Virtual Virtual Reality review: spiraling madcap realities

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’ witty and idiosyncratic Virtual Virtual Reality takes it to the next level, not just indulging the double inception inferred by its title, but offering many nested tiers within the proverbial matryoshka doll, one inside another, then another, then another, creating a madcap array of spiraling realities.

We play a new recruit for a company called Activitude, servicing its peculiar clients who—as our robot boss Chaz explains—have “hired you for whatever they feel a human might still be relevant for.” We visit them by donning various VR headsets, which take us to wildly different environments governed by their own rules and aesthetics. One of our first clients is a huge slab of talking butter, who asks to be “slathered on perfect crispness” and demands “optimal toast specimens only.” We must toast bread then stick it into this anthropomorphised glob of churned dairy.

Like in the aforementioned comedy game Accounting+, and others such as Sam & Max: This Time’s Virtual!, the narrative in Virtual Virtual Reality takes place on our first day on the job—a decision that narratively justifies the explanation of various things, including an early training-like section with Chaz. The teaching of basic object interaction is camafouled as a humorous moment involving us picking one of three objects, according to which is the most aesthetically appealing: a house plant, soccer ball or fish bowl. When I selected the bowl, Chaz yelled “incorrect!” and pledged to “make a tiny note in your file.” 

After this a box of VR headsets spill onto the floor. When you wear one you’re transported to an ocean environment where more headsets bob around, like fish. When you catch one and wear it, you’re sent another layer deeper: into a pink-ish desert-like setting, where straw brooms bob about in the breeze. The rolling out of these surreal mini worlds taps into the Rick and Morty-esque idea of infinite worlds accommodating infinite comedic scenarios, and adds unpredictability and freshness to a repetitive narrative structure, which goes like this: we complete tasks for a kooky client—generally doing a bad job—then return to Chaz, who berates us before we undertake our next task.

The game eventually breaks this formula and takes a darker and more complex narrative route, around the time we’re given an additional power: to vacuum up elements of the environments around us. Doing this restores things to a previous state, from an earlier time in the narrative universe, in a similar way to a mechanic in the mansion-set puzzler The 7th Guest VR, which allows us to shine a lantern at various elements to reveal what they once looked like. 

Unexpectedly introducing a new gameplay element can be—as it is here—a good way to zhuzh things up and enliven the pace. One the most striking examples of stretching these reveals across a long story arc takes place in Asgard’s Wrath 2, which introduces new elements at the beginning of each of its four chapters (or “sagas”), spread across a runtime that takes dozens of hours to complete. I won’t reveal where the plot twists in Virtual Virtual Reality go, suffice to say that they have something to do with the mysterious goings-on inside Activitude, including the true nature and motivation of whatever is guiding it. 

All that regular headset wearing, all that spiraling into realities and sub-realities, got me thinking about Edgar Allen Poe’s A Dream Within a Dream, in which the poet famously ponders the nature of “all that we see or seem.” What would old mate Poe think of all these multi-layered virtual inceptions? 

Perhaps he’d entertain the idea that simulations and dreams are essentially the same—or very similar—things, separated only by that small thing we call consciousness. Penetrating Virtual Virtual Reality’s wacky worlds felt like opening a series of curtains, one after the other, peeling back layers upon layers of them, crashing out of one world and into another. Visiting simulations within simulations, or dreams within dreams, will never get old.