I think it’s very fair to say that VR is still something everyone is trying to figure out, from consumer to the developers, both of the hardware and software. In 2013 at E3, I experienced the Oculus Rift for the first time and had not even held one since then until my own CV1 (Customer Version 1) finally arrived about two weeks ago. Since then I’ve spent many hours in the Rift trying out different games and software, and one of the first ones of those is Frima Studios’ Unreal Engine 4 powered adventure known as FATED: The Silent Oath.
FATED is played from the first person and you play a stout Norwegian man who is on the brink of death as the game begins. A spirit from Valhalla visits you at the outset and offers you a new chance at life in exchange for your ability to speak. You accept and find yourself in the back of a horse-drawn wagon where your wife and father-in-law are surprised to see your return from near-death.
Things aren’t all blue skies and butterflies after you awaken, though. Well, you will actually notice some pleasant blue skies, gray mountains, snowfall, and lots of other nice art and color-use as well as nature-effects if you look around. It’s a good looking game, the characters animations are a bit boxy and stiff, but the artwork and colors are great and there’s good reason to examine your environment to appreciate the job Frima did here. Anyway, not to get sidetracked, but there is trouble in the lands — details are relatively scant throughout the short adventure, but the Gods and Giants are battling as based off of Norse mythology, and the player finds himself in Ragnarok, the term to indicate the end of times. I can’t explain the events in justifiable detail, but for your part, FATED boils down to a basic game of exploration with a few light puzzles.
Your family are pretty much all of the NPCs you will see or interact with and these include your wife, daughter, nephew, and his mother. They do all of the talking to explain what’s going on in addition to the visuals you’re treated to, and there are about ten instances where you are asked to either respond ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ At these junctures, a soft sound effect is played and you have several seconds to literally nod yes or no and the Rift sensor will pick up on that. As a test, a couple of times I did not nod at all to see how the game would react and another time I nodded but the sensor did not catch it. In any event, the game carries on, there are no alternate paths or story arcs, but the illusion of a real choice was nice.
Gameplay itself is primarily about walking and listening. Some areas require a little bit of balance as you traverse a dangerous path that you could fall off of, for example. There are just a couple of puzzles, but these only require that you look at your environment and match symbols, nothing strenuous at all. In most respects, FATED is that basic and linear, but VR is still new enough it’s kind of unreasonable to expect a hell of a lot more. While gameplay is far from strenuous or difficult in any sense, how your body reacts to the VR and motion could vary as anyone who has spent time in VR can tell you. For FATED, you can switch between two ‘look’ modes, one that is entirely free form allowing you to walk with the left stick and look around freely with tracking, and the other ‘snap’ mode lets you use the controller’s right stick to ‘snap’ between views. I noticed that I would get warm and slightly nauseous if I played with the free-look on, so I eventually switched to the snap mode. Snap is not as smooth, obviously, but it did away with any discomfort I had while playing. While it’s usually not apparent when the game does this, it will save your progress at the end of each of two sections per each of the four chapters. The total experience should only take 2-3 hours to go through.
FATED was enjoyable overall, but one potentially critical point of contention is that I was not at all invested in the characters or events. The NPCs are designed to explain most everything about the story and they get kind of wordy, and by the end of the game I was honestly kind of tired of hearing them speak — your mileage may vary however, and with expansions, I might come to like them more. The game ends on a cliffhanger that I assume will be resolved with expansions, but as a first strike into VR, you can do a lot worse than FATED.
To the summary…
