VR's viability hinges on making sensible objectives integral to the wonder implicit in its format. Robinson: The Journey understands this and makes visible strides to balance astonishment and curiosity. Too often, however, it gets tripped up by contrasting wandering ambition against capricious behavior. Ideas fight, rather than support, one another, ensuring Robinson's first steps are also its last.
VR’s viability hinges on making sensible objectives integral to the wonder implicit in its format. Robinson: The Journey understands this and makes visible strides to balance astonishment and curiosity.
Robinson: The Journey is one of the first PlayStation VR games I have played that really goes for it. It doesn’t seek to exploit the novelty of its format, and it immediately positions itself as a game ahead of an experience. The novelty of PlayStation VR (at least if you’ve been fiddling with this technology for a month) is fading, and seasoned objectives will soon take precedent over a parade of parlor tricks. Games, without any sense of irony, still need to be games.
Robinson positions its protagonist, a boy named Robin, as the doomed survivor of a crashed generational ship, Esmeralda. Robin isn’t totally alone on the Earth-like planet Tyson III; he’s joined by a spherical, hovering AI buddy HIGS and a baby dinosaur he encounters and befriends soon after his miraculous escape pod landing. Tyson III is an attractive setting, pushing a jungle-like ecosystem against the interminable wreckage of the Esmeralda and loading it up with massive dinosaurs. In its own discordant way, Robinson aims to be the interactive sci-fi Jurassic Park mashup we’ve (well, I have) always wanted.
Perhaps the most implausible aspect of this setting, if you can ignore Robin’s position as the presumed sole survivor, is his kinship with a young tyrannosaurus rex. Laika, as she’s affectionately named, can be commanded to move to different positions, roar at various objects, and not much else. Her abilities are employed in a few puzzles necessary to push Robin’s quest forward—startle a brontosaurus so it moves a few feet, retrieve a battery from an area Robin can’t reach—but Laika ultimately feels like concept stopped short of necessity, a vestigial remnant too precious to abandon. She’s in service to the story and expendable to the game.
Despite its namesake, the crux Robinson isn’t the survival of its protagonist, but rather the unpropitious relationship between Laika and HIGS. HIGS’s acerbic droll provides the AI with a sharp and commanding personality that’s intended to provide Robin with direction and instruction. HIGS is your guide, and, by extension, the custodian of Robin’s wellbeing. Somehow HIGS allows Robin to frolic around tar pits and strange fauna and descend humongous perilous wreckage and chasms, but doesn’t sanction Robin’s relationship with Laika. Mending this tear is a meandering path that Robinson states as a priority, leaving the wonder of Esmeralda’s demise confined to audio logs and text entries. This is another instance where it feels like Robinson was intended for a higher calling and ultimately ends up focusing on a b-plot of the intended narrative.
Robinson operates by guiding its protagonist toward other damaged HIGS out in Tyson III’s wilderness. A farm, the aforementioned tar pit, and a monstrous jungle area are playgrounds for the first half of the game. Solutions to most puzzles involve carrying objects from point A to point B and every platforming challenge is conquered by Robin’s robust climbing skills. Robinson’s basic operation, it allows “normal” left and right stick movement (with a range of comfort options) without defaulting to teleport mechanics, making it feel more like a real game, but what you do is still relatively simple.
Robinson’s climbing mechanics are capable if not maniacal. Like Job Simulator, Arkham VR, and London Heist, the player is granted a set of floating hands that are adept at grabbing objects. Unlike those games, however, Robinson intends the player do operate both hands with a DualShock 4. Rather than reach out and grab ledges with a Move controller, the player is intended to stare at the object, crane their neck in the intended direction, and hope Robinson accounts for enough of z-axis to get the job done. This is weird, and leads to several instances where you’re either standing up to reach out or crossing invisible in-game arms in impossible directions.
