Gaming & Culture —

Wilson’s Heart is Oculus’ most interesting VR misfire yet

Game misses the mark as VR adventure. What does that mean for VR’s early days?

When will a VR system finally get an honest-to-goodness adventure? Early adopters and curious onlookers continue to ask this question, wondering when they'll get their own unique, hours-upon-hours mix of story, puzzles, battles, and thrills.

The closest answer up until now remains the incredible and memorable Resident Evil 7. However, that's a bit of a cheat, since it launched primarily for normal TV displays with an optional, albeit awesome, VR mode attached. Thus, the hunt's still on—and the folks at Oculus have been crowing for months about how their upcoming game Wilson's Heart would do the trick.

I'm not just here to inform you that Oculus's high-budget, high-production-value attempt missed the mark—especially for those readers who don't own an Oculus and high-end PC to match. Rather, I'm interested in exploring just how this week's new game, which once looked quite promising, slammed to Earth with melted wings on its back—and what that says for the current state of VR gaming.

You can Touch, just don’t move

Wilson's Heart opens with you strapped to a mechanical device in an apparent hospital-slash-torture facility. Your character, a military vet, has no idea how he got here. Your mission is to figure out how to escape this place while figuring out various mysteries along the way (like, for example, why your normal, human heart was replaced with a mechanical, magical contraption).

At first, the systems for getting around and solving puzzles seem solid enough. Use your hands to grab, pull, lift, and move objects near you, or you can stick them into a temporary inventory hold for later use. Like other VR puzzle-solving games, you have to "teleport" to move around large rooms, but Wilson's Heart specifically guides you. To move, look around whatever room you're in until you see a ghost version of yourself. At that point, tap a button and you'll warp to that spot.

You can only move to the exact places that the game developer permits, and these movement options usually change or disappear once you complete an objective. In some ways, this is comparable to a point-and-click game of old, where your view is limited to a single vantage point at any given time (and is littered with objects that you can interact with). Use and combine objects to solve little puzzles, step-by-step.

This results in a few awesome moments. For example, look at a mirror early on and you'll see giant bolts in your forehead. You can reach up to these and just yank them out. That's clever, as are a few moments in a painting-related puzzle where you pull your new, mechanical heart out of your chest to unleash super powers.

But the developers at Twisted Pixel fail the first major rule of VR: If your hands can reach a virtual object and you cannot "touch" or interact with it, then the realism is broken. Every spot you warp to is littered with random junk, and, in some cases, the objects you see (bottles, drawers) can all be touched, grabbed, or knocked over. But this is very rare. Instead, you'll regularly see a bunch of surfaces and objects in front of you, but you can only interact with the glowing ones (and usually, only one thing glows per scene).

This sucks for two reasons: first, because it breaks the realism when your hand just magically goes through object after object; and second, because the puzzles very quickly boil down to "warp to an exact spot, look for flashing thing, manipulate it, repeat."

Since you can't freely wander, you're pretty much always sailing straight toward puzzle solutions. This makes the rare exceptions, when a puzzle is tough, that much more maddening. In one hallway, I warped back and forth between the only nine available warp points over and over and over, trying to figure out what I should do next. Turns out, the thing I needed to do was in a place I had already warped to a few steps earlier in the puzzle chain; at that point, the object was grayed out. This happens a lot: The game doesn't know how to demonstrate to players, "This thing will be touchable and useful soon but, uh, not yet."

Tied in knots

This whole system isn't just bad news for WH's puzzle quality. It's also disorienting.

Oculus Touch, as sold to consumers, is designed for front-facing play. Its two sensor-cameras should be positioned within six feet of each other, as opposed to the Vive's opposite-corner sensors. This limits your range of motion. Oculus doesn't really want you spinning around in 360 degrees or walking around the room—hence, why Wilson's Heart uses an auto-warping system.

But the places you warp are often all the way behind you. If you keep your feet planted, you'll typically have to crane about 130 degrees in either direction to look for your next logical warping point. The game was designed for a lot of this motion, and it becomes uncomfortable quickly. But if you turn your entire body to look at things, then warp, the game will punish you in terms of perspective. Most of these warp points are set so that you stare directly at the important objects in that tiny vicinity. Meaning, you'll always wind up turning your body back to the "default" position.

I found myself generally annoyed by and uncomfortable with Twisted Pixel's solution to the Oculus Touch tracking problem. VR game designers should see this as a wake-up call: If your players must face forward in real life, due to tech restrictions, then make sure your virtual world caters to that. (Superhot VR and Robo Recall are great examples of this in action, and neither of those Oculus Touch games are as sluggish as Wilson's Heart.)

Listing image by Oculus Studios

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Channel Ars Technica