REVIEWS A-Z
In his influential book The Language of New Media, scholar Lev Manovich makes many compelling arguments about the nature of virtual reality. One of them is countering the idea that headsets liberate…
This charming puzzle game is built around a very particular central gimmick—like the first-person shooter Superhot and its “bullet time” mechanic. The essence of the latter can be broadly explained by referencing…
This brief but amusing interactive experience triggers location changes via a familiar concept: we don a VR headset at various points, taking us further down the rabbit hole of simulations inside simulations.…
Director Eugene Chung’s charming 20 minute narrative experience—a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Match Girl—received substantial acclaim when it arrived in 2016, the first year VR headsets became…
Apex Construct is yet another VR game in which almost everything of dramatic import has occured before we start playing. I call this “after the fact drama.” Like in other sci-fi games…
In Area Man Lives, we play a small town radio DJ with a listener who’s beyond obsessed: they’re convinced, in fact, the station is sending out signals directing them to perform particular…
We live in an ever-changing world, but some things never go out of fashion—like well-timed zingers, stories of zombie infestation, and the camaraderie shared between humans and doggos. This rootin-tootin sequel to…
A zombie apocalypse can be a lonely place; thank god for those voices in our heads. Or the voice, in the case of VR experiences such as Arizona Sunshine, which ask us…
Is it even possible to write about Asgard’s Wrath 2 without using the word “epic”? Early reports that Sanzaru Games’ sequel to its 2019 open-world RPG contained more than 60 hours of…
Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a single take 360 video presented from the perspective of an urn containing the ashes of a recently deceased man. The 11 minute Ashes to Ashes…
There’s a moment, early in Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, when you’ll walk onto a small balcony in Venice and survey a bustling scene below. Decorations are everywhere—a festival is taking place—and people…
Eliza McNitt’s mixed reality experience will transform your living room into a spaceship and send you hurtling through the galaxy, making pit stops at various planets to collect natural resources. Like all…
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…
Batman: Arkham Shadow swells with the atmospheric and environmental elements we’ve come to expect from depictions of Gotham City: dark lane ways, long shadows, musty corridors, neon lights. This dank and brooding…
I love the energy and exuberance of this experience; I love its pluck and sass. The developers of Battlescar: Punk Was Invented By Girls embraced an “everything and the kitchen sink” approach,…
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,…
The title “Before Your Eyes” derives from a familiar turn of phrase, commonly associated with near death experiences: “my life flashed before my eyes.” When we imagine this flashing we might think…
Food-focused documentaries crave that mouth-watering money shot: the images that make you think “man, I shouldn’t have watched this on an empty stomach.” There’s plenty of them in Behind the Dish, a…
I can’t say I was surprised, and in fact it felt thematically apt, to be hopelessly lost in the woods at night during a Blair Witch VR experience. A degree of aimlessness…
Some reviewers have compared Blood & Truth to the sassy British crime films of Guy Ritchie, the most obvious similarities being London settings and cockney-sounding nogoodniks. The game is packed with balls-to-the-wall…
It’s an evergreen question within the VR community: when will the medium achieve mass adoption? Blandly designed, fidgety, and frustrating productions like Bonelab make one think: not for a long time. This…
Lynette Wallworth’s 360 video Collisions explores the story of an Aboriginal man, Nyarri Nyarri Morgan, whose first exposure to western culture was witnessing an atomic bomb explosion in remote Australian desert. That…
The gaudily designed Cosmonious High is pumped full of cartoonish elements and bubblegum colours, making it clear the experience is intended for younger players. Its narrative premise reflects this too: we play…
Crow: The Legend is an animated 360 video about an exotic bird with majestic feathers and a stunning voice, who’s tasked with the job of saving his forest from its very first…
To describe the appeal of virtual reality, it’s sometimes said that you get to go inside the picture. The long-held prominence of the frame—first dominating paintings, then film and television—has accustomed us…
The first-person shooter and spy story Defector bears several similarities to the PSVR game Blood and Truth, both arriving in the same year (2019) and marketed with comparable messages. Each experience promised…
