Yaga, does a much better job providing the illusion of agency while acknowledging our limited capacity to influence the world around us. We play the imaginary friend of a crayon-wielding young girl, who quite literally draws us into her life and treats us as a confidante. We engage in basic activities with her—such as taking photographs and shining a torch—but there’s never an expectation that we can influence the wider universe, or that the plot will hinge on any of our actions.  After all, we’re her imaginary friend…it wouldn’t make sense for our actions to have broader consequences.

This is a clever way of narratively justifying gameplay limitations. Another interesting approach is taken in the 2019 sci-fi production Defrost, a series of 360 videos in which the viewer inhabits the body of a woman in a wheelchair. She’s recently awoken from a coma but— having suffered a stroke—is unable to speak or move. Given we are her, we cannot logically expect to speak or move either. Another creative way to acknowledge constraints.

Baba Yaga goes in the other direction and overextends itself. Towards the end (spoilers to follow) the story becomes forked, requiring Choose Your Own Adventure-esque choices. If we wear a mask, we become the new Baba Yaga; if we don’t, Magda becomes Baba Yaga. If we choose the former option we’re given an additional choice, of what kind of witch we want to be: one who restores beauty to the forest or one who destroys it. In this scenario our actions and decisions matter, shaping narrative outcomes. But it feels quite crude and tacky, our agency shoehorned in rather than earned. The production might’ve been more satisfying if it were purely told and experienced, and it didn’t pretend that we could play it, or that our actions really mattered.