It would have been sensible for Robinson to allow the use of two Move controllers. It would also be practical to play with a DualShock 4, as its dual-analog sticks provide the only logical way to move around in first-person. The designers of Robinson must have hit some kind of design impasse where compromising their direction was impossible and, in turn, that compromise was passed off to the player. The result is an experience with two hands, one of which is holding Robin’s multitool device that even looks like a Move controller, and no comfortable way to use them. Again, this makes Robinson feel like an idea went out the door before undergoing a satisfactory number of drafts. “Good enough,” may meet some sort of release-date mandated minimum, but it sure doesn’t feel right.
While the goals that drive Robinson are vague, a rudimentary but potent minigame accompanies the entire experience. All of the life on Tyson III, usually a familiar analog of past or present Earth, can be scanned and inventoried into Robin’s database. This brings up a minigame where you have to move your head to guide the center of the screen around tiny green spheres scattered all over the creature. Red spheres need be avoided or else the process starts over. This process does well to incentivize exploration, and it makes me want a Pokémon Snap or Afrika style VR experience that favors spontaneous photography over puzzles and actions. In Robinson, however, it’s an appealing but fleeting distraction.
The most surprising aspect of Robinson was its brevity. Even after getting stuck on a few non-obvious puzzles, I still wrapped up the story in about four hours. Robinson’s insistence in avoiding answers to larger questions and reliance on small scale environments also make it feel like transitory experience. How much is too much in virtual reality is still a question without an answer, but Robinson feels too short to satisfy all of the questions that it asks.
While Robinson’s action is simple, answering its call can be a problem. The largest issue is HIGS, who either can’t get out of your way or provides suspicions direction. He’s anxious about Robin venturing into the tar pit, and actually directs the player away from that area. You’re intended to disregard his warnings and continue on. Later, in the jungle, he told me to avoid the floor I had just cleared of raptors, so I went down there and died immediately. This inconsistency is frustrating.
Robinson is also partial to a tiny minigame from HIGS’ point of view. Robin has the ability to control HIGS, tap into his camera, and reroute power through broken devices. This provides the player with a small set of math problems, but it also provides a neat bird’s eye view of the current environment. A tangent like this would blow over in a regular game, but experiencing it in VR feels like you’re in the future and observing a floating hologram model right before your eyes. It’s a subtle and yet highly potent example of the power behind its medium.
Movement is subject to its own weird issues. Robin cannot run and struggles to walk, and finding the sweet spot between two can be a challenge. Eventually I surmised that Robin would walk quickest when facing forward and extremely slow when looking down. In a late section point in the game when you’re trying to sneak around corners and avoid patrolling raptors, figuring out this dichotomy can be infuriating. It’s tough to know if these choices were made as a concession to potential nausea or if that’s the kind of compromise Crytek had to make to maintain Robinson’s level of visual fidelity. Whatever the case, the result is less than optimal.
While I’ve been largely critical of Robinson’s operation, there’s no denying the power its presentation has in virtual reality. Crytek’s technical work has been impressive for the last decade, and stepping out of your escape pod for the first time and seeing the decimated Esmerelda crashed in the distance and seeing pterodactyls flying in the sky is awesome. Lush vistas and huge dinosaurs make Robinson feel like the No Man’s Sky I always wanted; it’s short lived, but it the closest I’ve ever felt to exploring an alien planet in a videogame.
Ultimately, Robinson’s imposing ambition feels cut short by a cascading series of compromises. Its world is beautiful and awe inspiring, but also slow and contained. The story is loaded with the potential of its namesake, but instead chooses to focus on the relationship between Robin’s companions. Control is intended to provide a tactical bond to your surroundings, but it’s implied and suggested rather than refined and executed. The medium is young and this is obviously Crytek’s first crack at it, but these observations are inconsequential to a general audience.
In Robinson’s story its protagonist’s fate goes largely unmonitored and unfocused. It’s probably not a coincidence that the integrity of Robinson feels the same way.