Many engaging 360 videos have been produced, and precisely none offer any kind of dramatic agency. Purely because they’re videos: beyond gaze tracking they have no interactive capacity. And yet when we…
What do you do when a figurine-sized space lady crashes into your lounge room, rabbiting on about a mission involving precious crystals? Help her out, of course! The narrative justification for Demeter’s…
Eli Roth not only gave his imprimatur to this 30 minute 360 video, but has implied ownership of it—the full title being Eli Rother’s BE MINE: A VR Valentine’s Slasher. The horror…
Eli Roth’s first crack at a VR experience is a schlock fest with laughably low-rent grindhouse vibes. When I first heard about it, I assumed the horror specialist had crafted an experience…
This 40-ish minute narrative experience from directors Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen unpacks the poignant personal story of a man who developed a condition known as aphasia, defined in an introductory text…
Evolution of Verse is a short 360 video—less than four minutes long—but it occupies a symbolically significant place in modern VR. This elegantly made experience’s director, Chris Milk, screened it during a…
This zippy, moreish, colourfully vacuous action-shooter reminded me of the title of a Russ Meyer movie: Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill! Sheer speed is a core feature of Fracked, which tumbles along at…
In this very sweet and unexpectedly poignant puzzle game, we assume the role of a huge benevolent being with translucent blue hands, who assists an adorable pint-sized creature named Louis. We’re his…
I don’t experience motion sickness in VR, but I’m willing to bet many have ripped off their headsets while watching this 16 minute production and bolted for the bathroom. That’s not a…
The look and feel of Gloomy Eyes recalls the stop-motion animations of Tim Burton, such as Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie. The character and set design of this 30-ish minute narrative production have…
Creator Jon Favreau and director Jake Rowel’s charming game Gnomes and Goblins beautifully evokes the simple, evergreen pleasures of arriving somewhere, and of being invited somewhere. When I recall the experience, I think…
Virtual reality enthusiasts such as myself have banged on about the need for more AAA content. The frustrating truth, at the time of publishing, is that spiffy new headsets arrive more frequently…
In another reality, Half-Life: Alyx was the blockbuster AAA title that catapulted VR into the gaming mainstream. That didn’t happen, of course, for various reasons that don’t need to be extrapolated here.…
The visual structure of this six minute 360 video is nothing if not simplistic, consisting entirely of two immersions: one filmed from the back of a convertible, the other from inside a…
Arriving at a period in VR history when new headsets were much more common than AAA games, Horizon Call of the Mountain offered a rare virtual reality experience with blockbuster aspirations—and a…
The menu screen of Into the Radius depicts surreal vision of an apocalyptic landscape, where the laws of physics appear to have broken down. Bare trees protrude from shrub-splotched land beneath a…
Many 360 videos take viewers to far-flung locations to witness cultures far removed from our ordinary lived experience. Here it comes with the added novelty of using the medium to explore the…
The JFK assassination has been pored over ad infinitum, a never-ending well of speculation and conjecture inspiring countless productions in various mediums. Director Chloé Rochereuil nevertheless brings some freshness and ingenuity to…
A virtual reality experience predicated on simulating workplace environments such as office cubicles and a car garage doesn’t sound like a hoot. But the delightful Job Simulator isn’t interested in lifelike recreations,…
At least, in the Jurassic Park movies, people arrive on the island before things go haywire. In this VR game, the journey there is botched: we’re on a small plane en route…
How’s this for an entertaining premise? In Killer Frequency we play a radio host manning the graveyard shift in a crummy small town, during the 1980s, where a serial killer is on…
Released in 2015, Land’s End was an early addition to the VR puzzle game canon, deploying simple mechanics and sparsely surreal environments. I played it on my very first headset—a Samsung Galaxy…
I’m a big fan of both Lone Echo games. They’re well crafted and grandiose space adventures, with engaging mechanics and satisfying narratives that scale up, up and away—to the edges of the…
In the not-too-distant future, when virtual reality’s embryonic years have become a dim memory, VR enthusiasts such as myself will recall certain things with a nostalgic twinkle in our eyes. For others,…
In the 16 minute narrative-driven experience Lucid, we journey through the deep recesses of an old lady’s subconscious as her daughter pursues an Inception-like mission—but in reverse. Rather than wishing the subject…
