Into the Radius review: a trippy shooter with terrible object interaction

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 sky of greys and faded yellows. Positioned 15 or 20 metres in front of us is a car suspended in mid-air: an impossible, thoroughly arresting sight, the stillness of the vehicle—completely frozen in time—juxtaposed with bits of leaves and detritus drifting down in the foreground.

The subsequent experience is a survival shooter sprinkled with trippy, Twilight Zone-esque vibes. Different spaces in the virtual world are accessed by walking through a thick cloud of mist, surrendering ourselves to a great unknown. The landscape is dotted with eerie human-shaped figures, black-like shadows, which shatter if touched—triggering some to impart words from the grave as they break into pieces. More intimidating things roam around and attack if they see you; some are shaped like people, others like large alien insects.

The sparse dystopian landscapes in Into the Radius are visually engaging for the aforementioned reason, contrasting motion with stillness. We move around, and so do our shadow-like foes, but other elements—such as rock showerings and pieces of curved railroad tracks hanging in the air—are like the vehicle in the menu screen: stuck in place, stuck in time. At first blush these hallucinatory flourishes, while decorative, suggest the developers have eschewed realism and seriously embraced VR’s ability to build a reality—a new reality—from the ground up. 

It soon becomes clear, however, that they’ve in fact treated realism awfully seriously. I say “awfully” because the experience, which has a heavy emphasis on inventory, is an epic downer when it comes to object interaction—which attempts to be so thoroughly realistic but is painfully fidgety. And frankly, a pain in the ass. I usually go light on areas like this in my critiques, acknowledging that we’re in an embryonic and imperfect era of VR, but no good analysis of Into the Radius can skirt past this issue; often storing, retrieving and handling objects is the very point of the experience. 

Instead of objects neatly appearing in rows in your backpack (as it does in other experiences such as The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners) the developers tried something different: you physically place them in a spatialized area, above or next to each other. The more items you add, the more crammed the space gets, forcing you to sort through your belongings. In visual and spatial terms this is obviously not how a backpack works (in real-life they are opened from the top, for starters) but you get what they’re trying to do: replicate aspects of lived experience. 

Many other processes in the game are mundane by design, such as the handling of guns (sometimes reloaded bullet by bullet) and even having to repair these weapons, by scrubbing them with a toothbrush and inserting a cleaning device into nozzles. Such activities force us to contemplate processes other games ignore for good reason—because they’re not dramatically interesting and certainly not fun.

Replicating aspects of lived experience, with a focus on the mundane, is well and good in theory; the big problem is that object interaction in Into the Radius is very bad and very buggy. I’m tempted to describe it as simply broken. Even basic actions, like grabbing onto a ladder rung or picking up an item, don’t work smoothly. If you spend a few hours in the experience I guarantee you’ll fumble many dozens—possibly hundreds—of times. Every fumble is a small immersion breaker, shattering what scholar and theorist Janet Murray called the “liminal trance”—a fragile threshold between real and imaginative worlds. 

An important part of designing a satisfying VR experience, during these early days, is understanding and working within limitations. The idea of a survival shooter doubling down on aspects ignored or minimized elsewhere may be conceptually appealing, but the effect here is paradoxical: in their quest to be “realistic,” the developers have provided countless reminders that we’re experiencing a contrived fantasy. 

The repetitiveness of the missions doesn’t help endear us to the production, often being fetch quests resulting in no emotional payoff and little sense of narrative progression. But when you’re fumbling around with your belt, or gun, or a ladder, for the zillionth time, story progression won’t be front of mind. You’ll be more concerned with asking: “why is this so hard?”