One YouTube reviewer declared that Maestro “nails the feeling of being a conductor.” I’d pay good money to be in the company of an actual conductor as they listen to those words:…
Two words spring to mind after experiencing the darkly beautiful and surreal Manifest 99: trains and eyes. Let’s start with the former. This 30-ish minute narrative experience is set on a train…
Max Mustard is an enjoyably daffy old school platformer given a virtual reality spit and polish. This is a genre filled with simple pleasures i.e. collecting coins, breaking boxes and stomping on…
Medal of Honour: Above and Beyond is a frustratingly episodic experience, crippled by stop-start pacing and a “jack of all trades, master of none” mentality. At various points in this game, stemming…
MLK: Now is the Time is a triptych of short experiences themed around three elements core to Martin Luther King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. It uses metaphors that aren’t just…
Ever wanted to get a taste of what it’s like to control a live TV news broadcast? Probably not; switching between camera setups in real-time isn’t exactly a common fantasy. Doing so…
Notes on Blindness was conceived as an immersive companion piece to the 2016 film of the same name, which explores the process of going blind from the very personal perspective of theology…
Interesting drama, as this 38 minute immersive documentary reminds us, isn’t necessarily about what will or did happen; it can also be about what might have happened. The event—or non-event—around which On…
The narrative spine of Paper Birds is formed by the testimony of a young boy who recounts a speculator tale: of parallel alternate worlds, beautiful and haunting; of his missing sister, who…
I have a big soft spot for Pearl: director Patrick Osborne’s five-and-a-half minute 360 video set entirely inside a car, with us riding shotgun. It might sound cheesy to say that this…
It’s impossible to play this frenetic first-person shooter and not be viscerally immersed: you really feel like your body’s on the line. In more ways than one. The term “on the rails”…
Every installment in the Pixel Ripped series homages a different era of video games, so far recreating the look and feel of productions from the 70s (Pixel Ripped 1978), 80s (Pixel Ripped…
During an early moment in the horror survival game Propagation: Paradise Hotel, an NPC asks us to lead the way through dark zombie-infested hallways. But the thing is: this guy is armed…
Ah, the click: the sweet, sweet sound of the click. So welcome, so satisfying, so moreish. I’m not referring to the sound of a computer mouse, or a remote control, or any…
Music is a weapon that can be used to fight monstrous robots in Federico Moreno Breser’s short, sweet, very stylish and energetic narrative-driven production, which injects traditional motion picture language with a…
Created as a companion piece to a longform article published in The New Yorker investigating secret detention camps in China, Reeducated is a visually engaging 360 video that has a good—perhaps the…
I’m not the kind of person who places much value on awards ceremonies. Any voting methodology has its limitations and drawbacks, so one takes them all with a grain of salt. Nevertheless,…
Early in the present era of virtual reality, which can be roughly marked by the dawning of consumer-available headsets in 2016, many filmmakers dabbled with the emerging medium, most attempting to port…
Like many humourous VR experiences, Sam and Max: This Time it’s Virtual! Heavily relies on vococentric forms of comedy. Most of the jokes in this kiddish assortment of gimmicky activities and mini-games,…
Released in 2016, SENS VR arrived during a period of intensive experimentation, when VR content creators threw all sorts of stuff at the wall to see what stuck. Written by Charles Ayats,…
Just your average, ordinary, run-of-the-mill experience about listening to the sounds of entire planets and disrupting the fabric of the universe. Eliza McNitt wrote and directed this very trippy non-fiction production, which…
Since Disney acquired the Star Wars franchise in 2012, tales from the galaxy far far away have felt very templated: a twisted family dynamic here, the clanging of lightsabers there, insert some…
This highly ambitious production from Tender Claws—a studio with a history in delivering innovative VR works—is the equivalent of a television anthology series, in the sense it’s divided into 11 distinct but…
Much has been made—and rightfully so—about the collapse of the two dimensional viewing experience in virtual reality. One of the medium’s amazing features is this revolution in screen space, placing us “inside”…
Want a simple way to increase the impact of colour? Make it scarce. Environments in the surreal first-person shooter Synapse are presented in monochrome, with flashes of colour giving particular objects and…
Ryan and Amy Green created the indie video game That Dragon, Cancer: I’m Sorry Guys, It’s Not Good to help deal with the death of their five-year-old son Joel, who was diagnosed…
What can a remake of a 30-year-old video game tell us about the future of motion picture performances? Quite a lot, actually. “Volumetric video” isn’t exactly a sexy term but hot damn…
Randall Okita’s tenderly crafted production unfolds like an experiential family photo album or embodied history lesson, exploring the story of his grandfather Yonezo Okita, who migrated to America from Japan in the…
The Climb games are wholly devoted to executing a single gameplay mechanic, at the expense of everything else. There’s plenty of other VR productions where that came from: Beat Saber is all…
Who would’ve thought that a horror rollercoaster shoot-em-up would be so bloody gnarly? Everybody, of course. Just a cursory look at the marketing materials for Switchback VR correctly indicates a grotesque arcade-like…
The Eli Roth-produced horror series The Faceless Lady is strikingly different to anything else on the market—while paradoxically bogged down by an aura of same-old same-old. Presented in the 180 video format,…
The Invisible Hours is a narrative-driven experience that combines aspects of a movie, video game and immersive theatre production. However the developers at Tequila Works couldn’t be clearer about how they intend…
What if you were the last employee working in a massive warehouse for an Amazon-like megacorporation, competing against robots to keep your job? That’s the initial premise of The Last Worker, in…
I was expecting lots of gunplay in The Light Brigade: a first-person shooter set in dark, dream-like environments illustrated with a surreal graphic novel-like aesthetic. I was expecting lots of bad guys,…
The Reservoir takes place in a surreal mini-golf course that symbolizes the end of a romantic relationship—that time when the flame is still burning but will soon flicker out. In that dying…
The Rose and I is a short, slight, sweet experience with the simplest of narratives, following a gender ambiguous person watering a rose on a tiny boulder-like planet. We watch this cute…
This short and sweet fairytale-esque experience captures a child’s journey to a magical forest, where they befriend a magnificent mythical creature. Presenting a bright and imaginative fantasy world, albeit in the form…
When I first learned of a Twilight Zone virtual reality experience, I was less than enthused. It seemed unlikely that the iconic anthology series created by Red Serling—intoner of that unforgettable spiel…
I love the central setting in The Under Presents: a nightclub on the edge of existence, situated on desert sands in a bizarro alternate universe combining apocalyptic aesthetics with vaudevillian vibes. The…
The appeal of video game sequels rests on returning players to worlds with which they’re familiar. That can feel like a cop-out, however, if a sequel applies too much of the same—same…
Like many VR productions of the present era, Vanishing Grace evokes a striking sense of solitude. Navigating this world is a lonely experience; sometimes I wanted to cry out “where the hell…
I enjoyed the first Vertigo—a zany space adventure in which we play a young woman trying to find her way home, navigating a vast and treacherous alien universe. But the sequel is…
The idea of putting on a headset inside a VR experience isn’t new and in fact has been executed many times— for instance in Superhot, Job Simulator, and Accounting+. But Tender Claws’…
When it comes to explaining the appeal of golf, nobody has said it better than George Costanza: “it’s just nice to be outside in a well landscaped area.” That quote from Seinfeld…
Many short 360 video documentaries break the old “show, don’t tell” principle by deploying extensive voice-over narration. In the case of Waves of Grace, which was co-directed by Gabo Arora and Chris…
Marvel’s first production for the Apple Vision Pro intends us to feel like a superhero, traveling to far-flung corners of the cosmos and defeating maniacal villains. But the developers aren’t fooling anybody:…
This short but sweet experience has a ponderous, ruminative quality, not just in abstract terms but in tangible things that can be stored and retrieved. It plays with the concept that memories…
Glitzy corporate video, or a brave new world of spatial entertainment? It can be both. This much is certain: you’ve never experienced a documentary quite like Who is Sabato De Sarno? A…
Wilson’s Heart takes place in a creaky old hospital where the player wakes up and removes bolts from their head, then sets out to discover who they are and what they’re doing…
One of the most rudimentary ways to direct attention in VR, where users can turn and face in any direction, is to blacken out space around an intended focus point. It’s pretty…
This intensely engaging and very creepy game takes place in an almost impossibly large modern mansion, owned by a Hollywood billionaire, where some years ago a handful of people died during a…
This engaging immersive documentary focuses on a seldom-explored subject: the loss of cultural identity as a result of military invasions. More specifically, it’s about how the war in Ukraine has profoundly changed…
